Oh, great. Here we go again: ABC7 New York has video of several mice running happily around the inside of trendier-than-thou frozen yogurt spot Pinkberry, located on the Upper East Side. The footage is gross, gross enough that it would dissuade us from eating there, but the Pinkberry faithful just didn’t seem to care when ABC7 showed them the footage and asked for comment:
We alerted customers about the mice. But today’s discovery didn’t affect the line that did continue to snake out the door.
A NY restaurant trade group is asking a court to outlaw a New York City Heath Board regulation that will require primarily large chain restaurants and fast food outlets, such as McDonald’s and Burger King (who have standard menus,) to display the calorie count of their menu items on the menu.
Kmart has paid a $15,000 fine to Westchester County, NY for not putting price tags on its merchandise. “Westchester’s law is clear: Items on store shelves must be clearly marked with a price tag, so consumers can verify how much an item costs and be sure that they are being charged the correct price at the checkout register,” County Executive Andy Spano told Lower Hudson Online.
Submitted to our Flickr pool, an excellent sign at the Duane Reade on E. 51st in NYC.
UPDATE: A current Target employee rebuts these statements, inside…
We’ve been hearing a lot about how the FAA is stressed and there aren’t enough air traffic controllers, but this is nuts: According to the NYPost, there were 5 near collisions over New York airports in the last month. There were 5 for all of 2006. What the heck?
Once upon a time we worked at an office where a certain loud individual would sit around bidding on her own stuff on eBay in a sad attempt to drive prices up on her collection of bedazzled jeans. We know this because she not only bid on her own stuff, she asked other people in the office to “fake bid” on her tacky crap.
What criteria do student loan companies use when determining which students to give loans to and how much to give? Don’t know? Neither does New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, but we’re pretty sure he’s going to find out. From the NYT:
“What criteria are they using in the underwriting of these loans?” Mr. Cuomo asked. “Parental income? Student income? Student creditworthiness? How about the school you attend? How is that weighted?”
I work from home and was in the middle of a busy period when a young man came to my door saying that he worked for ConEd or that he was doing some work for ConEd — he definitely identified himself with ConEd. Anyways, he told me he that he was doing work in the building and that he needed to see my bill to check if I had a message on it indicating that I was one of the ones in the building who would be getting a discount next month. Well, chock it up to me being distracted or just plain gullible, but I never even thought for a second that it was a scam. He seemed like he was merely performing a check, not anything more. He then proceed to tell me that I was, in fact, one of the lucky ones, and that I’d be seeing a 7% discount starting next month (all the while making notations on my bill, supposedly indicating where the savings would come from).
“Several companies are engaging in these very aggressive tactics against consumers and small businesses, many of the people and the businesses are getting ripped off,” said City Councilman John Liu. “There needs to be stronger regulation.” — BEN POPKEN
The New York Times is reporting that Columbia University will pay $1.1 million into a fund to educate students about loans, and will have its student loan office monitored by the state of New York for 5 years under the terms of a settlement that NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday.
The JetBlue Airways Airbus A320 was heading from Rochester to John F. Kennedy International Airport when the lightning hit it, causing a smell similar to that of an electrical fire to enter the passenger cabin, company spokesman Bryan Baldwin said. There was no fire or smoke, he said.
Because it was potentially on fire, the flight got to skip ahead of other scheduled flights and arrived 20 minutes early. Hooray? —MEGHANN MARCO
You too can work for an energy supplier and seize a piece of this exciting money-making opportunity! At least, that’s what the Craigslist ad told us.
You may know well the great promise of Network Marketing.
We love the part where they say the amount of money you can make from this depends on,
The timing of entry of the networker into the company growth curve.
aka, it’s better to be at the top of the Ponzi scheme. For the uninitiated, network marketing is just another name for multi-level-marketing (MLM), structurally similar to a pyramid scheme, except usually there’s an actual product being sold. Employees get money for selling products, and for signing up new recruits. A cut of your commission flows up to the guy who signed you up, and you get a cut of your recruits’ commissions, and so on up the pyramid. The FTC ruled that MLM isn’t illegal per se. Often they’re set up so the people on the very bottom don’t make much, or even end up losing, money. Amway is a famous example.
For nearly a year, we’ve told you about door-to-door salesmen trying to get New Yorkers to switch to IDT Energy, pretending to work for ConEd.
NYC citizen Jeff Boyle called the CEO of Valley National Bank at home to complain about some illegal construction noise. The CEO Gerald “Don’t You Know Who I Am” Lipkin, rather than apologizing for the racket, “flipped out.”
“You sit on the runway all hours; the weather is fine, and there isn’t an unusual increase in the number of flights. Yet you sit and sit and sit,” he said.” An FAA spokesperson thinks Schumer is smoking some fine dope,
FAA spokesman Laura Brown acknowledged there have been more delays nationwide and in New York, but said increased flights, not a lack of flight controllers, were to blame.
When Michael Fiore, the earl of sandwich, was building his restaurant, Tempo, he found there was no good sandwich place around. So in the extra space next door, he decided to open his own, to feed his employees and the neighborhood (not a bad marketing strategy either, to offer a down-market version of their high-quality product). The result is Tempo Presto, located at 256 5th Ave in Brooklyn, which brings the same intense attention to detail from Michael’s kitchen to the lowly sandwich. — BEN POPKEN
A postman threw what looked like a piss-filled glove right in front of us on the street yesterday.
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