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While teen retailers like Aéropostale and PacSun are going down in flames, its rivals are hunched on the sidelines, waiting to pick their bankrupted bones clean. There’s still money to be made catering to teenagers, after all, and analysts say Abercrombie & Fitch could be the one making it. The company’s Hollister brand and specialty clothing company Zumiez have the most overlap with failing teen mall staples like Aéropostale, PacSun, QuikSilver, Wet Seal and others that have declared bankruptcy and closed stores recently as they try to restructure, MarketWatch reports, which provides an opportunity to zoom in on some market share. Analysts at Keybanc Capital Markets analyzed more than 1,400 Aéropostale and Pacific Sunwear locations and compared them with Hollister, American Eagle Outfitters, Zumiez, and Tilly’s Inc, and found that Hollister and Zumiez have the most exposure at malls where Aéropostale and Pacific Sunwear stores are located. Aéropostale filed for Chapter 11 bankr...

Burger King already has one entry in the ongoing fast food meal-deal war  that focuses on one person — a 5 for $4 menu that includes a bacon cheeseburger, small fries, chicken nuggets, beverage, and a chocolate chip cookie — but that apparently isn’t enough to keep up with the competition. And so, the company has launched a 2 for $10 deal. But with two entire meals included in this bundle, who exactly is the company courting? While most of the meal deals offered by fast food restaurants including those at  McDonald’s , Hardee’s/Carl’s Junior, Wendy’s, and Pizza Hut focus on a quick, inexpensive lunch or dinner for one person, BK’s latest creation appears to cater to a duo. The new deal, dubbed the “2 for $10 Whopper Meal,” features two quarter-pound Whopper burgers, two small fries, and two small drinks, Burger Business reports. So does the fast food giant think couples will be coming through the door on date night? Or perhaps friends swinging by on a road trip for a quick ...

Anheuser-Busch InBev has one more regulatory body to mark off on its “Places To Get Approval For $107 Billion Takeover Of SABMiller ” checklist: South Africa’s Competition Commission gave its blessing to the mega-beer merger Tuesday after placing several conditions on the approval. The SAB portion of SABMilller has its roots in South Africa. Though the parent company’s global headquarters has been based in London for more than 60 years, South African Breweries still operates out of the Johannesburg area. According to Bloomberg , the South African regulators missed four deadlines for reviewing the merger before they finally signed off on the deal. By acquiring SABMiller, AB InBev would gain significant market share in Africa, where beer sales are expected to grow in the coming years. Of course, giving the green light to creating the largest beer producer in the world comes with a few conditions. Under the approval, AB InBev must sell SABMiller’s 26% stake in local wine, cider, ...

If you’re the kind of person who’s read and tried every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (or you’ve at least seen that movie about the woman who did) you’ve already gotten pretty close to the legendary Julia Child. But now you can get even closer: you can rent out the chef’s cottage in Provence and cook in her kitchen (or sleep in it, if you want). Airbnb is currently listing La Pitchoune , or La Peetch, Child’s summer cottage in the Provencal village of Châteauneuf for $628 per night. The home is owned by an American couple that want to honor Child’s legacy, Bloomberg reports, with ideas for the place including private Airbnb rentals along with all-inclusive culinary and yoga retreats, starting in 2017. Child’s presence can still be felt in the house with touches like a black book filled with instructions on how to deal with the home’s idiosyncrasies and where to find the best butcher in town. And then there’s the kitchen, perhaps the biggest draw for food fans out ...

If you’re using ad-blocking technology on your smartphone, you’re not alone. Some 2.5 million Americans are employing mobile browsers and other tech on their devices to avoid unwanted ads, but that’s nothing compared to the vast number of consumers blocking ads in China, India, and Indonesia. This is according to new data from PageFair , which reports that the use of mobile adblocking browsers — which have a default setting of blocking all ads — grew by 90% in 2015 alone, with some 408 million people using them worldwide. That’s around 21% of all smartphone users. Thing is: Almost all of those users come from the Asia-Pacific region. According to the report, this area only accounts for 55% of all smartphones, but 93% of ad-blocking browsers. The overwhelming majority of mobile ad-blocking is occurring in just a few countries: China, with 159 million ad-blockers; India (122 million); Indonesia (38 million); and Pakistan (10 million). Granted, these are all among the world’s largest ...

Though you probably know at least one at-home brewer who has gone to some lengths to buy all the equipment and materials necessary to whip up a batch of beer in their own kitchen, there are others who perhaps aren’t willing to go those lengths, but still like to be a bit DIY. For those folks, SodaStream has a new “homemade” beer system that brews beer much in the same way it makes soda — no knowledge of wort or hops required. The Beer Bar only makes one beer so far, a light beverage called “Blondie,” which contains 4.5% alcohol by volume and has “a smooth authentic taste, and a hop filled aroma,” SodaStream says . The system works by adding Blondie concentrate to sparkling water, resulting in about three liters of beer per one liter of Blondie concentrate. “We are excited to launch a brand dedicated to serving the global growing trend of home crafted beer,” Daniel Birnbaum, Chief Executive Officer of SodaStream said in a statement. So far, the Beer Bar is available only in “some ...

Enduring a flight delay or two is never a fun experience, especially when you’re coming off a nice, relaxing holiday weekend. But the passengers on an Allegiant Airlines flight encountered not one, not two, but three delays after their plane experienced several issues Monday, including one that required the plane to turn around mid-air.  The Allegiant Airlines flight from Orlando to North Carolina was delayed three times for a total of 10 hours on Monday, WESH-TV reports. Issues with flight 768 began shortly before take off, when the plane returned to the gate for a medical emergency. After taking off, Allegiant tells WESH that the flight turned around mid-air because of an electrical issue. Upon returning to Orlando, passengers exited the aircraft and mechanics were seen inspecting the cockpit area. Passengers tell WESH that they were told the flight would resume in about 15 minutes. However, that turned into 10 hours of boarding and deplaning before the flight ever ret...

If you yank the soft down feathers from the body of a goose that’s still alive, here’s the thing: the goose can grow that plumage back, and you can pluck it again. That’s apparently the inhumane practice on some poultry farms in China. A continuing investigation by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals discovered live-plucking on farms linked to suppliers of well-known U.S. retailers Lands’ End, Eddie Bauer, L.L. Bean, Sears, and Amazon. As anyone with hair might imagine, having feathers plucked while alive and awake is extremely painful and stressful for the birds. PETA sent camera-equipped investigators to farms that supply brands claiming to use responsibly-sourced down, and found bald birds as well as people who admitted that they pass off live-plucked down as being plucked after geese are slaughtered. “We advertised that it’s all plucked after slaughter,” PETA says that one industry representative told an investigator. “Nobody dares to buy it if you say it’s live-plucked....

Four years after New York sued Sprint for allegedly failing to collect more than $100 million in sales tax in the state, the U.S. Supreme Court has shot down the wireless carrier’s effort to avoid liability. This morning, the Supremes denied Sprint’s petition without comment, meaning an Oct. 2015 ruling by New York’s highest court stands. That decision only dealt with the state’s ability to even bring the case against Sprint. The issue of whether or not the company failed to collect taxes is still to be determined. The company argued that the New York Attorney General’s Office based its case on state laws that were trumped by federal communication laws and that it was ignoring the financial implications for its taxpayers in pursuit of state tax revenue. According to the Attorney General’s case [ PDF ], which was originally filed in 2012, Sprint deliberately failed to collect more than $100 million in sales tax from customers in New York in order to keep costs low in an effort to m...

Though the drive-thru at fast food restaurants serves a very simple, transactional purpose, sometimes what happens there is far from expected — and can even be dangerous. To that end, police in Pennsylvania say a McDonald’s customer ended up at the hospital after her own car ran over her in the restaurant’s drive-thru lane. Pennsylvania State Police said a 76-year-old customer’s food had fallen to the ground after a McDonald’s worker handed it to her, reports WPXI.com . The woman opened her door and leaned over to pick it up, and her car accelerated forward. As the car moved, the driver’s side door hit the building, and the woman fell out. The car didn’t stop until it crashed into a block wall in the parking lot… and then rolled backward and ran over the customer. She was taken in an ambulance to a local regional airport and flown to a hospital in Pittsburgh with moderate to severe injuries, and was listed in serious condition as of Monday night. Woman, 76, run over by own car at M...

Competition is great: when there are more options for something, consumers usually come out ahead. That applies to entertainment theme parks as much as to anything else: if there are more places to go, crowds will be mitigated, prices will be competitive, and amenities will probably improve. But “competing” doesn’t actually mean “duplicating the other guy’s stuff and displaying it at my place instead.” At least, it’s not supposed to. And yet, Bloomberg reports , that’s exactly what seems to be happening overseas, as a fight between Disney and Chinese company Wanda heats up. Disney has been building a new major resort in Shanghai, to join their list of international destinations in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. The Shanghai resort opens June 16, and will obviously be a big deal for the company in a major, growing, international consumer market. In short, there is money to be made in China, and Disney intends to use their existing, globally popular intellectual property to make that mon...

Air travel can be a mixed bag of fashion, as passengers of all different style sensibilities come together on a different kind of runway. Sometimes, those styles come into conflict with airline staffers, like in the case of a JetBlue passenger who was told her shorts were too short to fly, and that she’d have to change if she wanted to board the flight. Earlier this month, a burlesque dancer from Seattle was waiting for a connecting flight home at Logan International Airport in Boston, after flying from New York that day wearing a long-sleeved sweater, thigh-high socks, and shorts, reports KIRO 7 News . She tells the news station she had been waiting by the gate for about 45 minutes when a gate agent approached her. [“She] told me that she was really sorry for bringing this up but just what I was wearing was not appropriate and the flight crew had discussed it and the pilot had decided that I needed to put something else on or I would not be allowed to board the flight,” she said. T...

Most of us are perfectly happy with going to YouTube and streaming that clip of Pookie being exhorted — in language that is not safe for work — to lay waste to his place of work , but some folks may want to watch this video offline, or do some tinkering with the clip. Some YouTube videos are available for download, but most are not, which is why people turn to services that allow you to get your own copy of a streaming video. YouTube, not surprisingly, is not a fan of such services and is dangling the threat of legal action against at least one. TorrentFreak reports on a legal letter sent to the folks at TubeNinja , a service that lets users download videos from YouTube, Vine, Vimeo, and others. Is it legal to download these videos? Depends on the video, why you’re downloading, what you’re going to do with the downloaded footage, and who you’re asking. As we explained in an earlier story on services like PlayOn that allow you to record streams from Netflix, HBO Go, and others , the...

Despite what its actual customers say, for several years now, Samsung has believed that putting ads on their customers’ smart TVs is a really good idea. The idea really delighted the company when they first started slapping ads on smart TV home screens back in 2012 , and customers remain exactly as not thrilled about it now as they were then. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is looking to sell more ads on its televisions, and will upgrade software on TVs that are already out there to make them serve up more ads. If you’re wondering how much money there is in serving up ads to TV customers, a source told the WSJ that last year the company took in $20 million to $30 million from ad displays on TVs, but the advertising unit doesn’t actually make a profit. Samsung takes in about $24 billion selling televisions every year, selling about 50 million sets annually, but why leave things there when they could keep earning money from a customer’s TV after it’s been sold? Sams...

For-profit college chains often market themselves to non-traditional students — single parents, lower income individuals, military servicemembers — as a viable path to better job prospects and more money. However, a new report suggests that enrolling in of these sometimes costly schools may not help students reach their goals. A study recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that most students who enroll in certificate, associate and bachelor’s programs at for-profit colleges and universities generally see a decline in earnings five or six years after attendance, when compared to how much they earned before attending classes, Inside Higher Ed reports. “Analysis of degree-seeking students suggests that on average associate’s and bachelor’s degree students experience a decline in earnings after attendance, relative to their own earnings in years prior to attendance,” the report states. The study is based on Dept. of Education and the Internal Revenue S...

Because there’s always time for a new trendy thing in coffee to catch on across the nation, Starbucks will have a new option on tap for customers at around 500 locations this summer: Nitro Cold Brew. The company’s new offering will be available at stores in seven major U.S. cities this summer: Seattle, New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland. So what exactly is Nitro Cold Brew? It infuses nitrogen in cold-brewed coffee, which gives it a “smooth and creamy sweetness,” Starbucks says . Cold-brewed coffee is made from steeping coffee beans in cold water for hours, unlike iced coffee, which is made by pouring hot coffee over ice. “It almost comes out like a Guinness beer,” CEO Howard Schultz told CNNMoney of Nitro Cold Brew. “These are craft products, not dissimilar to the trend of craft beer.” Starbucks started serving Nitro Cold Brew at its Roastery and Tasting Room in Seattle in March for $3.95, and it proved to be the second-best selling item on the men...

Pizza may not have a reputation as a health food, but that’s no reason to use ingredients that may make the pizza even less good for you. In an effort to reach consumers clamoring for less-questionable fast food, Pizza Hut has announced some upcoming upgrades to its ingredients. By the end of March 2017, Pizza Hut will cease using cheese with artificial preservatives. The company has set the same deadline for cutting out antibiotics in the chicken it uses — “for its pizzas.” It’s important to note that qualification as Pizza Hut also sells chicken wings and pasta dishes that contain chicken. This summer (by the end of July), all the meat used at Pizza Hut will be free of two controversial food additives: butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), and butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), the latter of which is currently listed as a known carcinogen in California. The company tells Fortune that it also plans to remove additional preservatives and additives by 2020. by Chris Morran via Consumerist

We’ve spent a few months looking at why cable and internet bills are so confusing, and where all the fees come from. But if there’s one bill in our virtual mailboxes that’s even more bloated and byzantine than pay-TV bills, it’s wireless bills. Hundreds of millions of us get them, but odds are that most of us don’t understand every fee, tax, or surcharge we pay. So now it’s the mobile industry’s turn under our microscope. Up first: Verizon Wireless. When you sign up a mobile plan — some combination of voice, text, and data — you agree to pay something like $39 or $75 per month for your service. But when you get your actual monthly statement, the price you pay can be more than 50% on top of that advertised rate, thanks to a heap of sometimes confusing charges and fees. Who’s to blame for these extra costs? Everyone from state and local governments to the wireless provider itself. How can you tell which is which? The below bill was provided to Consumerist by a real-life Verizon Wirel...

If you were hoping that Target’s curbside pickup would eventually reach your city, your hopes are for naught: Target tells Consumerist the pilot program will be discontinued effective June 15. After Consumerist received word that the program — which kicked off in October 2014 with partner Curbside, and was being tested in 121 stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles — would be shut down, we reached out to Target headquarters. The company confirmed what we’d heard, saying in an emailed statement that it had “learned a lot” from the pilot, but “as we’ve shared for months now, at this time Target is focused on making sure we deliver and execute on retail fundamentals.” That includes devoting more of its resources toward “enhancing” its “core of digital-stores offerings such as Cartwheel, Order Pickup and shipping online orders from stores.” “The pilot with Curbside will be discontinued in mid-June as part of those efforts,” Tar...

After more than six weeks, thousands of striking Verizon workers may be heading back to work soon. According to Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, the telecom giant and union leaders have reached an agreement in principle. In mid-April, around 39,000 Verizon employees — members of the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers unions — went on strike as contract negotiations fell apart, affecting millions of landline phone and FiOS customers in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. “Today, I am pleased to announce that the parties have reached an agreement in principle on a four-year contract, resolving the open issues in the ongoing labor dispute between Verizon’s workers, unions, and management,” said Perez in a statement Friday afternoon. “The parties are now working to reduce the agreement to writing, after which the proposal will be submitted to CWA and IBEW union members for ratification.” Perez did not disclose any of the terms of the agre...

Now that we live in a world where it seems everything can be rated — from your restaurant experience to your root canal — privacy issues are popping up in unexpected places. Like in health care providers’ responses to negative reviews from patients on Yelp, for example. ProPublica teamed up with The Washington Post and found many situations where doctors and others zapped by negative reviews have replied to those patients’ negative reviews online, and in doing so, revealed details of medical treatment. Yelp gave ProPublic access to its public reviews, totaling more than 1.7 million, and let the group research them by keyword. ProPublica identified more than 3,500 one-star reviews in which patients mentioned privacy or HIPAA (otherwise known as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 which outlines patients’ rights to privacy, among other things [ PDF ]). There was a dentist’s reply to a patient who blamed him for losing a molar, which read: “Due to your cle...

Whenever there is a report of a drug company jacking up the price of a prescription medication, the pharma industry is often quick to point out that there are non-profit charities ready and willing to help patients get these drugs at a more affordable rate. However, those charities may have very close ties to the drug maker that could not only help the company turn a profit, but avoid some tax obligations. In recent months, several large pharmaceutical companies have been subpoenaed as part of an ongoing federal investigation into these connections. It works like this: Bob’s Drug Company acquires the rights to prescription drug Gleemonex and decides to jack up the price 500%, knowing that some people will not be able to afford the co-pay. However, it’s in the interest of Bob to keep as many patients using Gleemonex as possible, so it looks for ways to make the drug more affordable to those most in need: low-income patients on Medicare. Now, Bob’s Drug Co. can’t directly fund the co-p...

The same technology that means you can talk to friends or loved ones anywhere in the world for pennies per minute or for free has a harmful downside: it also means that scammers anywhere in the world can call you cheaply, too, using overseas call centers and an utter lack of human empathy to drain the pockets of victims, who are mostly senior citizens. We’ve shared stories about most of these scam types in the past, from IRS scams to grandparent scams to lottery scams and tech support scams . The fraudulent calls simply don’t stop, and experts agree that the best way to get rid of them is with robocall-blocking devices, to keep them away from vulnerable people altogether. The combination of cheap technology to make calls and block one’s number is perfect for scammers, who once would have had to invest tens of thousands of dollars for a system to block or to “spoof” their caller ID. Today, robocalling technology is cheap. It’s hard to catch phone scammers and harder still to prosec...

If you’re going for a hike this holiday weekend to enjoy the beauty only nature can provide, there is one thing you should know: ticks are your enemies, they’re out for your blood, and it’s up to you to destroy them. The Centers for Disease Control has some handy tips on how to prevent tick bites — walking in the center of trails, using strong repellants containing DEET, treating clothing with permethrin products, etc. — but even the best laid battle plans can’t always keep one of the little suckers from hitching a ride home with you. To rout out any ticks that may have latched on while you were out tramping through the woods or other brushy areas, the CDC recommends you bathe or shower as soon as you can after you come inside, preferably within two hours, and conduct a “full-body tick check” with a hand mirror. Don’t stop there, because the ticks certainly won’t: leaving clothing around that may be hiding ticks is also a bad idea. If you can’t wash your clothing in hot water, you ...

Okay, okay, we know what you’re thinking: “ Myspace ?” you scoff, “It’s 2016! I haven’t had a Myspace account since I was a kid! My gosh, what’s next, CompuServe?” And, yes, we get it — MySpace isn’t exactly the new hotness these days. It’s barely even the old hotness. It’s more like an old, forgotten sock in the laundry room. But the leak, reported by Motherboard , of 427,484,128 passwords is still a big honking deal. For one thing, although Myspace is the punchline of any internet joke, it still boasts 50 million unique users per month — not a number that holds a candle to Facebook’s 1.6 billion, granted, but still no small feat. But there’s an even bigger reason, aside from those 50 million loyal users, that this is a problem: because we, as a cultural beast, kind of completely suck at password management practices. We reuse them, even when we know we’re not supposed to. We use bad ones , even when we know we ought not. We — especially if we are teenagers or young adults signing ...

After weeks of excessively long lines at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints plagued travelers going through Chicago’s airports, the city’s officials says wait times are down to less than 10 minutes. While everyone hates unending lines at the airport, Chicago’s had it pretty bad recently, including a backup at O’Hare International Airport that was so bad, 450 American Airlines passengers were stuck overnight . Things are looking up at the start of the Memorial Day weekend though, as officials in the Windy City say aver security wait times at O’Hare have dropped to eight minutes, and to nine minutes at Midway, the Chicago Tribune reports. This isn’t some kind of ancient travel god magic, of course, as TSA has been yelled at by pretty much everyone recently for the heinous wait times at airports all around the country. To alleviate the excessive issues at Chicago airports, the agency recently sent additional screening staff to the city’s airports , and is expected to ...

Earlier this month, a federal court gave the go-ahead to a lawsuit alleging that Facebook’s photo-scanning, facial-recognition feature violated Illinois state law . Having lost that legal battle, it looks like Facebook may be trying to get out of the lawsuit by simply changing that Illinois law. The law in question is the Biometric Information Privacy Act , which sets restrictions on the collection and storage of biometric data. At issue is whether Facebook’s Tag Suggestions feature — which scans users’ photos and then tries to match that data to previously tagged users — should be considered as biometric data under this law. The BIPA does currently state that “photographs” do not count as biometric identifiers, but does that mean a physical photograph or any image of a human? Is there a difference between a photo that is archived without any sort of analysis or data gleaned from it, versus a photo that is scanned, analyzed, and compared to millions of other similarly uploaded image...

Before you hand that sippy cup over to your toddler, you might want to take a minute to make sure it’s not one of three million spill-proof vessels being recalled due to risk of mold. We may not know everything about kids here at Consumerist, but we’re will to bet swallowing mold wouldn’t be a popular experience. Mayborn USA is calling back three million Tommee Tippee Sippee cups because mold can develop on a removable, one-piece valve inside the cups, if the piece gets wet (which it will if you’re using it) and stays wet, and is “infrequently cleaned,” the Consumer Product Safety Commission says. The cups have a 7 to 10 oz. capacity and were sold for children ages 4 to 12 months. They were sold in a bunch of places: BuyBuy Baby, CVS, Giant, Kohl’s, Marco Baby, Marshalls, Meijer, Sam’s Club, Ross Stores, Target, Bealls Outlet, Walgreens, Wal-Mart and other mass merchandise stores nationwide, as well as online at Amazon.com, Babyhaven.com, and Diapers.com from December 2014 through ...

Just about any dessert-themed flavor is now plausible when it comes to novelty Oreo flavors and other stunt food, and it’s difficult to surprise us. Yet we were sort of surprised at one of the new flavors that Nabisco plans to release in June, since it’s sort of a type of cereal, and sort of not. Fruity Pebbles, you may recall, are a brand of cereal from Post. Yet here are cookies with the theme of Fruity Pebbles Oreos that are totally not official Fruity Pebbles. The flavor will hit stores next week, and will be available in a wide variety of grocery stores: Nabisco lists Ahold, Wegmans, HEB, AWG, HyVee, Winn-Dixie, Bi-Lo, Giant Eagle, Price Chopper, and Meijer, but “wherever you normally get your Oreos” is probably a fair guess. The other new flavor is more conventional, by Oreo standards, and is blueberry pie. That’s not what we’d think of as a traditional summer flavor, but it still sounds good. That novelty Oreo is an exclusive to Target, and will hit stores the week after Frui...

You know that scene in action movies where the hero has fired every bullet, thrown every piece of throwable furniture, set off every explosive, but still the bad guy lurches forward? At that point, there’s nothing left for the hero to do but run and pray. After the recent discovery in the U.S. of a bacteria that is resistant to a vital last-resort antibiotic, some scientists believe we’re inching dangerously close to that run-and-pray moment in the world of medicine. “We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters yesterday after military researchers confirmed the first-known U.S. instance of the MCR-1 gene, which provides antibiotic resistance to colistin, a drug of last resort. “That wouldn’t just be urinary tract infections or pneumonia — that could be for the 600,000 patients a year who need cancer treatment.” Added Dr. Frieden, “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients.” For decades, d...

Kids grow. This may not come as a surprise to most of us, who were ourselves children one, but health insurance companies are not necessarily prepared for this facet of reality. And where reality and bureaucracy can really come into hard conflict is when kids who need durable medical equipment might — gasp — outgrow the tech, which doesn’t grow at all. The Atlantic tells the story of one girl who suffered a sudden, virus-related paralysis. While it took some time for doctors to come to a final verdict on diagnosis and treatment, one short-term goal seemed clear: since the girl couldn’t walk, she’d need a wheelchair to get around. The girl’s medical team wrote a prescription for a wheelchair, but the family hit a snag when it came to insurance: without a formal diagnosis of the problem, they wouldn’t pay for any equipment. It took a crowdfunding campaign from friends and family to buy the girl her the first chair, but that one — secondhand, and adapted for someone else’s very differ...

In some cities, Uber customers can choose to get a ride with UberPool, which allows users to share a car with strangers who are traveling along (or close to) their route. It seems the ride-hailing company is trying to nudge folks toward selecting that option, with a new test of an “upfront pricing” feature that displays prices for both UberPool and the more expensive option, UberX. In an attempt to push UberPool, Uber is testing a version of its app that shows an “upfront pricing” feature during booking in San Diego, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle, and some New Jersey markets, the Los Angeles Times reports. Here’s how it’ll look, as seen in a screen grab we took using the app in Philadelphia — note that UberPool is the selected option by default: In comparison, a New Yorker trying to get somewhere would have to toggle between the UberPool and UberX options to get a price estimate for each trip — though again, UberPool is the default selection: Upfront pricing calculates things lik...

As the fallout continues from the collapse of Corinthian Colleges Inc. — former operator of Everest University, WyoTech, and Heald College — the Department of Education is trying to sort through nearly 20,000 loan-forgiveness requests from former students who claim that CCI and other for-profit colleges misled them into taking out huge student loans. Unlike many loans or lines of credit, federal student loans generally can’t be discharged through bankruptcy, so even if the borrower is unable to pay, they will continue to owe the debt. However, there are some ways in which students who have been victimized by bad schools can seek to get out from under their loan debt. If a school closes and there are no other options available to the student, they can argue for a “closed school” claim. The government has already forgiven some $75 million in loans to 5,800 former CCI students who filed this type of claim. The other way is the heretofore little-used “borrower’s defense” claim, which i...

Despite efforts from a restaurant trade group to stop New York City from requiring labels on foods high in sodium high-sodium food from going into effect, a state appeals court says the city can begin enforcement of the rule as planned starting June 6. The decision was handed down by a panel of justices from the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court in Manhattan, and denied a request to delay the labels while a lawsuit filed by the National Restaurant Association against the city is pending appeal, The Wall Street Journal reports. The trade group doesn’t want the city’s Board of Health to be able to enforce a 2015 rule requiring restaurant chains with at least 15 locations nationwide to add a warning label on any menu items that have more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium, or about a teaspoon’s worth. After a state justice upheld the rule in February, saying it was an informational label that didn’t stop consumers from buying certain items, the trade group appealed. A restaura...