Little things mean a lot. Just ask Visa and Mastercard, which has created a reliable billion-dollar worldwide industry by charging a few extra pennies with every transaction. So as you read this story about my anger over a rogue $2.50 fee, please keep that in mind. I don’t care about [Keep reading]
I’d love to retire the concept of Gotcha Capitalism. Unfortunately, it’s going nowhere. Companies continue to use fine print, manipulation, and information advantage to screw and cheat consumers out of nickels and dimes — at a scale that nets them billions of dollars and wrecks our market economy. I recently [Keep reading]
It’s the end of January — if that means your dry January ends today, I toast you for making it! But usually, the change to February makes you realize you have abandoned all the good intentions you had on New Year’s Day. January is usually a harsh reminder of how [Keep reading]
Half of Americans didn’t get a raise last year, according to Bankrate.com. And that’s the good news (more people got raises this year than last year). The bad news: The less you earn, the less likely you were to get a raise. This reality leads to another: the gig economy [Keep reading]
What’s a “nudge unit” and how might it help your company, your employes or yourself be better at whatever you do? The folks at PeopleScience.com asked me to look into that recently. It’s pretty fascinating. I’ve been writing about cognitive biases and other human behavior research for some time now [Keep reading]
Remember the news that victims of the Equifax hack might get $125 from a class action settlement, only to hear later the real amount would probably be a few pennies? And getting those pennies required a bunch more paperwork steps? And the lawyers who negotiated the settlement were going to [Keep reading]
Is tech hacking your happiness? And can you reverse that — can tech help make you happier? These are the questions Alia and I explore with Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and numerous other best sellers. People pay good money to hear Gretchen dispense her special kind of [Keep reading]
Turns out, Capital One is in fact anything but a-typical. Unless you are dead, you’ve seen the ads on TV for Capital One. A coffee shop in a bank? Capital One is anything but typical, we are told. And then the actor (Jeremy Brandt) tells us, over and over, “One [Keep reading]
Bank of America recently destroyed my debit card, then tried to charge me $5 for a replacement. Really! Worse still, it took about 30 minutes on the phone for me to get that $5 replacement fee waived, something no rational person would do — heck, that’s less than minimum wage [Keep reading]
This should come as a surprise to no one: Equifax is making hacked consumers wrestle with additional red tape. The firm is asking for more paperwork from consumers who were victimized by the credit bureau’s giant data breach in 2017. The additional red tape seems designed to shrink the ranks [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan