In case you missed it during the holiday weekend, a set of consumers’ rights were killed off and then rose from the dead, all in the span of about three days. While consumer advocates are declaring victory over the Cheerios fine print incident, there’s a bigger story you are probably [Keep reading]
General Mills on Saturday reversed changes it recently made to terms and conditions that would have limited consumers’ ability to file lawsuits against the firm. The move comes after a week of pounding in the public marketplace, which served a slice of humble pie to the firm and served as [Keep reading]
General Mills did the predictable thing today and, after refusing to answer questions from The New York Times, wrote a blog post criticizing the paper for getting the Cheerios story wrong yesterday. Feel free to believe the firm — and every other corporation — which tries to say that forcing [Keep reading]
Pope Francis is saying and doing all the right things. He’s eating meals with prisoners. He’s washing the feet of the disabled and the elderly. He’s living in a humble apartment and has rejected Vatican comforts. Imagine if someone nailed him to a cross for it? Today is Good Friday, [Keep reading]
Cheerios, Betty Crocker and Pillsbury might sound like the most American of American brands, but it sure sounds like Betty and friends hate America. Perhaps you spotted a New York Times story today about consumers giving away their right to sue Big Brand companies if they do something as simple [Keep reading]
Smart phone theft is exploding nationally, but carriers this week promised to deploy a simple new technology that could soon render stolen phones useless. Consumer Reports said Thursday 3.1 million consumers had their smartphones lifted during 2013, double the number of victims in 2012, according to its annual State of [Keep reading]
If you are paying more than 20 percent of your income in federal taxes, you are doing it wrong. That’s roughly what the Obamas pay every year — hey, at least it’s more than Mitt Romney. As you should know by now, Obama pays a lower real tax rate than [Keep reading]
Americans would gain free access to their credit scores and new rights to challenge errors that keep scores low under a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. The “Stop Errors in Credit Use and Reporting (SECURE) Act” is sponsored by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The legislation [Keep reading]
Surprise! Spirit Airlines is the undisputed champion of airline passenger complaints. In fact, it’s quite literally in a different league than other airlines — so much so that graphic artists making a chart of complaints had to omit Spirit (see above). Surprise No. 2, he said sarcastically: Among all other [Keep reading]
Heartbleed is the latest guts-of-the-Internet calamity that you should know about, but can’t really do much about. In short, the very thing that was designed to keep Internet communications secure — part of the system that puts that little lock next to your web addresses on top of your browser [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan