An MIT Media Lab team has developed a series of wallets that physically react when you electronically spend. [More]
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USDA Recalls 72,000 lbs Of Canned Chicken Salad
By 12.6.10
Time to find something else to eat for lunch. Packs of Bumble Bee Chicken Salads were recalled today as some of them may be “contaminated with pieces of hard plastic.” [More]
Comcast Suffers Major Midwest Outage
By 12.6.10
Another major outage hit Comcast customers, this time in the Midwest. Like the outage that occurred exactly a week ago on the East Coast, this one too started on a Sunday and involved their DNS servers being down. [More]
Motorola Droid 2 Screen Shatters In Man's Ear, Blood Everywhere
By 12.3.10
A Texas man showed up at the hospital with blood streaming down his ear after his Motorola Droid 2 screen shattered in his ear. [More]
Verizon's New 4G LTE Network Hits 21 Mbps In PC Mag Test
By 12.3.10
A PC Mag reporter tested out Verizons’ new 4G LTE Network and maxed out at 21 Mbps in his home test. Of course, no one else is on the network right now, which hits streets December 5th, but that’s a pretty sweet rate for shoveling data through the air (in America at least). Verizon is also keeping your monthly cap pretty darn low, and expensive. [More]
DHL Pays Urban Denizens With Coupons To Deliver Packages
By 12.3.10
DHL is trying out a new program called bring.Buddy where regular people can pick up and deliver packages along their daily route that they’d be traveling anyway. In return, the recruits earn free train tickets, coupons and carbon offset credits. And, of course, badges. The goal is to reduce costs and carbon emissions within dense urban environments. [More]
Woman In Wheelchair Strips To Lingerie, Still Gets TSA Patdown
By 12.2.10
In protest of the enhanced TSA pat-down, a woman arrived at the airport this week wearing only lacy black lingerie and holding her white poodle. She had hoped that if she “had nothing to hide” then she could avoid a pat-down. She failed in this endeavor. Naturally, it was captured by a fellow passenger and uploaded to YouTube. [More]
Google Fixes Algorithm So Harassing Your Customers Doesn't Boost Your Page Rank
By 12.2.10
Google says it has updated its algorithm so that making your customers hate you so they complain about you on other sites and boost your SEO no longer works. The move to soak up the “black Google juice” comes after a big NYT profile/investigation of the owner of an online store that was stoking customers to hate him because the inbound links from their complaints on other sites boosted his rankings in Google Search Results. [More]
This Used Car Ad Is Totally Tubular
By 12.1.10
Madison Ave, take some copywriting lessons from this radical used car ad: “Looking for a car with a sweet tape deck and a radio with five pre-sets? A car that needs new brakes and maybe some action under the hood?…Than this is the car for you! [sic]” [More]
Fancy Colleges Don't Matter
By 11.30.10
Smart and ambitious students should go to community college and state school, and save their money for funding their dreams. At least that’s one way to look at a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found going to a college where kids have higher SAT scores doesn’t result in more money after they graduate. [More]
Dream Home Is Actually A Meth House
By 11.29.10
A young couple thought they got a great deal, $190,000 for a two-story house in the historic district of Bristol Borough, PA with a yard and plenty of space. After they moved in, the headaches, sore throats and difficulty breathing started. Three weeks later, one of their new neighbors told them something the seller had neglected to mention: their new home used to be a meth house. [More]
Update: Couple Waits 7 Months For FiOs Refund. Instead, They Get A Debt Collector.
By 11.29.10
There could be some relief on the way for the couple, who, after waiting 7 months for their $144.81 refund from Verizon FiOs, got a call from a debt collector instead. [More]
Harassing Customers As A Business Model
By 11.29.10
One site has figured out a way to turn antagonizing customers into a profitable business model. [More]
My Ex Ruined My Credit And Jamie Dimion Doesn't Care
By 11.24.10
Lawrence has been in two bad relationships, first with his ex and now with Chase. He and the woman had shared expenses. He was on her credit card. They broke up but he was still on her card, which she continued to run up to $15k. Lawrence escalated his request to get taken off the card all the way up to CEO Jamie Dimion, who promised to sic one of his secretaries on it. And since this is a letter being posted on Consumerist, you can imagine how well that worked out… [More]
Dealership Sells Car To Elderly Man With Dementia, Who Then Dies After High-Speed Chase
By 11.23.10
Police are seeking criminal charges against two car salesmen who sold a 67-year-old wheelchair-bound man with dementia a new truck. He died later that day after suffering a heart attack, following a high-speed chase with police in his new vehicle. [More]
Paying With Credit? App Shows You The True Cost
By 11.23.10
(Android-only) Inspired by our coverage, Consumerist reader Rick came up with a nifty app to show you the true long-term cost of putting that latte on the credit card. [More]
TWC Offers New Cheaper Cable Package
By 11.22.10
Time Warner is offering a new tier of cable package called “Essentials” with fewer channels and a lower price. [More]
Wells Fargo Has A Dispute Representative Named "Dispute Representative"
By 11.19.10
It seems Wells Fargo has an employee whose actual name is “Dispute Representative.” Or at least so it would appear by the letter he received in his response to his request to have an erroneous item removed from his credit report. Guess the guy found his perfect job. [More]
