It’s not that UPS is ungrateful that all of us are shopping online so much and having items shipped to our homes. The problem is that making multiple stops in residential areas, dropping off only one package each time, is a lot less efficient than the business-to-business shipping that UPS was used to before Amazon Prime happened. That’s why the company is expanding its network of lockers, which allow 24-hour access to your packages without a delivery truck actually coming to your house.
Yes, pretty much like the Amazon Locker, but not limited to Amazon orders. The lockers are actually an expansion of the company’s Access Point program, where you can have your package redirected to a store near you. That’s handy if you live in a theft-prone area, or an apartment complex without an office for packages to be left, but it’s only useful as long as the store you’ve had your package sent to is open.
That’s why UPS had the idae to try setting up lockers: you’ll scan one of those “Sorry we missed you!” slips or a different barcode at a kiosk, and the door containing your package will open up. Some lockers are at 7-Eleven stores, which is a logical fit, and others will be at independent convenience stores.
UPS tested the program at a few sites in Chicago, and is now expanding it to the rest of Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington state. The company said that in the future, they’ll expand it to California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Texas.
Spam. It’s not just something that shows up in your email inbox from time to time, promising anatomical enhancements and luxury R0l3xes; sometimes it makes its way to your cell phone unbidden, leaving you with no recourse but to delete it… or sue whoever sent it to you, which is what one guy is doing after saying he got unsolicited texts messages from Universal Pictures pushing its movie based on a video game Warcraft.
The man filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status in Florida federal court on Thursday, The Hollywood Reporter reports, after receiving a message on his cell phone that he says he never signed up for.
“Hello from the Warcraft Movie team. You are one of the chosen few invited to join the fight today. Will you lead the Horde or Alliance to Victory?” says one of the promotional texts, with a link to the film’s page on Fandango.
The man claims Universal violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by sending the messages without his permission: he says he never gave Universal his number nor gave the studio consent to call or text him. The number used to send the messages is owned by Twilio, which is a company that allows users to send texts in bulk.
“Given the pervasive and prevalent usage of mass, mobile marketing that violates TCPA protections, as Defendant has done here, Twilio provides clients with warnings to not use their service to violate the TCPA,” states the complaint. “But, by sending unsolicited text messages without express consent and not pursuant to an ongoing emergency, Defendant did in fact use Twilio’s mass, mobile marketing capabilities to violate the TCPA.”
The proposed class is defined as anyone in the U.S. who got one or more texts from Universal. The plaintiff is seeking $500 in statutory damages per violation for himself and each class member. Universal hasn’t commented on the lawsuit.
Look, we know you probably don’t want to be here. Everyone else in the office is already gone, but you’re stuck holding down the fort, pretending to be reading emails when you’re really just seeing how many pages of “Brexit” Google results you need to go through before finding some really good Brexit-themed erotic fiction. Okay, maybe that’s just us. Don’t judge.
How about we spend what remains of the work week by purging our brains of all the things we learned since reluctantly waking up Monday morning?
Take the Consumerist quiz. Yes, it can be punishingly hard if you’re not keeping notes or cheating (either is fine with us, but check with your ethicist before consulting a search engine for answers), but that’s the point: Reminding ourselves how much we don’t know so that we have a reason to get back to it next week (after [legally] blowing things up, according to our respective state laws) with renewed vigor.
We’ve talked too much. Just take the quiz already, then slip out a side door and go home (or to a destination of your choosing).
Sports Authority is no more. The sporting goods store folded earlier this year, and for the past few weeks all their assets have been up on the auction block. That included all their intellectual property, which was snapped up this week by competitor Dick’s Sporting Goods. And that now means that if you were a Sports Authority customer, Dick’s just bought your information.
Dick’s, which has been picking and choosing through the assets of its ruined competitor, is confirmed to have snapped up all the IP just yesterday for a cool $15 million. And as the Christian Science Monitor reports, that data includes a total of 114 million customer files, including 25 million e-mail addresses.
We saw this happen last year when RadioShack folded. Personal data was on the auction block when the venerable electronics shop finally went bankrupt. In that sale, customers’ phone numbers were ultimately not resold, but the 117 million one-time consumers whose data was on file only had a short time to opt out of having their e-mail or mailing addresses sold to the new owners.
In that instance, though, earlier existing privacy agreements, and a settlement with AT&T and Verizon, ended up sparing some customer data from being handed over. In the end, the majority of consumer data was not transferred to the new owner.
However, Sports Authority’s privacy policy was a little more forward-looking than RadioShack’s, from an industry perspective. Their policy stated that any data they had could be sold along with other company assets, and so it has been. And there’s not much any customers can really do about it.
And this is the norm: an investigation last year found that 85% of the top 100 sites in the country had privacy policies with language explicitly saying that your personal data would be sold to a new owner if the company changed hands in any way, and only a tiny handful included any provision for notifying customers. Even fewer included any mechanism of opting out.
It’s July 1, 2016, which means that Vermont’s controversial rules for labeling certain products containing genetically modified ingredients (GMOs) is now in effect. With both the supermarket industry and agribusiness-backed Senators trying to defeat this law in court and on Capitol Hill, we took a field trip to Vermont this morning to see just what the labels look like in the real world.
The final rule [PDF] requires labels on or near various types of packaged and unpackaged foods. It does, however, provide manufacturers with what is effectively a few months grace period, as any packaged, processed foods currently without the label will — until the end of the year — be presumed to have been produced before the July 1 deadline. So if a Vermont shopper sees a bag of potato chips in December that doesn’t have the label, the producer of those chips would not be in violation of the law.
That said, we did find a number of products on store shelves that are already in compliance with the rules.
We also spotted the label on General Mills’ Grands biscuits:
Baked-good giants Bimbo is also already on board in Vermont, with labels on its high-profile brands like Thomas’s, and lesser-known lines like Freihofer’s:
Over in the frozen food section, Nestle-owned Stouffer’s is labeling its pizza products in compliance with the new rule:
As you’ve probably noticed, most of these notices are rather small. In some cases, we had to spend a little time looking for the relevant line of text. Interestingly, the label that was the most difficult to read was also the label written in the largest type. This squeeze bottle of Smucker’s doesn’t have the GMO label printed as part of the nutrition info or ingredients like most of the other products. Instead, it’s printed on at the plant at the same time the product is stamped with its “Best if used by” date:
Printing the label in this fashion allows a company to comply with the Vermont law but avoid having to make this disclosure on all products nationwide. It’s an interesting concept; we’ll be curious to see if other’s follow the lead of J.M. Smucker on this one.
As mentioned above, the Vermont rule is under attack on both the legal and legislative fronts. It’s been two years since a grocery industry trade group sued to stop the labeling law from being enacted, yet the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has yet to issue a decision on the matter, even though it heard oral arguments nearly eight months ago.
More recently, there’s been a bipartisan effort — led by two senators who have received a total of more than $2.1 million from agribusiness donors in just this election cycle — to push through new legislation that would:
• Override the Vermont law and any other state rules on GMO labeling.
• Eventually — in at least two year; likely more — create a national standard for labeling that states could not attempt to make more strict at the local level.
• Create a standard that would not require any disclosure on the affected products. Instead, the disclosure could be nothing more than a barcode, text website link, or phone number.
Much like the earlier, failed so-called “DARK Act,” which would have created a voluntary labeling national labeling standard, this newest piece of legislation was able to skip much of the usual legislative red tape by having Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell present it [PDF] as an amendment to an earlier Senate bill to defund Planned Parenthood (a bill that was originally intended to reauthorize the National Sea Grant College program). The amendment wiped out all the existing text of the previous legislation, including the DARK Act text, leaving only the new GMO labeling bill.
The new legislation sailed through its first major procedural test earlier this week, on a vote of 69-28. After the July 4th holiday, it’s expected that the Senate will take a cloture vote on whether to end debate on the bill; 60 votes would be needed for it to then move on for one final Senate vote.
This morning, our colleagues at Consumers Union wrote to members of the U.S. Senate, calling on the lawmakers to consider the ramifications of this legislation.
In addition to the previously mentioned concerns about overriding the Vermont law and creating a labeling standard that is nothing more than a website address, CU contends that the language of this legislation omits many types of genetically engineered (GE) food products.
“The bill’s definition of ‘bioengineered’ specifies that the bill applies to food ‘that contains genetic material that has been modified’ through in vitro rDNA techniques,” explains the letter. “This would likely leave out many highly processed foods from GE sources without detectable genetic material, such as refined sugars, high-fructose corn syrup, oils, or proteins from GE plants. Moreover, the definition would cover only food that ‘could not otherwise be obtained through conventional breeding or found in nature,’ which may be difficult to demonstrate for current GE products, if read literally, since the two main traits – resistance to the herbicide glyphosate and resistance to insect pests – involve moving genes from bacteria found in nature into food plants.”
Do you want to order a pallet of cat food and some bendy straws on Amazon? If not, don’t judge. If you do, it won’t matter if you’ve purchased those items in the past: Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa will no longer be limited to just reordering stuff you got before.
Folks who own an Echo, Echo Dot, Tap, or Fire TV can now direct Alexa to buy tens of millions of things, from a frisbee to a frozen yogurt machine, as long as it’s eligible for Prime shipping.
To place an order, you just say, “Alexa, order [fill in the blank with your heart’s desire].” Alexa will then suggest a product that ships with Prime and tell you the price, apply any discounts, and calculate your total. Once you’ve said “Yes” to confirm the order, you’re done. All products purchased via Alexa qualify for free returns as well.
If Alexa can’t find something you want or complete the order, it might offer options like adding the item to your cart on Amazon, adding it to your Alexa shopping list, or checking the Alexa app for more options.
Amazon says there are tens of millions of products you can now order with Alexa, excluding apparel, shoes, jewelry, watches, Amazon Fresh, Prime Pantry, Prime Now, and Add-On items.
IKEA is finally offering a fairly consumer-friendly recall on furniture that has tragically killed six children in the last three decades. Unfortunately, the massive recall effort is not exactly going as planned to keep the dangerous dressers out of consumers’ homes.
There are two big problems going on with the recall right now. One is actually getting your recalled dresser handled: IKEA will happily come to your house, take away your old one, and give you the money to replace it… if you can actually reach anyone to talk to, that is.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has been following this story closely for many years, heard complaints from IKEA customers that getting through on the phone hotline was proving nigh impossible. To find out how bad it was, the Inquirer sat down and started dialing. Their results were dispiriting to say the least.
It took them 35 attempts to actually get through to a live human they could talk to. Calls were straight-up disconnected 27 times before making it into the queue. Another seven calls were disconnected in the queue. Just once did someone from IKEA actually answer… and that was after an hour and twenty minutes on hold.
Still, the phone queue problems will probably ease up naturally over time, when millions of customers aren’t all trying to call at the exact same time. A week from now, consumers should have an easier time calling than they do right now. But another problem is going to be much harder to stomp out, and is much more dangerous.
Now that you can’t grab the Malm furniture at your local IKEA, anyone who really wants a piece is taking to the big world of secondhand furniture, on sites like Craigslist or Facebook. And that’s a problem: reselling recalled items is illegal, even for individuals.
The Chicago Tribune had a look online in their metro area and found more than 15 of the recalled dressers turning up for sale just since Tuesday. A cursory, two-second search of Craigslist in other major cities (Boston, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York) unsurprisingly reveals dozens more of the recalled dressers for sale, and there are likely hundreds more being sold right now in yard sales, secondhand shops, and online forums around the nation.
A spokesperson for the CPSC told the Tribune that the commission works with online resale platforms to monitor and remove postings for recalled products. Still, it takes time… and with an estimated 29 million individual products on the recall list
If you see a listing for recalled furniture online, please don’t buy it. It’s not safe. You can, however, take a minute to flag the post as problematic on whatever site you’re using, and give the CPSC a boost in their frankly Sisyphean task.
For many people, this Fourth of July weekend is sure to be a busy one — Parades! Picnics! Parties! But when the fireworks have all stopped and you’ve been rendered immobile after consumer too many grilled things — or if you just need a few hours to not talk to your family and friends — you can still get into the spirit of the weekend with some movies.
Here’s a list — far from encyclopedic, but a good start — of holiday-relevant viewing available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu (some are admittedly a bit of a stretch, but not every movie can be 1776):
Armageddon
Bruce Willis — that steely-eyed icon of American can-do grit — is tasked with saving the world from a Texas-sized asteroid threatening to wipe out humankind. Meanwhile, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” will threaten to take over your brain after only one listen.
Wet Hot American Summer and Wet Hot American Summer: The First Day of Camp
For the millions of Americans who’ve spent a Fourth of July at summer camp, the WHAS movie and series will bring back all those hours of macrame, capture the flag, and awkward adolescent social interactions. But funnier, and with Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, and Janeane Garofalo.
Coming to America
The classic tale of a prince willfully turning himself into a pauper by way of employment at a fast food restaurant, Eddie Murphy’s high-born character ditches his royal status so he can work at a McDonald’s knockoff, belittle Arsenio Hall, woo the girl, and get the true American experience.
The Sum of All Fears
Based on the Jack Clancy novel, CIA agent Jack Ryan has to foil a sinister plot to push the U.S. and Russian into World War III. Morgan Freeman gets involved and imparts wisdom at some point. True, Ben Affleck is not the Jack Ryan that Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin were in earlier movies, but at least he’s not in a superhero costume this time.
Forrest Gump
You know what they say about life, sometimes it can be boiled down to fictionalized versions of important events in American history in a movie starring Tom Hanks.
How to Make an American Quilt
Romantic drama about a group of women who come together every year to make quilts and tell stories about their lives. A spy thriller it is not.
Unsung Heroes: The Story of America’s Female Patriots
A documentary profiling some of the top-ranking women in the U.S. military.
Nick Offerman: American Ham
Nick Offerman’s secrets to a happy life involve red meat and minor nudity in this comedy special.
Of Men and War
A 2015 documentary following several veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, winner of a special jury award at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
Twelve O’Clock High
This 1949 drama stars Gregory Peck as a brigadier general tasked with turning a bunch of jaded pilots into World War II heroes. Think Mighty Ducks, but with war instead of hockey, and Gregory Peck instead of Emilio Estevez.
Beavis and Butt-head Do America
Because your love of America doesn’t have to be pure, celebrate your independence by screaming, “I NEED TEEPEE FOR MY BUNGHOLE!”
Seal Team Six: The Raid On Osama Bin Laden
A dramatic recreation that follows U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 from training for a critical mission through the nighttime raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.
Ken Burnsapalooza: The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
If you’re in the mood to eat up hours upon hours of time, documentarian Ken Burns is your man.
Making the American Man
Another documentary, this one takes a look at “the makers of American-made goods for men, and the resurgence of clothing manufacturing gin the United States,” according to IMDB.
American Genius
A National Geographic series that “depicts some of America’s fiercest scientific and technological rivalries, including Colt vs. Wesson, Edison vs. Tesla, and Jobs vs. Gates.”
Top Gun
Maverick! Goose! Iceman! Kenny Loggins!! Hotshot fighter pilots compete to be the best at The Top Gun Naval Fighter Weapons School while Tom Cruise learns some important life lessons about falling in love with your instructor.
The Ides of March
Nothing more American than political scandal, am I right? And even though Ryan Gosling is a Canadian, we’ll allow this movie on the list, since it’s an intense look at a (mercifully fictional) presidential primary campaign.
The Jackie Robinson Story
The Dodgers legend stars as himself in the 1950 drama about Robinson’s journey to becoming the player that broke long-enforced ban against non-whites in Major League Baseball.
The Tuskegee Airmen
Laurence Fishburne stars in this tale of “The Fighting 99th” — the first squadron of African American U.S. Army Air Corps fighter pilots in WWII.
Spirit of the Pony Express
The story of how the Pony Express became the Pony Express at the beginning of the Civil War. Also, PONIES!
Top Gun
See our write-up above. Same movie; different streaming service.
Delta Farce
Larry the Cable Guy and some of his friends get mistaken for Army Reserves, and are sent off to war woefully unprepared. We can only assume hilarity ensues, or maybe it’s a dark existentialist drama about the barbaric nature of man. Either way: Larry the Cable Guy.
Saints and Soldiers
Four American soldiers team up with a British guy fighting the bad guys in Europe in World War II to get back behind Allied lines after being separated during the Malmedy Massacre.
Medal of Honor: The History
Not to be confused with Medal of Honor the video game, this documentary narrated by Gary Sinise looks at the history of the medal itself.
If you thought cheese could be safely left alone, months after a series of cheese thefts rocked the dairy love world, you thought wrong. Some brazen jerk out there is still stealing cheese in Wisconsin.
Police are on the hunt for whoever swiped 20,000 pounds of cheese from a packed trailer parked in a lot in Oak Creek, WI, reports FOX 6 News. The cheese is worth more than $46,000 and a whole lot of satisfied smiles.
A police captain says the driver on his way from Green Bay to New York City had unhitched his trailer and gone to run an errand early Thursday morning.
“It’s unique. It’s a lot of cheese. It’s a high-value property, and we’re gonna take it seriously like we would any theft,” the police captain said.
It’s unclear if there cheese was targeted or if it’s part of a bigger operation.
“I don`t even know if they knew what was in it. Maybe they thought they were getting an empty trailer,” the owner of the business where the truck was parked told WITI News.
He says there have been thefts from that lot before, and he’s installed 24-hour surveillance cameras. He and the police went through the footage Thursday morning.
“Right now we have several leads we’re following up on. It’s pretty fresh. We’ve got some things we’re following up on and working the case right now,” the police representative said.
USA Discounters, the not-at-all discount retailer that went bankrupt last year amid accusations of running a financing scam on customers, is looking to close at least one state investigations with a proposal that would provide a bit of relief to some customers sued by USA Discounters.
Regardless of where the customer was living, USA Discounters almost always filed non-payment lawsuits in Virginia, requiring defendants to travel hundreds, possibly thousands, of miles if they hoped to defend themselves. With many defendants either unable to make the trip, USA Discounters would be granted default judgments.
In July 2015, shortly before the retailer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman sued USA Discounters, accusing the company of — among other things — violating Colorado law by filing non-payment lawsuits against customers in Virginia instead of Colorado.
While the bankruptcy filing put a hold on the Colorado AG’s lawsuit, Coffman’s office filed a $15.6 million claim with the Delaware-based federal bankruptcy court.
In court filings this week [PDF; PDF], the bankrupt retailer revealed that it has reached a deal with Colorado that, if approved, would end the litigation and provide some relief to sued shoppers.
