Zachary Maxwell is a 4th-grade kid who snuck a camera into a his school’s lunchroom for 6 months and made a movie out of it. Here is an outtake that shows what most of our children don’t tell us. After just a few minutes I know I don’t ever want to have to eat school lunches – yet, we make our helpless kids eat them every day.
Category: Bad Product
Pre-Peeled Re-Wrapped Bananas Anyone?
Commenting on my post below for Costco apples, one of my readers pointed out pre-peeled re-wrapped bananas in an Austrian supermarket chain.
Not only is this extremely wasteful, but I am grossed out by the looks of it. Who wants to eat a fresh banana that somebody already had their hands on and wrapped cellophane around.
Didn’t they know rule number one of eating: Never eat anything that comes wrapped in cellophane?
Microsoft Word Auto-Corrects iPhone
I got really tired of Microsoft Word correcting my spelling whenever I typed the word “iPhone.” It turned the word to “phone” and I kept having to go back and changing it. Well, today I was determined to put an end to it, and to my surprise I discovered that iPhone is intentionally listed in the auto-correct table – see below. This is how Microsoft Word comes installed.
stamps.com – Go to Hall of Shame
I recently came close to signing up for stamps.com, who advertise massively right now for new customers, and are approved and endorsed by the U.S. Postal Service.
In reality, they are a clunky service, many people can’t get it to work, and they charge $15.99 a month for the service, whether you use it or not.
Signing up is easy, making it work is hard, and canceling is apparently impossible. Here is a great article with comments that shows people’s experiences. Canceling requires calling in, getting the phone center run-around, arguments, and dogged persistence. This is reminiscent of what porn sites used to do – get in with one click and a credit card – pay to get out. I had such an experience once with MobilityPass, a global cell phone roaming service. No Contract, No Commitment, Pay as you Go, they advertised. That whole experience cost me over $200 for a “service” that never even worked. I had to cancel my credit card to eventually stop them from charging me.
Rather than using stamps.com, I ended up with PayPal, and I believe I have a much better service, and I am only paying when I actually need something.
It sounds like stamps.com is such a company. Stamps.com – business practices adapted from the porn industry.
The Hotel Soap Travesty
I spend about 60 to 80 nights in hotels every year. Given that some stays are for more than one night, I therefore estimate that I use about 50 hotel soap bars a year. Some of those are small, but some are quite substantial and elaborate.
About a year ago I put a little zip-lock bag into my wash kit so I could take those home, either to use, or to accumulate to see how much soap I personally wasted in a single year. The little box in the bathroom started filling up and eventually I threw it all out.
This particular bar of soap in the picture is from the Embassy Suites. It’s actually fairly large, according to the box, 50 grams or 1.75 ounces of soap.
So let me step on my soapbox, literally this time.
I recently read an unsettling book about children in the slums of India titled Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
Look at the little girl on the cover, sitting on her haunches in a pool of sewage. I believe that this bar of soap that I left in my hotel room this morning could wash this child for a month or more, keeping her clean and above all, much more healthy. Yet, I have no way to get this bar of soap into the hands of the child, just like I can’t deliver to India the pile of perfectly good food that the people at the table next to me just left on their plates and on the floor.
It is estimated that 1 million bars of soap are thrown away by hotels in the United States every day.
I personally, doing simple math, probably throw away ten times as much soap in hotels every year as I legitimately use at home in my shower. Due to the large amount of travel I do, I may not be a very representative example. But 1 million bars of soap is a lot of soap that is going to waste.
Researching this further, I found that there are movements underway to recover this. For instance, Clean the World is a foundation that does just this, collect slightly used bars of soap, cleans them and recycles them.
I found it somewhat astonishing they are actually worried about the “gently used” bars of soap harming the recipients.
Clean the World is committed to maintaining an environmentally and hygienically safe recycling process. As the world’s first, high volume soap recycler, Clean the World ensures that all bars of soap recycled and distributed domestically and abroad are completely safe and will not harm the end-user due to disease or pathogens that can be transmitted if proper re-purposing does not exist.
Read the book Behind the Beautiful Forevers and you will be convinced that if this little girl on the cover actually DID get a used bar of soap from the Embassy Suites into her hands, the last thing she’d do would be using it. She would trade it for money or something to eat, because she would look at a used bar of soap as something of a treasure, far higher in value than the bottle caps, pieces of plastic, glass and metal trash that she normally trades with.
Here is some more information in case you are interested in hotel waste recycling, something most of us don’t even give a second thought in this country of abundance.
And that’s why they call us Rich Americans. We can waste soap.
Assembly Line of Death – I Don’t Want to Eat Chicken Anymore
This is not for you if you are queasy.
Medical Expenses are Killing Us
For more than 15 years our company has been providing a health plan to the employees and their families. Employees and the company share the cost, paying 50% of the premiums each. Every year, in the last 10 years, the cost of premiums went up by somewhere between 15% and 30%. When that happens, we are forced to shop around for a better plan, another plan, just to keep the costs down. In the end, deductibles are now higher than ever, and premiums are higher than ever. Where is the relief?
I thought that the Affordable Care Act would address this. I thought we’d have some “public option” eventually to help with this problem.
Meanwhile, health care costs are about 20% of our nation’s GDP. That is insanely high.
You must read this lead article in Time Magazine of March 4, 2013. It is chock full of stunning facts and anecdotes that clearly show where the problem lies.
Here are some examples cited directly from the Time article:
- Charges for blood and lab tests for a chemotherapy patient amounted to $15,000, where with Medicare the same tests would have cost a few hundred dollars.
- A hospital charged $77 for each of four boxes of sterile gauze pads.
- A patient was charged $18 each for Accu-Check diabetis test strips. Amazon sells boxes of 50 for about $27, or 55 cents each.
- A patient was charged $6,538 for three CT scans. Medicare would have paid about $825 for all three.
- One hospital charged $333 for a chest x-ray. The national rate paid by Medicare is $23.83.
- On one patient’s bill under the category “Pharmacy General Classification” there was a charge of $108 for Bacitracin, a common antibiotic ointment.
- A patient was charged $24 per 500-mg tablet of Niacin. In drug stores the pills go for about 5 cents each.
- For Acetaminophen a hospital charged $1.50 per 325-mg tablet. You can buy 100 tablets on Amazon for $1.49.
- Hospitals charge $84 per bag of standard saline solution. Online, a liter bag costs $5.16.
The bottom line is: medical costs are so high because we let it happen. We willingly pay the bills, because when we’re in the emergency room, or the hospital, we’re scared “to death” and we’re not thinking clearly, if we’re thinking or conscious at all, and the system is rigged to take advantage of us.
Who protects us in that situation?
Isn’t that what we want from government?
Be Careful Who You Cheat
When Fitness SF, a San Francisco chain of health clubs, decided to stiff their web designers, they didn’t know what they were up against.
The web designers are a small company in Europe, not exactly in a position to fight back. So they directed the web site of Fitness SF to their message. Eventually, Fitness SF got wind of this and redirected it to some unformatted site, mitigating the damage. I captured the content though – found it hilarious.
First Page:
Second Page:
The Awesome Power of Social Media
Today I read this article on gawker.com about a musician who traveled with his guitar. He did everything he could to get Delta to let him bring his classic 1965 Gibson ES-335 on board his flight from Buffalo to Detroit — going so far as to offer to buy the guitar its own seat. The guitar was worth over $10,000. The airline refused to let him carry it on and made him check it.
Sure enough, the airline wrecked the guitar completely. The costs of repair were estimated to be almost $2,000. And of course, the guitar would never again have its pre-damage value.
Then Delta tried to get off cheap and offered the passenger $1,000 – which he refused. Even several letters to the president of the company remained unanswered. Then a call came from Yahoo news. Delta started playing ball.
I had a similar experience last year when I had an adverse outcome with the Avis car rental company in Germany. I was charged over 1,000 Euros for repair of a “scratch” I could not see and did not make. All normal channels, through credit card companies, insurance companies and Avis “customer support” got me nowhere.
Then I started blogging about the incident, publishing to Twitter and Facebook, accompanied by a letter to the CEO of Avis. Possibly due to my standing with Avis as a very frequent, long-term customer, but certainly partly due to my persistent social media campaign publishing the lack of cooperation by Avis, the company offered to absorb all costs of the “repair” within about five days of my writing to the CEO.
I put the record straight in my blog after Avis came through, and I have been a returning customer since.
