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( Tobyotter ) When’s the last time you went to a Frisch’s Big Boy? Can’t remember, or maybe you don’t have one nearby? The chain’s new boss wants to change that, and is pushing to expand to more franchise locations in the U.S., as well as retool the restaurants to bring in the younger set. You know the word, starts with an “m” and rhymes with “shmillennials.” NRD Capital took over Frisch’s Big Boy restaurants last week after shareholders approved a $175 million acquisition , marking the first time in the chain’s history that it won’t be under family ownership. NRD’s head honcho and interim Frische’s CEO Aziz Hashim says that while the brand has been profitable, it can benefit from a few changes. Our primary goal is to make sure our existing customer is totally taken care of,” Hashim told the Associated Press . “So, no plan to alienate our current customer base; we want to actually make it better for them. At the same time, we want to make an effort to drive some new customers.” So...

( DCvision2006 ) Under federal law, a city can regulate cable TV rates for its residents if there is not “effective competition” in that market — that is, if one cable operator dominated the TV landscape in that area. But the Federal Communications Commission recently revised its way of looking at things so that it now presumes that satellite providers offer effective competition for the cable industry. This change hasn’t gone over well with broadcasters, who have petitioned a federal appeals court to challenge the FCC. Let’s go back to 1992, when Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act. The law allows for cities — or any other body that authorizes local pay-TV franchises — to regulate cable TV rates if they can show that there is a lack of competition. In the decades since, the FCC had granted rate regulation authority to various governments and agencies around the country who had been able to demonstrate that the local cable TV company was th...

( Mandy Jansen ) Even before the public face of Subway became embroiled in a child pornography scandal, the nation’s largest fast food chain was facing sagging sales and concerns from franchisees about management. The company is now hoping a new look and refreshed menu can help put Subway back on track. Citing people close to the matter, The New York Post reports that Subway plans to reveal a rebranding effort in 2016. The 50-year-old Connecticut-based chain is reportedly considering redesigning the look of not only its stores and employee uniforms but its ever-changing menu. While a spokesperson for the company says it is taking a “multifaceted” approach to improving operations, they offered few details other than to note Subway would offer staff training and new products. The rebranding comes as the company has faced several setbacks in recent years. According to the most recent QSR 50 report , which compares growth and sales at the nation’s largest fast-food companies, Sub...

( funny strange or funny ha ha ) While running off to Sin City to get married by an Elvis impersonator used to evoke a certain spontaneous glamor and excitement, Las Vegas wedding chapels are more likely to be lonesome tonight than they have in the past, as those in the industry say quickie wedding customers just aren’t crowding their doors anymore. The number of Vegas weddings has been dropping over the last decade: In 2014 there were 128,000 Vegas weddings, while this year there were only 81,000, reports the AFP . This, despite the fact that Clark County’s marriage license office is open until midnight every day, even on holidays. “The wedding business here in Las Vegas has fallen off since 2004. We haven’t had ups and downs, and ups and downs — it’s just been a consistent drop every year,” says the pastor at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. “You know, people don’t have as much money anymore because the economy here isn’t that good.” Kitschy and quick used to be the he...

( Brady O’Brien ) Over the weekend, a number of Consumerist readers wrote to us with the bad news that, like a growing number of companies, Dish Network is updating its terms of use to strip customers of their right to dispute legal claims in a court of law. There is a way for Dish subscribers to opt out of this restriction — but only if they do it right away. The updated Dish “Residential Customer Agreement” [ PDF ] includes a new provision that requires that all customers settle their disputes through either mandatory binding arbitration or in small claims court. Both situations put severe limits on the damages that can be awarded. Additionally, Dish customers are barred from joining other wronged customers in any sort of class action. So even if the company were to do something that negatively affected millions of customers, each individual subscriber would need to file his or her own dispute with the satellite service… and then have it heard by a third-party arbitrator, or in...

Kim Kardashian issued a corrected endorsement for morning sickness pill after the FDA took issue with a first post’s lack of acknowledgement of associated safety risks. Weeks after federal regulators took issue with drug company Duchesnay for allowing mom-to-be Kim Kardashian to tout the benefits of its morning sickness pill on social media without properly disclosing the drug’s associated risk and limitations, the reality star posted updated endorsements, complete with acknowledgement of the pill’s side effects. The new “#CorrectiveAd” posts – which were quickly pushed down the page thanks to Kardashian’s posts about the MTV Video Music Awards – were mandated by the FDA after the agency issued a warning letter to Duchesnay in early August saying the lack of safety information included in Kardashian’s original July posts put consumers at risk. “I guess you saw the attention my last #morningsickness post received,” an Instagram post from the celebrity states. “The FDA has told Du...

( Lisa Brewster ) Here’s yet another story that’ll make you want to go out and buy a lottery ticket, even though let’s face it, this kind of thing will likely never happen to us: A guy who found $20 on the street and used it to buy a lottery ticket has won $1 million as a result of his lucky break. The California Lottery says a San Francisco Bay Area man spotted a $20 bill on the street outside the airport last week, and decided to buy two scratch-off tickets with it. One of them yielded the top prize of $1 million. “I scratched the ticket outside of the store,” he said, saying he was in shock when he won. “I told my friend who I was with that I didn’t know if it was real but, ‘I think I just won a million dollars.’ ” The man works as a bartender, and says he’s planning on saving the money for now. The store where he purchased the ticket will also receive $5,000 from the lottery for selling the winning ticket. Keep your eyes peeled for free money, as well: the winner joked that ...

As technology advances and our cars become more and more autonomous, they are also opened up more and more to a new danger that didn’t used to exist on the roads — hack attacks. To protect that new technology and reassure future customers that riding in self-driving cars can be safe, Uber has hired the same two vehicle security researchers who managed to remotely hack a Jeep earlier this summer . Uber Technologies announced that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek would be joining the company as of this week, reports Reuters . Miller had been employed at Twitter and Valasek was working at security firm IOActive. They’ll be joining other autonomous vehicle experts hired away from Carnegie Mellon University at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, a research center the company opened in Pittsburg in February. A spokeswoman said the duo will work with the company’s top security officers “to continue building out a world-class safety and security program at Uber.” It’s likely that their job...

If you only live in your condo part-time, you can imagine that the roommate who is there the rest of the time might get up to some hijinks while you’re away. But you probably didn’t think he would list your room on Airbnb without mentioning it. This is what happened to a man who splits his time between California and Chicago, and who recently came back from the West Coast to find that two random people sleeping in his bed and drinking his booze. “Your imagination goes crazy. What’s been going on?” The man, who owns the two-bedroom condo and sublets a room to another guy, tells CBS Chicago . “It could be everything from orgies to to drugs.” Suspecting that his roommate had listed the room online, the homeowner looked on the Airbnb site and found his condo was indeed available for rent. The roommate had even used some of the owner’s personal photos of the condo for the listing. Not surprisingly, that roommate has been given the heave-ho, while the homeowner looks for answers from Air...

( Patrick ) Heads up, mobile data hogs: T-Mobile is on to your tethering shenanigans and your testing the limits of what “unlimited data” means. In a blog post, CEO John Legere says that the company plans to go after its biggest “network abusers,” and it will begin today. What’s “abuse,” according to Legere? Using as much as two terabytes of data per month. It’s hard to use that much data in a month with just a phone, but this all goes back to the users violating the terms and conditions of their accounts, which T-Mobile coincidentally declared war on about a year ago . They didn’t end up carrying out the plan last year, but this year the warnings and account downgrades are happening. Smartphones can be used as mobile wifi hotspots, which is useful, say, when you’re trying to put up a blog post in the waiting room at the dentist. While T-Mobile only lets its users with unlimited accounts use about 7 gigabytes of data on their phones as mobile hotspots every month, there are ways a...

( slgckgc ) After saying that “forced labor has no place in [their] supply chain” for Fancy Feast cat food , Swiss conglomerate Nestle SA is now addressing another supply chain area, saying KitKat will be the first global chocolate brand to make all its products with sustainably sourced cocoa. This, as the chocolate industry has come under fire for allegations of child labor. All KitKat candy bars will contain cocoa made by independent third parties by the first quarter of 2016, the company said in a statement Monday . Nestle already uses only sustainably sourced cocoa in certain markets, but this move extends the practice worldwide, including in the U.S., where Hershey Co. holds the license to make KitKat bars. “We’re delighted to be a flag bearer for the industry, as the first global chocolate brand to announce such a move,” said Sandra Martinez, Head of Confectionery for Nestlé. “Sustainable cocoa sourcing helps safeguard the livelihoods of farming communities and delivers high...