According to the proposed settlement, which would allow USA Discounters to avoid admitting it did anything wrong, the company would pay a $1 million penalty. Additionally, for Colorado customers who were sued by the retailer, the price tag of any judgment against them would be reduced by 60%.
Closing the book on the Colorado lawsuit doesn’t spell the end of legal troubles for USA Discounters. More than half the states are currently looking into the bankrupt retailer’s business practices.
People who want to raise money for the causes they care about have another crowdfunding option: Facebook announced it’s expanding its fundraising feature for nonprofits to individual users.
The new feature is rolling out to a small slice of Facebook users to start, and will let users create standalone Pages to raise money for the U.S.-based 501(c)3 nonprofits nearest and dearest to them.
“Fundraisers allow nonprofit supporters to set up a dedicated page to share their story, tell others about a nonprofit’s mission, and rally around a fundraising goal,” Facebook says in its announcement.
Pages for nonprofits first launched last fall to let groups raise money from their Newsfeed. Since then, more than 600 nonprofits have signed on, Facebook’s Naomi Gleit, vice president of product management for social good at Facebook, told Mashable.
Fundraiser creators will be able to choose from almost 100 charities to start, like Nature Conservancy, Alzheimer’s Association, Oxfam, Mercy Corp, World Wildlife Fund, and more.
“Before we actually disburse funds to them, depending on how much money it is, we’ll do some more quality control,” Gleit said about the nonprofits overall. “We just want to make sure there’s no fraud, so there’s an additional layer of vetting.”
Facebook’s fundraising efforts are part of its Social Good team, which was launched in September 2015 and integrates tools like Safety Check and Amber Alerts.
Baseball is already brought to you by Disney, if it’s a game on ESPN. But now Disney wants to bring you all the baseball… at least if you stream it online.
The LA Times reports that Disney is in talks to buy a big stake in MLB Advanced Media, better known to most of us simply as MLB.tv.
MLB Advanced Media has other services too, but MLB.tv is the big one. That’s the $110 annual (or $25 monthly) subscription service that allows baseball fans access to live streams of all their out-of-market baseball games.
Live sports offerings are still the tether that keeps pay-TV subscribers paying up every month, but even that trend appears to be on the wane. The LA Times reports that ESPN lost 1.2 million subscribers last year, a trend that is unlikely to abate any time soon.
As cable and other pay-TV subscriptions wane and consumers increasingly turn to over-the-top streaming services for their fix, ESPN is fighting an uphill battle to keep eyeballs on ads. And now even Disney apparently realizes the streaming writing is on the digital wall.
For all those folks getting ready to fire up the grill for the holiday weekend, there’s one thing you might do before you break out the hamburgers, hot dogs, and donuts — clean your grill. But before you set to scrubbing, consider this: an estimated 1,700 Americans went to an emergency room between 2002 and 2014 after having ingested wire bristles hidden in grilled food.
That’s according to a recent study published in the medical journal Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, which said that one in four of those with grill brush injuries had to be admitted to the hospital. That is one way to ruin a perfectly good Independence Day weekend.
1. Examine steel or brass wire brushes carefully before use
Check out your tools before cooking — are the brush’s bristles tightly anchored to the brush, or coming loose in some spots? If a brush has fewer bristles in some areas, or the brush is worn or warped, it’s time for a new one, Consumer Reports says. Electric grill brushes should be replaced either every grilling season, or after 100 uses.
2. Use liquid grill cleaner when needed
Grill grates can get so gunked up that a more thorough scrubbing can be needed. Using liquid grill cleaners can help loosen up that gunk, with the help of abrasive pads. You can also use a wet fine-steel-wool pad, CR says.
3. Consider alternatives to wire brushes
A traditional stainless steel or brass wire grill brush might not be necessary; depending on what kind of grill you have, you can clean grill grates with a warm — not hot — pumice stone or a wire-mesh cleaning tool that looks like a scouring pad. Check your owner’s manual before using any alternatives.
Aside from a pair of federal-level regulations on certain types of fireworks, what you can or can’t set off this Fourth of July weekend will depend on which state you’re in.
According to the American Pyrotechnics Association, only a few states — Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Jersey — have bans on all consumer fireworks. Yes, that even means sparklers.
Another handful of states — Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Vermont — do allow sparklers and some novelty items, but even then these states disagree on the items that are permitted. For example, the Illinois rules spell out that consumers can have and use “snakes,” smoke bombs, toy cap guns, and “trick noisemakers,” while across the river in Iowa they only explicitly allow certain types of sparklers, snakes, and cap guns.
Title 16, Part 1500.17(a)(3) prohibits: “Fireworks devices intended to produce audible effects (including but not limited to cherry bombs, M-80 salutes, silver salutes, and other large firecrackers, aerial bombs, and other fireworks designed to produce audible effects, and including kits and components intended to produce such fireworks) if the audible effect is produced by a charge of more than 2 grains of pyrotechnic composition.”
While (a)(8) bans: “Firecrackers designed to produce audible effects, if the audible effect is produced by a charge of more than 50 milligrams (.772 grains) of pyrotechnic composition (not including firecrackers included as components of a rocket), aerial bombs, and devices that may be confused with candy or other foods, such as ‘dragon eggs,’ and ‘cracker balls’ (also known as ‘ball-type caps’), and including kits and components intended to produce such fireworks.”
Wherever you live and whatever you light up, set off, or blow the ever-loving snot out of this weekend, please be careful. Don’t put your fingers, limbs, or life at risk just for the sake of a loud bang.
While no one will fault you for grilling up hot dogs and hamburgers at your Fourth of July cookout, these and other traditional grill fare are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to yummy things you can cook over an open flame this weekend — so why not celebrate by grilling something a little more unexpected?
If you’re looking to switch things up this year and need a little help thinking outside the realm of meats and basic veggies, we’ve rounded up a bunch of mouth-watering ideas for inspiration.
Disclaimer: we haven’t made most of these, but we do think they sound yummy.
Warning: If you’re not eating while reading this, or won’t have access to food soon after, this list could cause insistent stomach rumbles.
1.Pizza (toppings and cheese, your choice, which is how all pizza should be, all the time).
Apple is having a busy week, according to recent reports: Jay-Z’s streaming music service Tidal could be joining Tim Cook and friends in the near future, while another rival service claims the tech company is blocking update to its apps to push people into the arms of Apple Music.
The Wall Street Journal cites the ever-present “people familiar with the matter” who say Apple is looking into possible shoring up its music service with Tidal, which has a very good relationship with big names like Madonna and Kanye West (it’s also the only streaming service to offer a 15-album Prince catalog).
Just because there are discussions happening, the source says, that doesn’t mean anything will come of it. A Tidal spokesman told the WSJ that executives hadn’t had any chats with Apple.
Tidal charges $20 per month, and is well-liked by many musicians because it only has a paid subscription service. Spotify, on the other hand, has both a premium, paid tier and a free tier, which irks some artists.
Speaking of Spotify, the company is accusing Apple of rejecting its app’s update in order to herd customers toward Apple Music, a person on the inside told Bloomberg Technology.
Apple put the kibosh on the update because Spotify was pushing folks to subscribe to the service online instead of through the iOS mobile operating system, the insider claims, citing an internal Spotify company letter. That way, Spotify could avoid paying the 30% cut on monthly subscriptions that are billed through iOS.
Re/code says that in the letter, which was sent to Apple’s top lawyer by Spotify general counsel Horacio Gutierrez on June 26, Spotify says Apple is “causing grave harm to Spotify and its customers” by rejecting the update.
“This latest episode raises serious concerns under both U.S. and EU competition law,” Gutierrez wrote. “It continues a troubling pattern of behavior by Apple to exclude and diminish the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Music, particularly when seen against the backdrop of Apple’s previous anticompetitive conduct aimed at Spotify … we cannot stand by as Apple uses the App Store approval process as a weapon to harm competitors.”
Here are six of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.
Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.
Last fall, Tesla released a beta version of Autopilot, a software upgrade that would let the car take over some driving functions, including steering, cruise control, and lane changes. Today, the company announced some sad news: the first fatal crash in of one of the company’s vehicles while in autopilot mode happened in northern Florida in May.
The company shared the news in a blog post, and this summary comes from a combination of that account and the police blotter from a local newspaper. The crash occurred on a divided highway, where the 2015 Model S collided with a tractor-trailer that was making a left turn in the opposite direction.
Neither the driver nor the autopilot system saw the truck, and the car drove under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer hitting the windshield, then shearing off the car’s roof. The Tesla kept driving and stopped about 100 feet away from the road past the tractor-trailer.
“The customer who died in this crash had a loving family and we are beyond saddened by their loss,” the company said in a blog post, noting that he was known to the company and to other electric vehicle drivers, and a great supporter of technology and progress. “We would like to extend our deepest sympathies to his family and friends,” the post concluded.
The Verge discovered that the driver in this crash had posted a modestly viral dashcam video taken in early April of this year when his car swerved to avoid a truck that drifted into his lane. He also posted a collection of videos of his car’s autopilot in action to YouTube.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the crash after Tesla reported it since the car was in partially autonomous mode at the time. The crash “calls for an examination
of the design and performance of any driving aids in use at the time of the crash,” the agency notes in the paperwork that opened the investigation.
“The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation will examine the design and performance of the automated driving systems in use at the time of the crash,” the agency said in a statement. “During the Preliminary Evaluation, NHTSA will gather additional data regarding this incident and other information regarding the automated driving systems.”
It’s one thing if an online ad is misleading or misrepresents the site that you click on, but what happens when you order an item that isn’t as promised? As overseas clothing companies that market solely through Facebook have proliferated, some customers blame Facebook, even though the site doesn’t vet the products and services of every advertiser. Now, at least, Facebook wants to listen if you’re scammed or misled by an ad on the site.
Facebook agreed to look into this after a Buzzfeed investigation into shady clothing peddlers in China that market on social media. The story exposed companies with a truly alarming number of complaints filed elsewhere on the Internet, but with carefully scrubbed Facebook pages and appealing ad campaigns.
A Facebook representative told Buzzfeed that they’ll use the information to look at trends and find problematic companies or ad campaigns. After all, if users don’t click on Facebook ads, how does Facebook make money?
The site’s response is a simple form on their help site asking for information about problematic ads, including . isn’t just for clothing sites: you can also leave information about ads that are misleading or problematic in other ways.
Since people tend to keep our cars longer than we used to, there are still plenty of model year 2001, 2002, and 2003 cars from Honda and Acura still on the road. Recent tests show that each time one of the vehicles’ airbags deploys, there’s up to a 50% chance that it will rupture, posing a serious risk to drivers and passengers.
We know that hundreds of millions of vehicles out there have potentially hazardous airbags, so what’s the rush with these Honda and Acura cars, SUVS, and minivans? In an announcement today, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shared recent test results that eight out of the ten deaths in the United States attributed to Takata airbags occurred in Honda vehicles from this period.
Takata performed the tests at NHTSA’s request, and they showed that airbags ruptured as frequently as 50% of the time under test conditions. Ideally, you hope that a vehicle’s airbag never deploys, but it could be a serious problem for passengers if one of these does.
The vehicles were previously recalled between five and eight years ago, and most had their airbags replaced with a less dangerous model back then. However, NHTSA reports that there are still 313,000 of them still on the roads that haven’t been fixed, and the agency wants to get word out to their owners to repair them right away.
The U.S. Transportation Secretary, Anthony Foxx, is not messing around, saying in a statement that “folks should not drive these vehicles unless they are going straight to a dealer to have them repaired immediately, free of charge.”
Here’s the list of vehicles that are in need of immediate repairs.
2001-2002 Honda Civic
2001-2002 Honda Accord
2002-2003 Acura TL
2002 Honda CR-V
2002 Honda Odyssey
2003 Acura CL
2003 Honda Pilot
Vehicles that have spent all or most of their time in warm, humid regions are the most susceptible to the defect, but all cars from these models are under recall. If an airbag from one of these models deploys, it poses a serious risk of rupturing and injuring the driver and passengers with shrapnel, which can kill them even when the crash that caused the airbag to deploy wouldn’t have.
Well, Virginia, we had a good run. The Old Dominion spent a while having the fastest average internet connection in the U.S., but that reign is over. A new report drops Virginia all the way back to 9th place, and puts in a handful of high-achieving newcomers at the top of the heap.
That’s the news from the latest “State of the Internet” report [PDF] from internet analytics firm Akamai, which has been running these quarterly updates for years.
The U.S. as a whole continues not to crack the ranks of the global top ten for fastest national averages — coming in at 16th place — but there’s lots of interesting moving and shaking going on among the states. Notably, several states have seen gains in average speed of more than 25% just since this time last year:
D.C. may be a city, not a state, but it saw a whopping 48% increase in average internet connection speed over the last year. Maryland also saw a 40% increase, with New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island also all seeing gains of 30% or higher.
At the other end of the spectrum, Kentucky, Idaho, and Alaska have the lowest speeds in the nation, around 10.9 Mbps — just over half of what 3rd-place Rhode Island sees.
Higher speed connections — greater than 10 Mbps or 15 Mbps — also continue to be more widely available and, unsurprisingly, are seen in the states with the highest overall average connection speeds:
In five areas — Delaware, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and D.C. — more than 50% of all the internet connections Akamai recorded cleared the 15Mbps threshold, all of which are huge gains over last year. Of course, if 51% of users are clocking in above 15 Mbps, that still means 49% aren’t — to say nothing of actually reaching the FCC’s 25 Mbps threshold for “high-speed” broadband service.
Still, gains are gains. The number of internet users in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey who have 15 Mbps or greater connections, as compared to this time last year, went up by 70% or more, coming close to doubling in twelve months.
Even in the best-performing states, barely a quarter of users hit that 25 Mbps mark. In D.C., the highest-ranking, it’s 29%. Delaware follows at 25%; Rhode Island and Massachusetts come in right behind at 21%; New Jersey, Maryland, and Utah all tie for fourth place at 19%, and Virginia comes in at fifth place with 18%. On the other hand those changes, too, are tremendous, with New Jersey posting a huge 180% increase in users clearing that mark as opposed to last year.
In the future, when you forget that Sports Authority went out of business and type in their website address, you’ll end up on a page owned by the defunct retailer’s biggest competitor. Dick’s Sporting Goods reportedly scooped up the Sports Authority name, including its domain names and customer mailing lists, for $15 million in the company’s intellectual property auction.
Reuters reports that a source close to the auction shared that Dick’s was the big winner in this auction. The sporting goods retail landscape isn’t a promising one lately, but Dick’s did also reportedly win 31 leases for a total of $8 million, most likely in areas where it doesn’t currently have a store.
When Sports Authority put its current stores up for sale as a going concern, which means buying the business and all of its inventory, liquidators made the highest bids, selling off inventory at nice discounts eventually.
Buying the intellectual property of Sports Authority, as Reuters reports that Dick’s Sporting Goods has done, would allow Dick’s to open Sports Authority stores or an e-commerce site if it wanted to, but it probably won’t. Instead, purchasing the mailing list and loyalty card member information means acquiring some customer names, especially in areas where it doesn’t currently have stores. Buying the brand means that no one else can own it.
Now Dick’s can let the brand that used to be plastered on tickets and billboards at sporting events simply die off instead of worrying about the brand being resurrected, as Modell’s and UK retailer Sports Direct had planned to do with the Sports Authority brand on a small scale.
There was no reported winner for the naming rights to the field where the Denver Broncos, reigning Super Bowl champions, play. That will please the Broncos: the team wanted to prevent the contract from being sold at the bankruptcy auction, and to perhaps find a more lucrative deal with a new sponsor on its own.
Did you enjoy a pad thai, macaroni and cheese, or a pesto cavatappi for lunch sometime in the last few months? And then have your bank very suddenly replace your credit or debit card, due to an unnamed data breach, in early June? You’ve may have Noodles and Co. to thank for both.
The 20-year-old fast-casual pasta-based chain announced this week that it is the latest victim of a large scale data breach affecting consumers’ payment data.
The hack lasted from January 31 until June 2 of this year, Noodles reports, at which point it was detected and stopped.
The company has been, as one does in this sort of situation, working with third party security investigators to determine how the breach happened and what was stolen. Lo and behold, there was malware in Noodles’ computer systems that managed to yoink payment card information including cardholder name, card number, expiration date, and CVV.
Online orders were not part of the breach, Noodles added.
The company suggests the usual: check your credit reports with the three agencies, put freezes or fraud alerts on any if you need to.
Noodles has published a list of all affected restaurant locations broken down by state. States that were part of the breach include:
Arizona
California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Maryland
Minnesota
Missouri
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Virginia
Washington
Washington, DC
Wisconsin
For more information, Noodles has created a landing page for all information related to the breach. The FTC also has a a guide online to help consumers deal with having their data lost or stolen in hacks.
As a reminder of how much everyone has come to depend on a free (or work-supplied, if your workplace uses Google accounts) online service, today civilization may yet still collapse due to a morning outage of Google Calendar. There were no widespread reports of people wandering streets or office hallways with no idea of where they were supposed to be, but that may be because the outage only lasted a few hours.
As usual when a service other than Twitter is down, people took to Twitter to vent about the situation. Or celebrate. One of those things.
Wait, @googlecalendar is down? This is like a snow day for adults, right?
When you see a label that says “natural” on your meat, you might make some assumptions about what’s in it. Doesn’t that label mean meat that doesn’t have preservatives or artificial colors, that comes from animals raised without growth-promoting hormones or antibiotics? Well, no, it doesn’t necessarily mean that, and a recent lawsuit from the Animal Legal Defense Fund calls Hormel out on its labeling.
Yes, that’s the same Hormel that owns organic meat brand Applegate Farms, but this lawsuit is about Hormel’s own trendy Natural Choice line of lunch meats. The suit, filed by animal rights group the Animal Legal Defense Fund, asks why the line is marketed as having the features customers expect in “natural” products, but contains plant-derived preservatives and comes from the same meat supply as Hormel’s other products.
“Contrary to Hormel’s branding campaign,” the ALDF explained in a press release explaining the lawsuit, “meats the company advertises as ‘natural’ actually [come] from animals raised in the worst factory farms that employ additives, hormones and antibiotics, and contain ingredients that constitute artificial preservatives.”
Like what? The group claims that the pacakging claims meats are free of nitrates and nitrites, common processed meat preservatives, but that Hormel uses celery juice powder, a product that sounds natural, but is just a rich source of nitrate. Another natural-sounding additive, cherry powder, combines with the nitrate to form sodium nitrate. They didn’t add any nitrates or nitrites, though!
The group alleges that Hormel is breaking District of Columbia consumer protection law, and filed their suit in Washington.
Snack food giant and grocery store staple Mondelez International apparently has decided it needs more chocolate for the s’mores you can make with its Honey Maid graham crackers, and is making a takeover bid for Hershey Foods.
The WSJ, citing the ever-popular “people familiar with the matter,” says that Mondelez has contacted Hershey about the sale. The Hershey Trust, which holds 8.4% of the stock and 81% of the voting power, has historically resisted any sale offers.
Mondelez, however, is reportedly “prepared to go to lengths” to win over America’s most famous chocolate brand, including pledges to protect jobs, relocate to Hershey, PA, and rename the whole company Hershey, according to a source.
The Mondelez family of brands currently includes a whole bunch of snacks, crackers, and candies that you know, including Oreo, Cadbury, Chips Ahoy, the entire Nabisco line, Philadelphia (cream cheese), Ritz, and Trident and Stride gum, among many others.
The Hershey Company, meanwhile, makes more than just Hershey’s-branded chocolate. They also sell a variety of other candy brands, including Twizzlers, Mounds and Almond Joy, Reese’s peanut butter products, and York peppermint patties.
Hershey also already owns the rights to Cadbury candies in the U.S., which are different (and widely considered less good) than their British, Mondelez-owned counterparts.
This holiday weekend, many Americans will no doubt be in the mood to celebrate Independence Day with brightly colored fireworks that go “whiz!” and “bang!” and make us all proud we got rid of the British early on. But no matter how fun fireworks can be, they can also be very, very dangerous. To bring that message home, New York Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul is sharing the story of how he lost part of his hand in a firework accident
In a new public service announcement from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Pierre-Paul shows the world exactly what can happen when you aren’t careful around such explosives, holding up his right hand to show the damage a firework did when it accidentally exploded in his hand last year.
“Fourth of July, I lit up a firework, thought I could throw it away real quick,” he tells CPSC chairman Elliott Kaye in the video, filmed at the Giants’ indoor practice facility at the Quest Diagnostics Training Center in East Rutherford, N.J. “And in a split second, it blew off my whole hand.”
He lost his index finger in the accident, and suffered severe damage to his right hand.
“I’m just truly, truly blessed to be alive,” Pierre-Paul
“Keep fireworks away from kids,” Pierre-Paul implores viewers, while Kaye chimes in to remind folks to keep professional fireworks to the professionals.
Don’t have a car, but want to work for Lyft or Uber as a driver? Hertz is hoping it can squeeze some extra miles out of its older cars with new deals it’s just announced to supply rentals to the ride-hailing companies.
Under the agreements, drivers have set rates on two- to three-year-old models Hertz has rotated out of its fleet, which can be rented from Hertz off-airport locations. The cars can then be used for either personal or business reasons, and they can be rented out for just a few days or even months.
“We consider this agreement to be largely complementary to our rental car business,” said John Tague, president and CEO of Hertz Global Holdings, in a statement.
The agreement will expand Hertz’s pilot program with Lyft, which it debuted in Las Vegas last year. The rental car company will be bringing that program to Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
The Hertz/Uber program will at first only be available in Los Angeles, but the company says it plans to expand both programs across the country eventually.
While Keurig is surely hoping there will come a day when its failed KOLD soda-making machine is but a misty, sparkling memory, it’s not the first company to reach for the stars, to fly too close to the sun, to try to capture lightning in a bottle… and fail utterly and completely, thereby forever securing a spot in the brand failure hall of fame, never to be forgotten.
Keurig is far from alone, of course: many companies have tried to bank on former successes by coming up with some strange ideas. And so we present forthwith, 16 other examples of companies who thought they had the next big thing, only to fall flat on their faces.
1. The Ford Edsel
Perhaps nothing embodies the idea of a commercial failure as much as the Edsel, which was unveiled on Sept. 4, 1957 to the public after a yearlong teaser campaign. It was met with resounding rejection, as customers deemed the gas-guzzling, pricey car an ugly waste of money. Three model years and 110,847 Edsels later, Ford pulled the plug on the Edsel in November 1959. Ultimately, Ford took a $250 million hit (in 1958 dollars, or about $2 billion today) for the development, manufacturing, and marketing of the vehicle.
2. Crystal Pepsi
For some reason, Pepsi got it into its head that cola shouldn’t be brown; it should be clear, while still tasting like cola but looking like a lemon-lime soda. That push for sensory confusion resulted in Crystal Pepsi, a caffeine-free “clear alternative” to regular colas.
“You’ve never seen a taste like this!” Pepsi promised, which was true, but not in a good way: many consumers were grossed out, confused, or just disappointed, with some insisting the beverage had a citrus hint to it. PepsiCo killed Crystal Pepsi in 1993 after only a year.
“People were saying we should stop and address some issues along the way, and they were right,” the man who conceptualized Crystal Pepsi, David Novak, told Fast Company in 2007. “It would have been nice if I’d made sure the product tasted good.”
Thursday, April 23, 1985. That’s the date Coca-Cola announced a change to its secret formula — the first one in its 99 years — and a change that would forever link Coke with brand failures to come after it.
It wasn’t originally called New Coke — it was a can of Coke with the word “New!” on it, until 1992 when it was officially renamed Coke II.
The backlash from consumers was so immediate and so fierce, the company hurried to get the original recipe back on the market within three months of New Coke’s arrival. On July 11, 1985, Coca-Cola held a press conference to officially announce the return of the old Coke, and admit how very wrong it had been.
“The simple fact is that all of the time and money and skill poured into consumer research on a new Coca-Cola could not measure or reveal the depth and abiding emotional attachment to original Coca-Cola felt by so many people,” said Coca-Cola’s president at the time, Donald Keough.
5. Frito-Lay Lemonade
What would be perfect to wash down salty snacks? A big, cold glass of lemonade. That must have been the thinking behind the Frito-Lay brand’s unsuccessful foray into branded beverages with Frito-Lay lemonade; it didn’t work out so well.
Something about the Frito-Lay name just didn’t sound refreshing to consumers, Entrepreneur noted in 1998, and parent company PepsiCo dropped the product.
6. Tropicana carton redesign
When it comes to breakfast beverages, Tropicana learned that messing with its brands is not a good move. In January 2009, Tropicana came out with a new look for its cartons, including a clever cap that looked just like an orange.