Today, we have a powerful megaphone with the Internet and the various social media outlets. In the past, if you were wronged by a large corporation, you could never have fought back. Now, a few appropriate blog posts and relentless distribution can get a buzz going very quickly, one that companies as large as Delta or Avis can only ignore at their peril.
This is one of the most powerful effects of social media.
Do you have any stories like that to share?
Kinder Überraschungseier
The producer of the German brand Kinder Schokolade (chocolate for children) also makes Kinder Überraschungseier (surprise eggs). Those are chocolate eggs with little toys inside them that children enjoy and collect.
Those are banned in America, and the US customs confiscates them as a choking hazard if you try to bring them into the country. It’s not like German children are choking in droves from those evil eggs, but clearly, in the US we are very concerned about such a hazardous product, even if it is brought in by individual people in suitcases for their own consumption.
Yet, in California, we didn’t accept Prop 37, requiring labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMO).
Monsanto and a number of other companies opposed this measure by pumping a lot of money into a negative campaign and won. There won’t be labeling this time around, and we won’t know what’s in our food. Note that in Europe, Monsanto supports the labeling. Presumably they think European customers are smarter or at least less likely to be deceived, so they caved.
We are worried about our children swallowing toys and choking. Yet, we’re ok with all of us daily consuming products that may have lethal hazards in them, hazards we can’t touch, see, feel, taste or detect in any way at all – but we’re allowing the companies that produce those products to not label them. Note, this is not about the products themselves, whatever they might be. Prop 37 was just about labeling of those products. LABELING.
We voted for the companies to be allowed to hide possibly dangerous surprises in our everyday food products, like meat and potatoes.
Huh?
Stimulus Money Abomination
Here is an example of stimulus money gone out of control. LG Chem is a factory in Holland, Michigan that was built with stimulus money. Various contracts require that it keeps employees and keeps growing. So it looks like the workers there are getting paid by federal funds and have yet to build a single battery – and there is no end in sight.
If you have misgivings about government running or supporting business, this is your ammunition. It shows the complete ineptitude of the government to manage millions of dollars. Somebody should pull the rug out from under this catastrophe quickly, since it’s still going on. Watch this video:
LG Chem Boondoggle
I wonder how many other such boondoggles are operating out there, masquerading as real businesses.
You can count on Romney using that against Obama.
Food Labeling – Proposition 37 – and Monsanto
Just a month ago, Prop 37 which institudes food labeling in California, had 68% in favor and it was winning by a landslide. Obviously, people want to know what’s in their food – it does not matter if the stuff in their food is actually dangerous or benign.
We want to know!
Monsanto and their supporters have raised $40 million to defeat Prop 37, and it’s working. Only 48% of the population is now in favor. Well-designed propaganda, on Facebook, online, in flyers and on television is misleading and confusing the people.
Since the bill is not perfect, and some hotdogs require labeling and others don’t, they claim we should not have this requirement.
Nonsense, all of it!
We want to know what’s in our food!
.
Prop 37 – Take Two
Here is an ad I saw on my Facebook page:
So why does it matter that some pizza is labeled and other pizza isn’t?
SOME PIZZA will be labeled. That’s a good step in the right direction.
If we had used this bogus argument when we first tried to ban cigarette advertising on TV, we would have argued that:
Why would we ban cigarette ads on TV when they still are in magazines and billboards? And how are we ever going to ban cigarettes in public buildings? It’s never going to happen. So why bother banning cigarette ads on TV? It’s good money for the TV industry. Leave a good thing alone.
Makes no sense to me.
.
Danger on your Dinner Plate
Here is an excellent article that shows what happens when you privatize an industry that really SHOULD be government regulated. We all hate the FDA, blame it for making things difficult for drug companies, industry and farmers. I can see why we feel that way. Then I read this about private inspection companies and anecdotal results.
Ridiculous Argument Against California Prop 37
California Prop 37 implements food labeling if the product contains genetically engineered components or ingredients.
I am a scientific-minded person and I am a business person. This proposition has nothing to do with whether the products themselves are safe or healthy. It’s about labeling them.
This argument, straight out of the California Voter Information Guide, implies that the products are safe. It’s not about the products!
It also implies that we need scientific justification for labeling. No, we don’t.
I am a consumer, and I want to know what’s in my food, so I can make my own buying decisions more effectively. You can’t tell me that it’s going to cost all this money to put labels on food.
IT’S A STAMP! Let’s put it on.