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When Americans travel, our money goes with — and not just in a metaphorical sense. Where people go, coins get left behind. Meanwhile, the pennies we drop at home get swept into trash heaps and scrap yards, falling out of sight and out of mind. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist — and even if they’re beat up, it doesn’t mean they lose their value. The Wall Street Journal reports this week on the weird and lucrative market of coin repatriation. Money that has traveled around the world can come back home, and those pennies add up. How many nickels, dimes, and quarters have you lost in your car over the years? Now multiply that by 315 million Americans and the more than 250 million cars we collectively own, and it adds up. When those cars are scrapped and shredded, the metal goes overseas, often to China. And that’s where the repatriation business comes in. A bunch of hired hands go through all that salvage and pulls out the coins. The man behind the repatriation business then col...

When a Long Island collectibles seller heard reports from customers that items were arriving damaged, he became a one-man investigative reporting team and decided to watch workers in action at the local FedEx store. He was surprised to watch an employee picking up packages and flinging them onto a truck. Yes, even packages labeled “fragile.” “I was just blown away. I was absolutely left speechless for the most part,” he told New York’s WCBS . (Warning: auto-play video at that link.) “I couldn’t believe it.” He evidently isn’t a regular Consumerist reader, though we see delivery drivers chucking one package at a time more often than drivers chucking entire loads of packages at a time. He was so surprised to see this that he whipped out his phone and took a video. “If my local fedex store is any example of the companies standards then they are in need of a major reboot,” he noted on the original footage that he posted to YouTube. When asked about the video footage, a FedEx represen...

Anheuser-Busch InBev’s pending $107 billion merger with SABMiller will now include fewer brands: the beer behemoth announced today that it will sell several of its betrothed’s eastern European assets in order to appease federal regulators and speed up approval for the mega-merger.  Reuters reports that AB InBev said that it had put up for sale SABMiller’s business in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia for $8 billion. The sale would likely include a number of top brands in eastern European markets, such as Pilsner Urquell in Czech Republic and Dreher in Hungary. AB InBev said it expected considerable interest from potential buyers, with analysts suggesting the top candidate could be Carlsberg. The potential sale of the eastern European brands would mean that AB InBev would continue to have a minuscule presence in the market, Reuters reports. “The eastern European markets may have provided an unwelcome and unnecessary distraction, and valuation notwithstandi...

American Airlines has apologized to a concert musician who wasn’t allowed to board a flight carrying her 18th-century violin, despite the airline’s policy that says small musical instruments can be treated as a traveler’s carry-on. The woman says a flight attendant and the captain of an American Eagle flight from Chicago to Albuquerque, NM told her she’d have to valet-check the instrument, which she refused to do. “Violins are too delicate to be checked,” she told the Associated Press . And though her 1742 Guarneri is a rare and valuable instrument, that shouldn’t matter when it comes down to it, she says. “It could be a $50 student violin and the same problem exists.” Both federal regulations and American’s own policy back her up: “Musical instruments are also considered a carry-on item and must fit in the overhead bin or under the seat in front of you,” American’s carry-on policy reads . In January 2015, the Department of Transportation finalized its rule regarding instruments ...

Rovi and TiVo are getting hitched. The technology maker announced Friday that it would pay $1.1 billion to bring the set-top box recorder under its wing.  Through the deal, Rovi says it plans to combine TiVo’s traditional television and on-demand content with its own guides, advertising, analytics, and cloud services. The new company aims to “write the next chapter of the consumer entertainment experience.” Rovi said in a statement. Rovi estimates that the combined company will have revenue of more than $800 million. TiVo will keep its name after the transaction is completed, which is expected to occur within 12 months. “It’s an exciting time as the media and entertainment landscape undergoes a significant evolution,” Tom Carson, CEO of Rovi, who will continue to lead the combined company, said in a statement. “The combined capabilities of TiVo and Rovi place us in a tremendous position to extend services across platforms and to a customer base that includes traditional, over-...

When Corinthian Colleges Inc. collapsed, leaving thousands of students in the lurch with student loan debt and credits that they didn’t know would be usable at other schools, they were generally unable to sue the failed for-profit educator because the students had unwittingly signed away their right to a jury trial or class action. CCI wasn’t the only for-profit operator with this anti-consumer practice, and a new report tries to get a grasp on the scope of the problem. The study [ PDF ] from the Century Foundation shows all ten of the largest for-profit school chains — representing more than 600,000 students and nearly $8 billion a year in federal student aid — use at least one overly restrictive clause in their enrollment contracts (click chart at left to enlarge). These include the all-too-typical forced arbitration clauses , which strip students of their right to take the school to court. Instead, legal disputes must be resolved through a confusing process involving a third-party...

For the past several months we’ve been working our way through real customers’ pay TV bills one by one , and one piece of reader feedback keeps bubbling up again and again: Why pay for TV at all? This is the age of the cord-cutter, right? Just ditch cable already! So we got curious: how much money, if any, would one of our real live customers save by swapping entirely to online video? As a yardstick, we’ll price against what our sample Comcast customer was paying. Their bill was nominally $99 for a triple-play package, plus $39.93 in taxes, surcharges, and fees, for a total of $138.93 per month. For the sake of easy math, we’ll round that off to a $140 bill, and work from there. First Comes the Internet You can’t watch online video without a broadband connection, so we need to start there. Since we’re comparing against our sample Comcast customer from before, we priced out internet packages for new customers living in the same neighborhood where that customer lives. In that area...

Venmo is a PayPal-owned money-transfer service that allows users to send payments to each other over the internet. Yesterday, PayPal revealed that Venmo is currently under investigation by federal regulators. In its quarterly earnings report PayPal discloses that it received a Civil Investigative Demand from the Federal Trade Commission on March 28 as part of the FTC’s “investigation to determine whether we, through our Venmo service, have been or are engaged in deceptive or unfair practices in violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act.” The FTC is seeking documents and answers to Venmo related questions, which could ultimatley lead to an enforcement action by, or settlement with, the government, along with possible changes to the way Venmo operates. Venmo, which handles hundreds of millions of dollars each year in peer-to-peer transfers, has been around since 2009. PayPal acquired the service in 2009. The idea behind Venmo was to allow individuals to transfer money for non-p...

Here are ten of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness. Bonus photo: please welcome Consumerist’s new hire, Archibald Leash of the Philadelphia Leashes. He’s now training as the junior officer of our K-9 unit. Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here , and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool. by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

Alexa is spreading her personal assistant wings. The Amazon Echo mainstay is now available on its first device not produced by Amazon: the Triby, a connected message board of sorts for your home, office, or other destination.  Triby’s integration of Alexa comes just a month after Amazon announced it had improved developers’ ability to use the personal assistant in their own devices. Alexa’s presence in the portable voice-controlled hub built by Invoxia works much like it does inside Amazon’s Echo: it can follow simple verbal commands, stream music, connect to other smart devices, and answer inquiries. “As a company with a speciality in creating speakers and telecoms devices, we are excited by the world of possibilities consumer products like Triby offer families to improve their lives,” Sébastien de la Bastie, managing director of Invoxia, said in a statement. While Triby and the Echo speaker are similar products, the Triby is more on par with Amazon’s newer Echo Tap or Dot : ...

As we reported earlier this month, Paramount Pictures is trying to block a crowdfunded Star Trek fan film based, in part, on the studio’s claim that it actually owns the copyright on the Klingon language . Now the Language Creation Society has chimed in on the case, making the argument that Paramount can’t claim ownership on a fictional language. While Klingons have been part of the Star Trek universe since the original TV series, the actual Klingon language was not created until 1984 for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , produced by Paramount. “Given that Paramount Pictures commissioned the creation of some of the language, it is understandable that Paramount might feel some sense of ownership over the creation,” writes the LCS in a brief [PDF Klingonamici ] filed yesterday with the federal court hearing the case. But, feeling ownership and having ownership are not the same thing.” While Paramount has long asserted its ownership over the Klingon language, and official books p...

In what seems to be an effort to carve itself a share of the fast food breakfast market, Subway is offering customers a free breakfast sandwich throughout the month of May. Getting that “free” food won’t be as easy as simply holding out your hand and saying “gimme,” however: you’ll either have to be the kind of person who likes to eat sub sandwiches before 9 a.m., or have a refrigerator to stash one until lunchtime, because the Subway deal is a buy-one-get-one situation: customers will get a six-inch savory breakfast sandwich “with the purchase of any of their favorite handcrafted subs” at participating locations. [ Subway ] by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

You might remember Mighty Wings. Back in 2013, McDonald’s tested the breaded and fried wings after months of testing, and they failed, leaving the chain with 10 million pounds of leftover wings in a freezer vault . The original $1 per wing price point just didn’t appeal to people, especially when they could get wings cheaper in sports bars and the chain still had a dollar menu . The wings are back, though, for a limited time in Atlanta. Don’t call it a test, since it’s unlikely that the wings will come back nationwide. We contacted McDonald’s to confirm the news, and they told us that “the juicy, bone-in chicken wings are in a bold, spicy breading and available until mid-June.” On Twitter, people in Atlanta are rather confused about this. McDonald's has wings?? — Darnell_The_Gawd (@Consistent__D) April 27, 2016 If you eat wings from McDonald's I'm sure you'll eat actual feces — A.J. (@AJ_Phx) April 27, 2016 Attention all #ATLiens ….Mighty wings, I re...

It doesn’t pay to cheat. That’s the moral of Volkswagen’s ongoing emissions-cheating scandal after the carmaker announced Thursday that its tab for fixing vehicles, compensating owners, and paying fines to federal regulators in the U.S. could exceed the $18 billion previously earmarked to address the scandal.  VW executives warned in an annual earnings report [ PDF ] Thursday that the company could face “further significant financial liabilities” as it continues to work with regulators in several countries to address the scandal that affects more than 11 million vehicles worldwide. The company’s tab in the U.S. alone will likely exceed the $18 billion the carmaker deducted from last year’s earnings to cover costs of the scandal. VW estimates that it will spend nearly $8.8 billion to pay for fixes and provide buybacks for the more than 500,000 vehicles equipped with “defeat devices” designed to cheat federal emissions tests in the U.S., per a settlement the company entered ...

If you wanted to get an idea on the ridiculous overuse of forced arbitration, here’s one of the more absurd examples we’ve seen — a weight-loss supplement with the added non-benefit of stripping users of their right to sue the company that made the pills. On the back of the box for MetaboUp, you can find the following mice-print paragraph: “All sales are subject to ORI’s Terms & Conditions of Sale which can be found at http://www.metaboup.com . These terms include a mandatory, binding arbitration clause and a waiver of the right to a jury trial or to participate in a class action.” So it’s not the actual arbitration clause. To find that, you need to go to the MetaboUp website, and find the Terms of Use link buried far at the bottom of the homepage: On that page , there is more detailed information, specifying that “Any claim, dispute, or controversy… shall be resolved exclusively and finally by binding arbitration,” along with the names of the possible forums for such hearing...

On the list of dangerous and distracting activities you should not be doing while driving, Snapchatting behind the wheel is definitely up there, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been reminding everyone this month on social media with the #justdrive hashtag. Nevertheless, the lure of a Snapchat filter that displays your speed can prove too strong for some drivers, resulting in at least one accident. A recently filed lawsuit [ PDF ] accuses Snapchat of negligence for the speed recording filter that allows app users to record their speed of travel while walking, running, and, unfortunately, driving. According to the lawsuit, an 18-year-old woman was using the Snapchat video filter in September 2015 when she slammed into an Uber driver’s car at 107 mph in a 55 mph zone. He suffered a traumatic brain injury and was hospitalized for months, and now needs a walker or wheelchair to get around and cannot work, the complaint says. The plaintiff’s lawyer says in a st...

The lure of luxury goods can be very strong, but thieves in Paris took that desire for designer products to an extreme, police say, using a sports utility vehicle to ram their way into a Chanel boutique, ransacking the store and fleeing on scooters with a “quite significant” haul. Police say the burglars slammed into metal shutter protecting the front of the store with a stolen Jeep Cherokee early Thursday morning, The Wall Street Journal reports, at a time when police patrols in the city are typically ending their night shift and returning to their stations. After raiding the store and grabbing a bunch of bags, the robbers set fire to the vehicle in an effort to get rid of evidence, and fled on scooters, police said. It’s unclear how many people were involved or the value of the stolen goods, with police noting that the haul was “quite significant.” “These criminals generally dump the products on black markets at a fraction of their official price,” a police officer said. Burglar...

Back in January, the state of Ohio and federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered and investigated Listeria contamination in salad greens that came from a Dole processing plant in Springfield, OH. The plant has been closed since January, and started limited production this week, but haven’t announced exactly what the source of contamination was or how they were able to eradicate it. The CDC was able to identify the bacteria in patients beginning in July 2015, and the last documented case was in January of 2016. There were a total of 33 people in the United States and Canada who were confirmed ill with the pathogen from the Springfield plant, with 19 patients in the United States and 14 in Canada. “Confirmed” cases, in food poisoning, are people who were ill enough to visit a doctor or who were hospitalized and had samples of their blood or feces taken to be matched to the CDC database. Of the known patients who died, one was in the U.S. and three were in Canada. “...

A bird might be small compared to a jetliner, but get a whole bunch of them together and they can do some pretty serious damage. Passengers on an American Airlines flight out of Seattle found that out yesterday, when the plane was forced to turn around after a bird strike left a two-foot dent in the nose of the aircraft. American Airlines Flight 2310 was heading to Dallas/Fort Worth last night with 150 passengers on board, but ended up turning around after two or more birds apparently hit the plane, reports KIRO-TV (warning: link contains video that auto-plays). AA flight 2310, scheduled to Dallas has just returned to Sea-Tac, landed safety. — Sea-Tac Airport (@SeaTacAirport) April 27, 2016 The plane landed safely back at Sea-Tac, with a visible dent on the nose cone. “American Airlines 2310, from Seattle-Tacoma (SeaTac) to Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW), returned to SeaTac due to a bird strike, which struck the nose of the aircraft,” the airlines said in a statement. “Our maintena...

The rumors are true: Comcast’s media empire is getting a new addition in the animation department. Comcast is, of course, not just a cable and telecom behemoth; they are also NBCUniversal, film and TV giant. And now Universal is picking up DreamWorks Animation for even more than $3 billion the rumor mill guessed earlier this week. The move brings family-friendly franchises like Shrek , Madagascar , and How To Train Your Dragon under the NBCU umbrella, as well as classics like Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer … and positions Universal Studios, with all its subsidiaries, in prime position to compete with Disney/Pixar for those lucrative movie and merch dollars. “DreamWorks Animation is a great addition to NBCUniversal,” Steve Burke, CEO of NBCUniversal, said in a statement. “[DreamWorks has] created a dynamic film brand and a deep library of intellectual property.” And really, it is all about that back-bench and licensing: “DreamWorks will help us grow our film, television, theme par...

Online travel booking site Priceline announced today that CEO Darren Huston — who has served in that role since January 2014 — will be resigning after a company investigation discovered he was in a relationship with a fellow employee. The resignation is effective immediately, Priceline said in a statement today. While Priceline looks for a replacement, former CEO and current board chairman Jeffery H. Boyd will serve as Interim Chief Executive Officer and President of the company. He was also the CEO of Booking.com, and will be replaced in that position by Gillian Tans, the division’s operating officer since September 2011, and its president since January 2015. Husto, who had served as CEO since January 2014, stepped down after an in-house investigation conducted by independent board members uncovered a personal relationship he had with another employee, who was not under his direct supervision, the company said in a statement. “The investigation determined that Mr. Huston had acted...

Just weeks after China’a Anbang Insurance Group bowed out of its bid for the Starwood Hotel brand , another Chinese hotel group has gobbled up a different group: Carlson Hotels, the operator of the Radisson chain.  Carlson announced Wednesday that it had finalized a deal to sell itself to HNA Group, a division of HNA Group Co. Under the agreement, for which a purchase price was not disclosed, the companies say they will be able to more rapidly expand their respective chains. “We look forward to working within HNA Tourism Group, a greatly respected global enterprise, in what will be an exciting new chapter in the history of Carlson Hotels,” David P. Berg, Carlson Hospitality Group chief executive officer, said in a statement. “As part of HNA Tourism Group, Carlson Hotels will have an opportunity to advance our commitment to providing guests with hospitality world-wide.” Carlson currently operates 1,400 hotels in 115 countries and employs about 90,000 people. The Carlson deal, ...

When you sign up for telecommunications services — some combination of TV, broadband, and/or phone — you’re told you’ll pay something like $49 or $99 a month… and yet the price you actually pay can be as much as 40% again on top of that, thanks to a heap of sometimes confusing charges and fees. Which ones do you blame the government for, and which are made up by your cable company? One business at a time, we’re using real customers’ bills to break it down. We’ve covered Comcast, TWC, DirecTV, Charter, FiOS, and Uverse in our bill guide series so far. Now, it’s Dish’s turn. The below bill was provided to Consumerist by a real-life Dish customer who subscribes to a programming service tier that nominally costs $89.99 per month. The subscriber also pays for some extra premium and movie options, which definitely increase the rate. Setting aside the premium content add-ons, though, $28.57 — about 18% of their overall $157 bill — comes from some kind of additional surcharge or fee. Dish b...

Relieving pain isn’t a simple issue of taking a pill and feeling better. It’s a complicated cornucopia of treatments ranging from over-the-counter remedies to holistic healing to prescription medications, with some $300 billion a year spent each year on painkillers in the U.S. alone. Treating pain is also risky business, with studies showing that consumers often aren’t aware of what’s in the over-the-counter medications they take , resulting in deaths from something as seemingly innocuous as kids-formula acetaminophen . At the same time, there is growing concern about the overuse of prescription painkillers, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently urging doctors to give some thought to how generous they are with their prescription pad , saying that the overprescription of opioids is a “key driver of America’s drug-overdose epidemic.” In the current issue of Consumer Reports , our colleagues take an in-depth look at the current state of painkiller use and abuse. Here...

Just like you might get annoyed when you have to wait too long for your Uber driver, that driver might be losing money for all the time you dawdle inside because you weren’t ready to be picked up. That’s why the service is testing a new policy that allows drivers to tack on a fee if a passenger keeps them waiting for more than two minutes.  This is a revision of an existing policy in some markets, where Uber drivers are allowed to charge no-show fees of $5-10 to passengers who don’t turn up within five minutes of the car’s arrival. TechCrunch reports that the late passenger fee is currently being piloted in New York City, New Jersey, Phoenix, and Dallas, and depending on evaluations could expand to other areas in the coming months. The “Request When You’re Ready” pilot was first spotted by a New York Uber user via a pop-up on the company’s app. . @uber reduces the amount of time before you can cancel without a penalty: From 5 min to 2 mins. REAX? http://pic.twitter.com/d8e...

Comcast has — deservedly so — been the subject of thousands of customer complaints since expanding its test of data caps in 2015. In an effort to establish a more realistic data cap, Comcast is more than tripling the monthly data threshold in these markets from 300 GB to a full terabyte. In a blog post, Comcast claims that its typical user only goes through about 60 GB of data a month, and that the new terabyte limit would suffice for more than 99% of its customers. The change will kick in for affected customers starting June 1. The new 1 TB limit applies to all plans in these markets, regardless of the customer’s data speeds. For customers who can’t keep their data use under that 1 TB ceiling, Comcast will continue to offer its “Unlimited” add-on tier. But instead of the current level of $30-35/month, users who want to go beyond the terabyte mark would have to pay $50 for each month of unlimited access. Users who just need to go slightly over the terabyte limit will have the option...

The only place you’re supposed to be able to get Girl Scout cookies is from the scouts, so how did a bunch of discount stores in South Carolina end up selling these treats at upwards of 90% off? WSPA-TV in Spartanburg, SC, recently looked into this mystery and found that the stores had purchased them from a wholesaler, who had apparently gotten the cookies from an affiliated baker as a donation after the conclusion of the most recent Scouts sales season. The Scouts tell WSPA that the cookies were donated in “good faith and consistent with past practices to a domestic hunger-relief charity,” not with the intention of them then being resold to at a discount retailer. Sales of the coveted cookies are generally restricted to the troops, who are expected to learn lessons of responsibility and leadership through the process. Additionally, heavily discounted offseason sales of the cookies may make the treats less attractive when the season rolls around again. “If the public thinks that ...

FAA regulations prohibit pilots from consuming alcohol at least eight hours before flying or having a blood-alcohol level higher than .04%, and it’s a federal crime to fly with a BAC of .10% or higher, which is why a now-former JetBlue pilot is in hot water. The pilot of a JetBlue flight from Florida to New York was arrested last year for flying under the influence of alcohol when a random breathalyzer test found his blood-alcohol content was .11, the New York Post reports. The April 21, 2015 arrest was recently made public after a Brooklyn court unsealed a federal complaint about the incident on Wednesday. According to the complaint, the pilot was selected for the random test after he flew 151 passengers from Orlando to New York’s JFK airport. After the initial test returned a reading of .11, the pilot allegedly tried to blame the results on the “gum that he was chewing,” the complaint states. “During the walk to the onsite testing office at JFK Airport, Murphy’s face was red, a...