Clever or no, consumers haaaaaated it. The product went “poof” by the next month, and the original packaging reappeared on shelves in March.
“We underestimated the deep emotional bond” loyal customers had with the original packaging, Neil Campbell, president at Tropicana North America in Chicago explained to The New York Times then. “Those consumers are very important to us, so we responded.”
7. Gerber’s single servings for adults
Pre-made baby food is super convenient for parents: You get the meal in a jar; it’s the right size for your 10-month-old; it’s already pureed; and it’s portable. Win/win.
However, jars of mush — aside from maybe applesauce and Soylent — do not generally appeal to most adults. In fact, the list of people over 21 who have ever thought, “I wish my beef bourguignon were all pre-mashed and then stuffed in a jar” is infinitesimally small — and so was the market for Gerber Singles, one of 1974’s worst ideas.
The plan had been to sell the product to college students and young adults who had moved out of mom’s house and might not be otherwise able to feed themselves. It turns out, young adults had plenty of other options they liked better — anything other than adult baby food, for example.
8. Bic Underwear & Hosiery
If we say “Bic,” the first thing that leaps into your mind is probably going to be “ball-point pen.” Pencils and highlighters might be close runners-up, and, if you’re feeling particularly thoughtful, you might mention disposable razors or lighters. You are not, however, likely to think of undergarments and hosiery.
The women’s underwear line, which included pantyhose, launched in 1998. It was — like all those other Bic products — designed to be disposable. The problem is, most women aren’t really looking for disposable underwear. Nor are they planning to buy underwear from stores (or sections of stores) where Bic’s other products are sold; at least not unless it’s an emergency.
The products — which never launched in the United States — quietly disappeared from overseas stores in 1999. We found a pair on eBay recently, if you’re still interested.
9. Lifesavers Soda
Lifesavers have been around since 1912, but in the 1980s, Wrigley thought it might make a run at the beverage market with a candy-flavored soda.
Sugar plus sugar — sounds like a sure thing for the go-go-go ’80s, right? Not so much. Some folks found the fizzy drink too sweet, like drinking “liquid candy,” and the product disappeared into the sugary chasm from whence it came.
10. Miller Beer
In the mid-1990s, there was Budweiser and Coors, but while Miller Brewing Company had a variety of namesake beer brands — Miller High Life, Miller Lite, Miller Genuine Draft — it didn’t have a flagship mononym brew like the competition did.
So in early 1996, Miller launched a new product, simply called “Miller,” which featured the company’s trademark against a red and blue background on a traditional brown bottle, calling it “different from any existing premium beer.”
It didn’t go very well, coming up short on a company goal to hit 1% market share by the end of 1996, Milwaukee Business Journal reported in 1997, and the company soon took plain-old Miller off the shelves.
11. Gap logo redesign
In October 2010, Gap executives apparently figured out how to use Photoshop, or at least whatever crude graphics program came preinstalled on their office computers, with the resulting logo looking liked it belonged on a cracked plastic sign outside an anonymous office park warehouse, instead of a huge national clothing retailer.
Everyone hated it, because look at that thing — it’s “as bland and uninteresting as jeans and a black t-shirt,” as we wrote then.
Only two days later, Gap scrapped the crap logo, saying, “We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers.”
12. Kellogg’s Cereal Mates
Portable cereal is not actually a bad idea. On-the-go breakfasts are popular. Cereal is popular. Putting the two together seems like a strong commercial idea and, indeed, your modern grocery store has a lot of different portable, single-serving options. Kellogg’s 1998 attempt, however, hit the sweet spot of “does not solve problem” and “too weird,” and failed miserably as a result.
The packages — containing a single-serve sealed bowl of cereal, a box of milk, and a spoon — were advertised as something to find in the fridge case, to make your family’s chaotic morning easier. The thing is, cereal you keep in the fridge tastes kind of meh by the time you open it. And shelf-stable milk, while perfectly safe if properly packaged, continues to be a hard sell for most American shoppers.
So Kellogg’s managed to capture the worst of both worlds — soft cereal and warm milk — while making the product too high-priced and redundant to use at home and too cumbersome to take on the road.
13. Coors Rocky Mountain Sparkling Water
Coors says its been brewing its beer with “pure rocky mountain spring water” since 1873, and in 1990, the company decided to take the alcohol out of the equation and just sell straight-up sparkling spring water.
Despite the growing popularity of bottled water, many shoppers were confused by the company’s first non-alcoholic beverage since Prohibition, which featured a Coors logo just like its beer products. Coors abandoned the idea two years after launch.
14. Colgate’s Kitchen Entrees
Food is something you are supposed to eat, and it makes your teeth dirty. Toothpaste is something you are not supposed to eat, and it makes your teeth clean. So you can get an immediate sense of why toothpaste-branded food was maybe doomed to failure.
Frozen meals were all the rage in 1982, and you can see why Colgate-Palmolive wanted in on the trend. Much harder to understand is why they thought the Colgate toothpaste branding would help sell savory foods. Nobody wants their toothpaste to taste like stir-fry… or their stir-fry to taste like toothpaste.
Made by Clearly Canadian, Orbitz looked like a drinkable lava lamp: marketers touted the fruity soft drink filled with gelatinous spheres as a “texturally enhanced alternative beverage,” but many consumers just thought it was gross. The drink was shelved in 1997 a year after it debuted, while its name has been repurposed by a certain online travel booking company.
16. Frito-Lay WOW Chips
If you don’t remember WOW chips, consider yourself luckier than many consumers who actually bought them… and whose bodies did not respond well to olestra, the fat substitute used to reduce the fat content of these chips.
First introduced in 1998, Frito’s new idea was popular at the beginning, with WOW versions of Lay’s, Ruffles, Doritos, and Tostitos bringing in $400 million in sales. But by 2000, sales had dipped to $200 million, after many customers reported anal leakage caused by olestra.
A new warning was added to packaging as well: “This Product Contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients. Vitamins A, D, E, and K have been added.”
The chips were rebranded to “Light” around the same time, and WOW disappeared, leaving only painful, streaky memories behind.
17. Keurig KOLD
While folks might love their single-serving coffee machines from Keurig, the company made a big mistake trying to compete with SodaStream. The Keurig KOLD was a soda-making machine that cost $370 when it was introduced in 2015 — and it fell flat.
