среда, 1 апреля 2015 г.
вторник, 31 марта 2015 г.
jikHere’s What Co-Branded Sprint-RadioShack Stores Will Probably Look Likede
Yesterday, the sale of 1,740 remaining RadioShack stores to hedge fund Standard General was approved by a bankruptcy court. We’ve known since before the bankruptcy filing that their plan is to team up with Sprint to re-open stores that will be part phone store, part RadioShack merchandise. What would that look like? Sprint has already showed us. Well, they showed the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, which makes them public documents.
Here’s the original document: the later pages aren’t all that interesting to people who aren’t heavily into retail demolition. The document was filed on Monday: if RadioShack’s new management and Sprint stick to the same timetable, stores in the new format will be open in a week and a half.
It looks like the “Fast Start” layout is meant to use much of what’s already there in RadioShack. Of course, all of those displays from other carriers would have to go: the most important task would be removing AT&T, Tracfone, and Verizon displays in favor of Sprint and its prepaid buddies like Boost and Virgin Mobile.
The biggest change would be to the signage. Even though Sprint is supposed to take up only 1/3 of the square footage of each store, you wouldn’t know that from the sign out front.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
jikOne Year After Merger, Men’s Wearhouse Announces Layoffs At Jos. A. Bank HQde
(Xurble)
It was a little over a year ago that Men’s Wearhouse and Jos. A. Bank ended months of contentious courtship and merged, with Men’s Wearhouse acquiring the smaller clothing chain for $1.8 billion. Now, the honeymoon is over, and Men’s Wearhouse is laying off or transferring some employees at Jos. A. Bank HQ in Hampstead, Maryland.
Men’s Wearhouse plans to lay off 122 employees and move many of the positions currently based in Maryland to Men’s Wearhouse offices in New York City and in Fremont, California. Shortly after the merger in June of last year, there were 778 employees at the Jos. A. Bank headquarters. A spokesperson told Baltimore Business Journal that there will be an estimated 450 employees left after the layoffs and restructuring are done.
Men’s Wearhouse plans to keep Jos. A. Bank’s HQ in Hampstead — but with far fewer workers [Baltimore Business Journal]
Report: Jos. A. Bank lays off 122 headquarters employees [Chain Store Age]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
jikBankruptcy Court Approves Sale Of 1,740 RadioShacks To Standard Generalde
The Great RadioShack Bankruptcy Auction Standoff may be over. The 94-year-old electronics retailer declared bankruptcy in February, and then closed around half of its stores, selling their leases. The company wanted to rid itself of the rest of its stores before April began so they won’t have to pay April rent on all of those stores out of money that should be going to their creditors.
The most important creditor here is Standard General, which is using RadioShack’s debt to the hedge fund as part of its bid for 1,740 of the chain’s remaining stores. Today, the bankruptcy court approved the sale of those remaining stores to despite the objections of other lenders. RadioShack preferred the bid from Standard General, which consisted of debt forgiveness and a modest amount of cash.
Backers of the SprintShack plan say that it will keep more than 7,000 current RadioShack retail employees working. The judge decided that Standard General’s bid was the superior one, and had the added benefit of “saving a century-old American retail icon.”
The highest competing bid for the company was from another lender, Salus Capital Partners. While that bid was entirely in cash rather than debt forgiveness, it would have led to having liquidators sell store inventory, leases, and fixtures
RadioShack co-branding of stores with Sprint wins court approval [RadioShack]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
jikFlight’s Inaugural Journey Delayed After Firefighters Accidentally Spray Plane With Foamde
Picture this: You’re all hyped up and ready to fly across the ocean as part of an airline’s inaugural journey to a destination across the ocean, everyone is cheering, the excitement is building and then suddenly foam is spraying everywhere. Celebration over, and you’re forced to wait a night to get off the ground. Delays are annoying, yes, but rarely are they caused by celebrating firefighters pressing the wrong button.
That’s what’s reportedly behind the delay of Virgin Atlantic’s first flight from Manchester, England to Atlanta, GA, reports The Telegraph.