We can understand why people continued to shop at retailers that have been hit by data breaches. You still need to buy groceries, clothing, housewares, etc. But what about a website whose main selling point is privacy? Even though AshleyMadison.com — the dating website for cheaters — has been publicly embarrassed by the posting of millions of users’ personal data, it claims that people are still signing up… and that they’re not all just dudes. A statement from Avid Life Media, the Canadian parent company of Ashley Madison, claims that “hundreds of thousands of new users signed up” with the site in the last week, including 87,596 women. The company is making a point of this last figure after a Gizmodo analysis of the stolen Ashley Madison data concluded that not only was there an extraordinarily high ratio of male to female users on the site (even though it’s free for women to sign up), but that virtually none of the female accounts had communicated in any way with the men on the site...

( БРАТСТВО ) When you’re a multibillion-dollar company that’s been under heavy scrutiny from federal regulators and you’ve been turned down by several potential suitors in the last year, you don’t simply give up on a possible merger. Or at least that seems to be the case for Fiat Chrysler when it comes to the automaker’s unrequited love for General Motors. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne once again expressed his desire to see the two car manufacturing heavyweights join forces in an interview published over the weekend on  Automotive News. Although Fiat Chrysler [FCA] was shot down by rival GM previously, Marchionne says he’s not backing away from a potentially lucrative deal, not without a fight, anyway. After crunching the numbers, he tells Automotive News, that his board feels there really is no choice in the matter; they must put pressure on GM to begin talks. “Look, the combined entity can make $30 billion a year in cash. Thirty. Just think about that [expletive] nu...

You have until the end of September to see Katniss on Netflix. While there’s always plenty of streaming content to watch on the Internet these days, if you’re a fan of Hunger Games or Transformers flicks, better watch them on Netflix now, while you still can: the subscription streaming service says it won’t be renewing its deal with Epix, the cable provider with domestic streaming rights to those movies in the U.S. Hunger Games: Catching Fire , World War Z and Transformers: Age of Extinction will all expire at the end of September, Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer at Netflix announced in a blog post on Sunday . Netflix says that it’s working on its own original movies so that members can have access to newer content, because studio licensing practices often mean a long wait to see theatrically released movies at home. In the meantime, the company says it won’t be renewing its deal in the U.S. with Netflix. “While many of these movies are popular, they are also widely availabl...

Google provided this example of what its new services ad function will look like. Less than a year after Amazon took on the likes of Angie’s List, Yelp and other companies that can connect consumers to professional service providers like plumbers, locksmiths, electricians and others, Google announced it would join the fray by adding prescreened service providers to its sponsored search results. The new service – which launched in the San Francisco Bay area on Friday – is part of Google’s paid app for small businesses called AdWords Express in which professional service providers pay to be within the top search results for a given word, like “plumber” or “clogged toilet.” Service providers are screened and qualified by Google. They must be licensed, insured and complete a background check and mystery shopping review, a spokesperson for the company tells the Wall Street Journal. After the qualifying process, Google says it will organize the information provided by the company int...

( @marc_weiner ) People traveling through Newark Liberty International Airport on Sunday were in for a bit of a wait, as authorities locked down Terminal C for more than two hours after a man breached security. CBS New York reports that shortly before 7 p.m. , a man illegally entered the terminal through a door in a secure hallway. A passenger waiting in the terminal tells the Associated Press that he heard yelling and then saw several TSA agents chasing a man. Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained the man and turned him over the Port Authority police. The AP reports that the man had a ticket for a flight at the airport, but it was unclear why he entered the secure hallway. Immediately after the man was detained, CBS New York reports, that per security protocol, the terminal was evacuated, put on lockdown and swept by authorities and K9 units. It reopened around 9:30 p.m. Travelers at the airport took to Twitter during the lockdown, showing long lines of p...

( frankieleon ) In recent months, Walmart increased pay for entry-level employees so that all workers were making at least $9/hour . At the same time, the retailer’s earnings have come up short of expectations, leading Walmart to instruct managers to curb spending by cutting hours for some workers. Bloomberg News reports that Walmart HQ recently explained to store managers that if they have over-scheduled their staff — that is, if the store’s sales projections aren’t in line with its labor spending — they may need to do things like send people home early or direct them to take a longer, unpaid lunch break. Bloomberg says dozens of employees have confirmed these types of hour reductions in their stores have already begun to take place. Walmart claims this won’t affect efforts to provide better customer service, cleaner stores, or properly stock shelves. However, one Texas Walmart staffer says her store has cut 200 hours of worker pay per week from its ledger. In a single day, eig...

( eren {sea+prairie} ) After American consumers learned about horrible working conditions and trafficked workers on some fishing vessels out of Thailand, class action lawsuits began, accusing American, European, and Thai companies of benefiting from deplorable working conditions farther up their supply chain . One of the companies accused, the Swiss conglomerate Nestle, says that “forced labor has no place in [their] supply chain” for Fancy Feast cat food. In an e-mail to the Associated Press , the company didn’t deny the allegations, but did explain that its suppliers are supposed to respect human rights, and the company has worked to eliminate all forced labor from its global supply chain. The initial class action complaint points out that while cans of Fancy Feast do say that the fish comes from Thailand, it does not specify “Made in Thailand out of fish that may have been caught by men and boys trafficked from poorer neighboring countries and forced to work punishing hours whi...

( Liz Wise ) eBay and PayPal have now completed their divorce , and one of the terms that they agreed to is that eBay still has to process a large number of its payments using PayPal. That could be the reason why eBay is eliminating competitors ProPay and Skrill from the payment options for shoppers and for sellers. eCommerceBytes points out that the timing is interesting , since PayPal also happened to raise fees for sellers who process more than $3,000 per month in payments using the service In their e-mail to sellers about the change, eBay said that the two services had very few users, which means that perhaps letting buyers use them isn’t worth the bother for the company anymore. However, eBay does have an incentive to make sure that as many online payments as possible come from PayPal. That’s part of the terms of the companies’ split: 80% of payments through the site must come through PayPal, or eBay will owe its former partner money. “eBay will be incentivized to grow new u...

Fast-food and coffee chains want to serve up drinks and desserts that are flavored like chocolate chip cookies, but these aren’t just any old chocolate chip cookies. No, chains including Dunkin’ Donuts, Dairy Queen, and now Burger King are selling Chips Ahoy-branded items in their restaurants, a confusing bit of cross-branding. A new offering from Burger King is even stranger. It may be in the testing phase, and was spotted in Visalia, California. It combines two flavors to create the Chips Ahoy S’mores Milkshake. What is so s’morey about it isn’t entirely clear, unless the ice cream is supposed to be marshmallow-flavored. The reader who reported its existence to The Impulsive Buy says that it consists of…crumbled-up chocolate chip cookies and ice creamy goodness, with whipped topping. There are no graham crackers in sight, and no chocolate other than the chips. On the other hand, now I want to try pressing a toasted marshmallow between two cookies. Someone find me a campfire. FAST...

( Akira Ohgaki ) Amazon’s Prime program includes third-party merchants, whose shops let the online Everything Store expand its inventory without building more warehouse space. While the company is experimenting with making these merchants part of the Prime program for items that already have free shipping, However, some of these merchants get to limit how far they will ship an item for free. This is logical for smaller companies that don’t have the same bargaining power with the U.S. Postal Service and private carriers as Amazon, and who simply don’t want to subsidize cross-country two-day shipping. The Wall Street Journal reports that sellers can define which geographic regions they’re willing to provide free Prime shipping for, and customers in other areas pay standard shipping fees. Another Amazon shipping experiment that the WSJ learned about from an unnamed source is called “Amazon Day,” a service that would combine all of a household’s Amazon orders on the same day of the we...

( benh57 ) Unlike its fellow major carrier United Airlines , American Airlines says it will honor super cheap fares some lucky customers nabbed last week due to a glitch in its booking system. Airline Reporter points to a post from Aug. 20 on Flyertalk that shared the workaround with fellow customers. The fares were achieved in part by changing the country of origin to Brazil: One Flyertalk user posted a screenshot of a round-trip business class ticket on American from Sao Paulo to Hong Kong for R$1,255 Brazilian Reals (BRL), or approximately $350 U.S. dollars. Usually that fare would cost R$12,000 or about $3,350 in U.S. currency. It’s thought that perhaps the error was caused by transposed currency values when the data was entered, causing the U.S. dollar to be highly overvalued against BRLs. Currently, R$1.00 is about $0.29 U.S. Switch those two around and bang, you’ve got a discount. American apparently had a few mistake airfares squeak through on a variety of international...

( J ) After several years of back-and-forth rulings, an appeals court in Washington, D.C. has ruled today that the NSA’s controversial bulk phone data collection program can indeed continue… at least until November, when it gets shut down anyway because Congress changed the law in June. If you’re feeling a bit confused by what is or isn’t legal, there’s a good reason for that: this case has been going back and forth for years. And while it’s been doing so, the law itself has changed. This particular legal saga began when the ACLU and others filed a lawsuit against the NSA. In December, 2013, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit , finding that the bulk phone data surveillance program did not violate any existing law. The ACLU appealed. In May, 2015, an appellate court vacated the ruling from the first judge, reinstating the ACLU’s lawsuit and kicking it back down to the lower court. The appeals court found that the NSA’s actions did outstrip the scope permitted to i...

( Mike Mozart ) After an offer to “settle the beef” in the name of raising awareness for Peace Day was unceremoniously shot down by McDonald’s with a rather passive-aggressive note, Burger King has received a proposal – or two – of its own to consider. Would you consider ordering a Slampper or a Whipple Whipple next time you’re at Burger King? Those two collaborations could certainly be making an appearance on the menu board if the company accepts a proposal from either Denny’s or Wayback Burgers, respectively. Fortune reports that just days after McDonald’s shot down The King’s call for a truce – and the creation of something called the McWhopper – smaller burger chain Wayback Burger made its love for Burger King known, offering to take over the Golden Arches’ spot in the proposed collaboration. . @BurgerKing , we won't leave you hanging. #McWhopper #WhipleWhiple #SettleTheBeef http://pic.twitter.com/wCFiYuGOPO — Wayback Burgers (@waybackburgers) August 26, 2015 ...

( dbrooks125 ) While cable companies’ investors might be shaking in their boots whenever the word “Netflix” pops up , the streaming video service isn’t the giant slayer it’s been made out to be — at least according to Time Warner Inc. Jeff Bewkes, who says his HBO is better than Netflix. Bewkes spoke at a cable conference in Amsterdam yesterday, saying investors don’t need to freak out as customers continue cutting cords and leaving cable providers for services like Netflix, reports Bloomberg . “Netflix is good, but not that good,” Bewkes said. “The pessimism in the market about the sector is overdone — our industry will figure out how to take content and sell it on demand.” It’s true that they’re making an effort: traditional broadcast and cable networks like HBO, Showtime, Starz and CBS have all hopped on the streaming bandwagon recently. But most of the pay-TV competition isn’t coming from cable, it’s coming from Netflix (with 65 million subscribers) and the likes of PlayStatio...

All year, we’ve been sharing information about a scam hitting companies all over the world , where very clever and resourceful scammers impersonate bosses and extract money on false pretenses. The best protection against this kind of fraud is education, and while law enforcement are doing their best to let people know about the scam, the number of victims is only increasing, and law enforcement estimates that the scammers have drained $1.2 billion worldwide from businesses’ bank accounts. The scam itself is very simple: our fake e-mail up top sums up the basics. A scammer e-mails an employee, pretending to be the CEO, boss, or other person in charge. They ask for a certain amount to be transferred to an imaginary supplier. While the return address will appear real, the actual domain name that the message comes from and that the user replies to will be a fake version that the scammer has registered: perhaps bossmeg@c0nsumerist.com or consumeri5t.com. Scammers are becoming more sophis...