“Passengers still have to go searching for airfares with a calculator in one hand, and that’s how the airlines like it.” — Chrisopher Elliot of consumer travel site Elliot.org. The Trump administration just helped kill some price tags. That’s bad for consumers, but good for huge, monopolistic airlines. The main [Keep reading]
Merry Christmas! Another day, another story of America shamefully and needlessly wrecking families. All in the name of upholding the letter of the law. This time, it’s a Mexican couple from New Jersey who’ve lived in the U.S. for 30 years; their 16-year old son will now be in custodial [Keep reading]
Move over, resort fees. There’s a new enemy in your quest to get a good deal on a hotel room: The “urban destination charge.” Travelers cramming into New York City to catch a glimpse of the famous Christmas tree outside Rockefeller Center are now getting hit with a relatively new [Keep reading]
Gift cards will be America’s second most popular present to give this holiday season, trailing only clothing. Six in 10 givers will buy someone spendable plastic, according to the National Retail Federation. But if gift recipients had their way, gift cards would be No. 1. (Clothing came in second, 61% [Keep reading]
As the Republican tax bill process comes to a head this week, you’re sure to hear a Tower of Babble about what it is — a middle-class tax cut, a middle-class tax increase, a deficit exploder. Fortunately, there’s data to help us out. Here’s an amazing story and analysis by The [Keep reading]
“It turns up being a joke…in a sick, sad kind of way.” As Americans return to their desks from the Thanksgiving holiday, they are learning about a tragic comedy that is indeed playing out in Washington D.C. Two people claim to run the federal agency devoted to protecting consumers from [Keep reading]
One of the themes of my Restless Project is that American consumers today are subject to major forces they can neither see, nor understand, nor plan for, and that’s a great source of day-to-day anxiety. Examples are all around us. Here’s one: Pew recently found that 46 percent of Americans [Keep reading]
Standard Oil committed many sins on the way to infamy, and Teddy Roosevelt’s s&*t list, but a big one was “vertical integration.” Rockefeller’s people owned oil refineries, and trucks that delivered gasoline, and the gas stations that sold it, and so on. It owned businesses up and down the supply [Keep reading]
You’ve probably heard of something called the “small sample size” problem. Well, if you are shopping for health care right now, that’s you. And that’s why it’s stupid to buy health insurance. To be more precise, I mean shopping for health insurance is a fairly futile, stupid exercise. Insurance companies [Keep reading]
For many years, the end of every scammer’s story — the sweatheart scam, the fake eBay product, the lottery “winnings” — went something like this: “Just wire me the money through Western Union.” Western Union is now paying a price for being so popular with criminals — $586 million. And [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan