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This morning, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai made a claim that net neutrality, which hasn’t even been in place for two years, has driven investment in U.S. broadband to historically low levels. However, the actual numbers given by the nation’s largest cable and telecom companies don’t appear to back this up. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Pai blamed net neutrality for causing uncertainty in the broadband market and declared that “uncertainty is the enemy of growth.” However, many of the nation’s largest broadband providers have grown in the last two years. Since Feb. 26, 2015, the day that the FCC voted to approve the neutrality rules, AT&T’s share price has increased by more than 20%, Comcast’s is up 26%. Verizon’s stock price is at the same level as it was, though it has fluctuated as much as 15% in either direction since then. Charter’s share price is up 40%, after the FCC allowed it to acquire Time Warner Cable and Bright House in 2016. The only major broadband provi...

It takes a whole lot of beans to try to compete with Italian espresso in Italy, but Starbucks’ outgoing CEO Howard Schultz says his chain is finally up for the challenge. Starbucks has some 26,000 stores in 75 countries around the world, but not Italy. Schultz says it’s time to enter that market with one of the company’s new high-end cafes , which will open in Milan next year. “I didn’t think we were ready to come to Italy,” Schultz told The Associated Press . “I think Italy is such a special place. I am so respectful of the Italian coffee heritage and the Italian culture, and I think we had to earn that respect, opportunity, and I think over the years we got to the point that we are now ready to come.” The cafe will also feature Princi baked goods and deli items as part of Starbucks’ partnership with the Italian bakery , which until now, only involved cafes outside of Italy. Schultz will be spending much of his time focusing on the company’s line of upscale “Reserve” roastery loc...

A week after a South Korean court approved a warrant for the arrest of Samsung vice chairman Jay Y. Lee in connection with a bribery case , the executive and four others were officially indicted.  The New York Times reports that Lee, who was arrested on Feb. 17, was indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges while four other senior executives — three that have resigned — were indicted for the same charges, but not arrested. Lee initially avoided arrest last month when a court denied the prosecutor’s first warrant request, citing a lack of evidence. The indictments come at the end of the South Korean special prosecutor’s 90-day investigation into a corruption scandal involving South Korea President Park Geun-hye. Lee was first publicly tied to the case last month when he faced 22 hours of questioning related to his part in the scandal. The case involves whether or not millions of dollars in payments from Samsung to businesses and foundations run by an associate of the Pres...

While JCPenney recently announced plans to close more than 130 stores and offer early retirement to employees to cut its staff, the department store chain also has some good news. It is expanding appliance showrooms to an additional 100 stores for a total of 600, and adding more brands to its offerings. Appliance sales have apparently been a hit, especially as Sears stores continue to close in malls across the country. The chain’s appliance sales have expanded from a three-state pilot project just over a year ago to 500 stores. Some stores even sell whole-house HVAC systems. JCPenney got rid of its own appliance sections back in the ’80s, but now sees an opportunity in that business. It’s no coincidence that it’s expanding this business as it has a new CEO who previously worked at Home Depot , now a big appliance-seller. “Appliances reinforce the ongoing strength of our growth initiative as we pivot our retail strategy towards non-apparel and growing categories,” CEO Marvin Elliso...

Being stuck in traffic for hours on end? Awful. Being stuck in traffic for hours on end with some tacos? Not so bad at all. While drivers on I-5 in Washington were stuck in traffic for hours after a truck filled with propane tipped over, the operators of one taco truck saw an opportunity to set up shop, selling much-needed food to stranded commuters, reports The Seattle Times . Motorists caught in a standstill on Monday included three employees driving a taco truck to serve lunch in a Seattle neighborhood. Their original plans put on hold indefinitely, the workers decided to open the truck for lunch anyway, right where they were. Taco truck, stuck in Seattle’s big I-5 closure, opens for lunch anyway: https://t.co/RQicTXlZWm http://pic.twitter.com/KtI3FOHBUT — The Seattle Times (@seattletimes) February 27, 2017 “We are ready to serve food, everywhere,” the truck’s owner told the Times. It’s a good thing, too, as there were plenty of customers ready to chow down in the middle...

