A few weeks ago, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel bragged that the company had sold 150,000 pairs of its “spectacles,” sunglasses that are able to take 10-second video clips and post them online. Spiegel claimed to be satisfied with the first iteration’s sales of around 150,000 pairs. What he didn’t mention was that there are reportedly a lot more unsold Snap specs. [More]
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Snap Has Sold Around 150K Pairs Of Video-Taking Sunglasses
By 10.4.17 — Updated: 10.23.17
Last year, Snap, parent company of the app Snapchat, introduced a whimsical single-purpose product. Its Spectacles, originally available only from vending machines in a few major cities, cost $130 and record 10-second video clips to be posted on Snapchat. That’s it. Somehow, the company claims to have sold 150,000 of these devices. [More]
USDA Says Chicago Soda Tax Puts $87M In Federal Food Stamp Funding At Risk
By 8.11.17
A controversial tax on sweetened beverages in Chicago is putting the entire state of Illinois at risk for losing millions in federal funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, commonly referred to as food stamps), according to a warning sent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to state regulators. [More]
Snapchat Wants To Help You Stalk Your Friends With New Map Feature
By 6.21.17
Because there is apparently no such thing as oversharing on social media these days, Snapchat is rolling out a new “Snap Map” feature that lets users creep on where their friends are posting photos from. [More]
Report: Snapchat Initial Public Offering Set For $22B
By 2.16.17
Four months after Snap Inc. — the company behind Snapchat and Spectacles — quietly began looking into an initial public offering, filing papers to gauge investor interest in a public debut to the tune of $25 billion, the photo-messaging app has revised those plans, dropping the price by about $3 billion. [More]
4 Reasons Amazon Is Willing To Accept Food Stamps For Grocery Delivery
By 1.12.17
This year, some Americans participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, aka “Food Stamps”), will be able to pay for groceries online through Amazon, FreshDirect, and some supermarket chains. Given that food delivery services have thus far tended to cater to higher-income consumers, why are these companies — and in particular, Amazon — eager to accept SNAP payments? [More]
USDA Can No Longer Hide How Much Money Stores Make From Food Stamps
By 12.1.16
All across America, families use benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP — formerly, and colloquially, known as the Food Stamp program) to buy food, but participation in SNAP varies from store to store, and the federal regulator that oversees the program has denied requests to turn over data on retailer-specific use of SNAP benefits. However, yesterday a federal court ruled that the government can no longer shield this information from public view. [More]
Snapchat Uses Vending Machines to Sell ‘Spectacle’ Smart Sunglasses
By 11.10.16
Forget about pop-up stores or branded kiosks. The new thing for selling your tech product is apparently vending machines — at least according to SnapChat, which is using bright yellow dispensers to market its new line of Spectacle photo- and video-taking sunglasses. [More]
Small Store Owners Say Proposed SNAP Regulations Would Send Customers To Supermarkets
By 6.28.16
SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is what has replaced what were once called food stamps with debit cards. Not all stores are authorized to accept food stamps, and proposed new regulations would change the requirements to accept them. While the foods that recipients can use their balance on wouldn’t change, the food that retailers are required to stock before they can accept SNAP would. [More]
People Buying Fewer Hot Pockets After Tastes Change, SNAP Cuts
By 10.22.14
It’s easy to make fun of Hot Pockets. Over the years, we’ve laughed at the dough-encased food-like objects when they’ve been recalled for containing plastic and meat considered “unfit for human consumption,” when Nestle tried to sell young foodies on the products, and even when they were declared a separate food group. Things are not well at Nestle, which is Hot Pocket HQ, right now. [More]
$18 Million WIC And Food Stamps Fraud Scheme Used Pretend Grocery Stores
By 6.12.14
WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) are both federally-funded, state-administered programs with the simple goal of preventing Americans from going hungry. In Georgia, 54 people have been indicted for setting up pretend grocery stores that defrauded the programs of millions of dollars. [More]
Louisiana Residents Who Milked SNAP Outage May Lose Food Benefits
By 11.14.13
Xerox and Walmart pointed fingers of blame at each other in the immediate aftermath of a public benefits card failure last month. Some shoppers saw that their cards showed no balance or limit and took the opportunity to strip store shelves. The administration of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal knows where the blame really belongs, though: with the shoppers. [More]
When A Real EBT Outage Hits, Customers Freak Out And Don’t Get To Buy Food
By 10.16.13
This weekend’s 17-state EBT glitch was a disturbing lesson in human nature, with customers at one Louisiana Walmart cleaning off shelves when their cards showed no limit, and abandoning entire carts when their transactions didn’t go through. Reader N. works at a retailer somewhere in the Midwest, and reports that a much smaller government benefits system outage on Monday had very distressing results at her store. [More]
Hard-Up College Students Turning To Food Stamps
By 2.3.12
Being in college and having an empty wallet tend to go hand-in-hand. A full course load can make it difficult for students to find steady work, and in many college towns the work that’s available isn’t going to pay for very much. But while my fellow students were undergoing (legal) drug trials and donating whatever bodily fluid they could get a few cents for, some in the current generation of cash-strapped collegians are turning to food stamps. [More]
NYC Welfare Worker Admits To Running $7 Million Food Stamp Scam
By 8.10.11
While the feds recently announced a spike in the number of Americans using food stamps, at least some of those 45.8 million people didn’t exist. A Brooklyn woman who worked for NYC’s Human Resources Administration has entered a guilty plea to charges of creating fake identities to scam the government out of millions in food stamp benefits. [More]
Record-High 45.8 Millions Americans Using Food Stamps
By 8.5.11
According to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture’s latest report on its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps), a record 45.8 million Americans received SNAP benefits during the month of May, up 12% from the same month in 2010 and 34% from two years ago. [More]
Should Fast Food Restaurants Be Allowed To Accept Food Stamps?
By 6.20.11
Only three states — Arizona, Michigan, and California — currently allow fast food restaurants to take payments from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (better known as “food stamps”), but Yum! Brands, parent company of KFC and Taco Bell, is currently leading a push in its home state of Kentucky to open that option up to state residents there. [More]