In a bid to get you in and out of stores quickly and efficiently, Walmart is turning to its digital offerings. The big box retailer plans to roll out upgrades to its mobile app that will allow customers of its pharmacy and money service departments to complete some transactions through their phones and pick up items at new, dedicated “express lanes.”  Walmart on Tuesday announced that starting next month it will roll out the mobile upgrades to create a “faster, easier, and more convenient experience” experience for pharmacy and money service customers. With the update, Walmart pharmacy customers will be able to refill prescriptions from their phones and use an “express lane” to pick up their order and pay electronically. To get started with the online pharmacy services, Walmart says customers can input some information — such as scanning prescription numbers — into the app prior to coming into the store. To complete the transaction, customers must come to the pharmacy co...

Who knew all you’d have to do to get a lift into space is ask Elon Musk for a ride? ride? The CEO of SpaceX (and Tesla) says two private citizens approached the company — ostensibly wearing trench coats and carrying suitcases of cash — and asked to go on a trip around the moon. He’s planning to take them there in 2018. He won’t be piloting the Crew Dragon spacecraft himself on the one-week trip, of course, but the ride will be privately crewed as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, SpaceX said in a statement on Monday . Musk says the plan is to launch the Crew Dragon later this year and send it to the International Space Station in demonstration mode, with no humans on board. A later mission with crew is expected to fly in the second quarter of 2018. Once Crew Dragon missions are underway for NASA, SpaceX is planning to launch the two space tourists — who have already paid a “significant deposit” for their moon mission — “on a journey to circumnavigate the moon and return to the...

Have you ever met someone and immediately thought “You look like a Heather,” and then it turns out they person is actually named Heather? While you might want to believe you have some kind of psychic ability, you probably don’t. Instead, a new study finds that under the right circumstances people can often correctly match names to faces based on social perceptions.  The research , published this week in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , found that social perceptions can likely influence facial experience. The study, based on eight experiments involving hundreds of people in France and Israel, explored whether or not name stereotypes can be manifested into facial appearance, creating a face-name matching effect. “Both age and ethnicity play a role in our name and in our look,” the report states. “Our goal was to see whether the face-name matching effect could be demonstrated beyond these variables.” Through this effect,...

Most retailers are having trouble bringing in foot traffic, leading once-steady brands like JCPenney , Sears , and Macy’s to shutter large swaths of stores. Yet, those customers who continue to shop at brick-and-mortar retailers appear to be happier about the experience. The American Customer Satisfaction Index has released the annual results of its survey for consumer sentiments about the nation’s largest retailers, and despite large-scale closings at Sears, Macy’s, and JCP, scores for each of them are up this year. Sears and Macy’s each improved by six points, and JCP enjoyed an eight-point bump. How could that be? Scores rose even for retailers that announced drastic cutbacks to their store count and layoffs after the holiday season. Those were mostly department and discount stores . Macy’s rose six points, from 73 to 79, and announced that it would be closing 68 stores shortly after the holidays . Sears rose six points as well, from 71 to 77, but its parent company announced the...

Like slices of buttered toast, cupcakes, and pans of lasagna, smartphones always seem to fall face-down when dropped. Third-party repair shops have popped up to help users when this happens, but using these companies while an Apple device is still under warranty has been a gamble until now. Departing from Apple’s network of Genius Bars and authorized repair shops for services previously meant voiding one’s warranty. Let’s say that you bring your phone to a third-party repair shop after smashing the screen. A few months later, the volume buttons stop working, and that’s when you learn that letting an unauthorized shop open up your phone means that you’ll have to pay out-of-warranty prices to get a repair of your phone. Over the weekend, 9to5Mac shared a leaked memo to retail store employees that details a change to the company’s repair policy. If the whole phone or the display has to be replaced to fix the problem, customers will have to pay the out-of-warranty rate to make up for...

Last week, FCC Chair Ajit Pai declared that he would halt the Commission’s new privacy rule before it kicks in on March 2 . That last-minute decision is now under fire from within the FCC and beyond. This privacy rule — delineating which user data an internet service provider can and can’t share without a user’s permission — stems from our old friend, net neutrality, which just happens to celebrate its second birthday today. Two years ago today, the FCC voted to recategorize broadband so that it could be regulated more like a utility. One of the side-effects of this decision is that privacy concerns about ISPs shifted from being the duty of the Federal Trade Commission to the FCC. And when the FCC finalized its version of these privacy rules in Oct. 2016 , it created some new ISP-specific regulations that did not sit well with the telecom industry. Basically, the rule says that ISPs must get users’ permission before they can share certain sensitive information with third parties. ...

Takata recently agreed to pay $1 billion to close the books on a federal criminal investigation into its shrapnel-shooting airbags linked to 11 deaths , but the auto parts company — and several automakers — must still answer allegations that these airbags were a known problem long before the massive recall. Today, attorneys representing victims of Takata airbags also accused Ford, Nissan, Honda, BMW, and Toyota of knowing about this defect for years and doing nothing about it. The Detroit News reports that documents filed Monday in United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida claim that the automakers knew the airbags could rupture violently, injuring occupants, but continued to use the devices in order to save money. The filings are part of pretrial evidence-gathering related to dozens of lawsuits against Takata and the automakers. According to the filing, internal documents from Ford, Nissan, and Toyota suggest that despite concerns over the safet...

Have you ever wondered how a retailer can leave a Bluetooth skimmer on a payment card terminal in its stores for weeks at a time? It’s harder to detect the devices than you might think, because crooks have their own places to shop for spare parts that snap right on a payment terminal and are hard to spot if you aren’t looking for them. A security technician at an unnamed U.S. retailer sent photos of the outside and inside of the device to Krebs on Security for educational purposes after three of the devices were found in a store. The skimmer uses Bluetooth to zap customers’ payment data in real time to either a second device hidden nearby or even someone sitting in a car in the store’s parking lot with a phone, computer, or tablet. The way that store employees found the skimmer was pretty low-tech: They noticed that the buttons on the PIN pad were more difficult to press than usual. When they discovered the reason why, a sweep of the rest of the registers turned up two more. Ther...

When Keurig quietly discontinued its Rivo Cappuccino & Latte System in Dec. 2016, the company said customers would still be able to purchase Lavazza brand pods — the only ones the Rivo accepts — in its online store, as well as from a few other retailers. Soon after, however, customers started bumping into “out of stock” notices almost everywhere online. What’s the deal? Consumerist reader John wrote in saying he’d heard Keurig has had supply chain issues, noting that all the caffeinated pod products for the Rivo have been out of stock for months at Keurig.com. On Keurig’s site there’s a warning that at least one of the out of stock products is unavailable “until February 2017.” While caffeinated varieties are also out of stock on Lavazza’s website and on BedBathAndBeyond.com , as of Feb. 27, there are still pods available in certain flavors on Amazon — albeit at a hefty price. Keurig pulled the plug for Rivo late last year, but it sounds like it some customers never got the...

In recent years, the FCC played a key part in blocking the mergers of AT&T and T-Mobile, and Comcast and Time Warner Cable, while also using its regulatory leverage to place pro-consumer conditions on the mergers it did approve — like getting Charter to agree to not use data caps for seven years . However, the FCC will apparently give AT&T its wish and not even chime in on the pending merger of AT&T and Time Warner. This is according to recently elevated FCC Chair Ajit Pai, who told the Wall Street Journal today that he has no reason to review the merger if it’s not brought to the Commission’s attention. “My understanding is that the deal won’t be presented to the commission,” Pai told the Journal. While FCC review of a merger involving AT&T (the nation’s largest phone service provider, and second-largest pay-TV provider) and Time Warner (one of the biggest players in pay-TV content, with channels like CNN and HBO) might seem like it’s destined for FCC review, AT...

The brave retail archaeologists we call the Raiders of the Lost Walmart recently made a side expedition to Kmart, where they dug up a cache of sports-related gear that has apparently been sitting around, unpurchased for years — more than a decade in one instance. Reader Steve was shopping at his local Kmart store in Arizona when he noticed something on a sale rack that isn’t all that unusual for a store in Arizona: The store was selling commemorative t-shirts from a game that the NFL’s Cardinals played. What was unusual was that the game was in October 2006. “Why would anyone want a 11-year-old shirt celebrating two teams playing each other that both sucked that year?” Steve pondered. That’s a good question. The significant thing about this game is that it was the first regular season game that the Cardinals played in their then-new home, University of Phoenix Stadium. Reader Joe found something similar in his local Kmart: A rack of U.S. Open t-shirts from the years 2011 through ...

While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently recommended further limiting the amount of lead found in common cosmetics , that guidance didn’t extend to hair dyes that contain lead acetate. Now, a coalition of consumer advocates says the agency should reconsider its approval of the ingredient in hair dyes. Earlier this month, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Environmental Working Group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, our colleagues at Consumers Union, and others signed a petition [ PDF ] claiming that lead acetate — the active ingredient in products like Grecian Formula that slowly darkens grey hair when used repeatedly — is a neurotoxin and carcinogen, and thus, shouldn’t be in hair dyes. “We now know that lead is more dangerous, especially to children, and skin absorption is a more significant route than FDA thought in 1980,” Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director at EDF, said in a joint statement from the groups . “We also have evidence that when the dye is appl...

More than a year and a half after spending nearly $1 billion to acquire game-focused livestreaming service Twitch, Amazon’s finally doing something you’d have expected them to try sooner: Putting big “Buy” buttons on streams of some new games, so you can grab ’em while you’re watching ’em. Games from more than 20 publishers, will soon be sold directly digitally through Twitch livestreams, the Wall Street Journal reports . It makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Watching a live stream of someone playing a game on Twitch is entertainment, sure… but it’s also a perfect informercial. After watching a few hours of someone playing League of Legends , Overwatch , or whatever 2017’s big hit turns out to be, you may decide you’d like to give it a whirl, too — and putting the “buy” button right there with the video makes that, as the marketers like to say, frictionless for you. It means you don’t navigate away from the video to shop, nor do you forget to go look up and buy the game ...

After 85 years in business, Family Christian is closing for good, shutting down all 240 of its retail stores. USA Today reports that the company, which had stores in 36 states, decided to close after facing declining sales following its 2015 bankruptcy protection filing. The Michigan-based company, which transitioned from a for-profit retailer to a non-profit ministry in 2012, blamed the closure on “changing consumer behavior and declining sales.” “Despite improvements in product assortment and the store experience, sales continued to decline,” Chuck Bengochea, the company’s president, tells USA Today. “In addition, we were not able to get the pricing and terms we needed from our vendors to successfully compete in the market.” The company, which employed about 3,000 people, said the only remaining option was to liquidate its assets, Christianity Today reports. While the company hasn’t released a timeline for when stores will close, its online marketplace now features a prominent...

Eleven months after NASA said it was working on a quieter, “low boom” supersonic passenger jet that could travelers around the world in a matter of hours, the agency says it has started testing the plane with Lockheed Martin. NASA is testing a scale model of the Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) X-plane that is 9% of the real plane’s size in a wind tunnel at its Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the agency says . During tests over the next eight weeks, engineers will expose the model to wind speeds ranging from Mach 0.3 to Mach 1.6 (approximately 150 to 950 mph). “We’ll be measuring the lift, drag and side forces on the model at different angles of attack to verify that it performs as expected,” said aerospace engineer Ray Castner, who leads propulsion testing for NASA’s QueSST effort. “We also want to make sure the air flows smoothly into the engine under all operating conditions.” NASA says recent research shows it’s possible for a supersonic airplane that, when flying fast...

Price-comparison ads at Wegmans will soon be getting a bit of a makeover following an ad watchdog’s suggestion that the grocer modify in-store displays in response to a Costco complaint that the low-cost price comparisons were misleading and false. The National Advertising Division — an independent industry watchdog administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus — investigated the complaint leveled at Wegmans by rival Costco, finding that while the price comparisons were accurate, they should clarify that prices are subject to change. Costco, in a complaint filed with NAD in early February, claimed that Wegmans’ in-store point of sale displays featuring a series of Wegmans’ products listed side-by-side with Costco products, falsely compared the prices. In each case, the prices displayed indicated that the Wegmans’ products were less expensive. But Costco argued that the price displayed for the Costco product was often false and actually lower than the one displ...

Grocery sales comprise over half of Walmart’s receipts, so it makes sense that the mega-retailer wants to keep its prices competitive. In at least 1,200 of its stores, though, the chain is reportedly slashing prices in an effort to give customers a reason to shop at Walmart instead of discount grocer Aldi and other supermarkets. Reuters learned from sources at companies that supply Walmart that the retailer has launched price comparison tests at 1,200 stores in 11 states. The chain’s reported goal with these tests is to find the right price for popular items that will attract more customers and beat competitors, but still earn a profit. Reuters went out and spot-checked stores in Illinois and Iowa, two states that are part of the price test. In all of the stores, they used a basket of basic items like tomatoes, bananas, milk, peanut butter, eggs, and pasta, and checked the prices of the imaginary basket against Aldi. Shopping for all store-brand items, the wire service found that t...

Don’t like having to talk to a real, live person when you want to order food? You won’t have to if you’re visiting one of 1,000 Wendy’s locations with self-ordering kiosks. According to The Columbus Dispatch , the company is planning to install the new kiosks in around 16% of its locations by the end of this year in response to demand from customers and franchise owners, the Ohio-based chain said last week during its investors’ day. “There is a huge amount of pull from (franchisees) in order to get them,” David Trimm, Wendy’s chief information officer, said. “With the demand we are seeing… we can absolutely see our way to having 1,000 or more restaurants live with kiosks by the end of the year.” It’s a win-win for the company: Younger customers get an ordering experience they prefer, Trimm explains, and the kiosks also reduce labor costs. A typical store will get three kiosks for about $15,000, Trimm said, estimating that franchisees will make up that money in less than two years ...

There are number of things you can put in applesauce to give it a bit of a kick: cinnamon, brown sugar, but definitely not glass. Yet, Trader Joe’s is recalling its applesauce over concerns it might contain that dangerous, unwanted ingredient. Manzana Products Co. Inc. announced Sunday in a  notice posted with the Food and Drug Administration  that it would recall three applesauce products sold at Trader Joe’s stores nationwide after determining the bottles might contain pieces of glass. Manzana initiated the recall of the 24-ounce glass jars of “First Crush,” “Organic,” and “All Natural” unsweetened applesauce following reports from consumers who found glass in their products. It’s unclear if any of the customers were injured by the glass. Affected products, which can be identified by the “best before” date printed on the top of the lid, include: The company says that all jars of the potentially affected products have been removed from store shelves and d...

It’s been two weeks since Verizon’s surprise announcement that it was bringing back unlimited mobile data plans kicked off a huge flurry of activity, with all four national carriers introducing or improving their own offerings. But a point-by-point comparison of all four left many folks wondering: Is AT&T even trying ? AT&T apparently wondered that too, and so is tweaking their plan once more. Starting on Thursday, March 2, AT&T is dropping the prices on its unlimited data offering, and adding some features. Today, AT&T’s unlimited offering begins at $100 for one line, then adding $40 per line thereafter. Subscribers who put four lines on their plan can receive a credit, knocking it down to $180 per month. AT&T’s simplifying that, dropping the first line for Unlimited Plus to $90, then selling two for $145, three for $165, and four for $185. It’s also now letting customers use their mobile devices as portable hotspots, allowing customers to tether their laptops...