The Airbus A330-300 was enjoying the celebratory hullabaloo at Manchester Airport, complete with a planned salute from fire crews, who were supposed to send the plane off with a spray from water cannons, when somehow the hoses were switched, releasing jets of fire-suppressing foam.
Not only does that make a big mess, but it clogged up jet engines and turbine blades, grounding the plane so it could undergo a safety check before taking off.
The flight’s 257 passengers who were anxiously awaiting the journey were told at first there’d be a five-hour delay, but after gnoshing and swilling a few refreshments, the airline cancelled the flight until the next day. Passengers were put up in hotels overnight and returned to the airport this morning.
“The pilot explained that the plane was being given a water cannon salute. Unfortunately someone had pressed the button for foam, instead of water. It clogged up the engines,” said one passenger.
“We needed to give the aircraft a thorough check over,” Virgin Atlantic said in explaining the delay.
Plane grounded after firefighters accidentally sprayed it with foam [The Telegraph]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
jikJetBlue Cancels Passenger’s Ticket For Flight He Wasn’t Even Supposed To Be Onde
Anyone who has traveled frequently enough has likely had to deal with your flight being canceled or rescheduled and all the havoc that can ensue trying to keep the rest of your itinerary from being completely screwed up. But what’s a traveler to do when the airline screws up twice and cancels your ticket for a flight that you’re not even booked on?
This is what happened recently happened to JetBlue passenger Tim and his wife, who were scheduled to fly direct from Boston to St. Thomas on the morning of Feb. 16 with some friends.
The couple had booked their tickets months in advance and had all their confirmation numbers, etc., ready as the departure date drew near. Then they got an e-mail on Feb. 13 saying that their flight had been canceled and they would have to reschedule.
Only problem was that JetBlue had the correct flight listed in the e-mail, but the wrong date. The e-mail said that the Feb. 15 flight was canceled, not the Feb. 16 departure that Tim had booked.
When Tim contacted JetBlue to figure out what had gone wrong, he says a rep for the airline told him that their tickets had somehow been switched to that earlier flight.
The best the airline could do was put them on a late-evening flight on Feb. 17, which wouldn’t arrive until the early morning of Feb. 18, nearly two full days after he was supposed to arrive.
Meanwhile that Feb. 16 flight he’d originally booked had departed as planned with his friends aboard.
Since extending his vacation was not a possibility, this would mean that Tim’s holiday would be ruined, so he investigated other ways to salvage his trip.
Because of the bad weather in Boston at the time, seats on planes out of the city were at a premium, explains Tim, who eventually ended up looking at the New York City area airports for more reasonable options.
“I found a flight out of Newark, NJ, Tuesday morning at 8 A.M. that would get me into St Thomas at 3:30 PM,” he writes. “I booked that flight, reserved a one-way rental car and drove 5 hours to a hotel nearest the airport. I stayed at the hotel overnight and caught a flight out Tuesday morning putting me into my final destination approximately 24 hours late.”
Not only did he have to go in the hole for the expense of the rental car and hotel just to make it to the Newark flight on time, Tim faced additional expenses once he landed. His final destination was actually the island of St. John, but since his friends who’d arrived the day before had already picked up the rental car they’d all intended to share.
“The cost to salvage our trip involved new airline tickets, a rental car, a hotel, taxis and a ferry plus the lodging cost for a night we had already reserved/paid for,” wrote Tim in a detailed letter to JetBlue asking for the airline to reimburse him for the cost, which totaled nearly $2,000.
We also wrote to our contacts at JetBlue asking them to investigate what happened. It took a couple of weeks and several e-mails but today the airline gave us the following statement: “We want all of our customer to have a great experience with JetBlue. We have been working with the customer directly and believe we have come to a solution.”
It’s not much, and doesn’t explain exactly how this screw-up happened, so we reached out to Tim, who confirmed that he has been contacted by JetBlue and that the airline has offered to reimburse him for his expenses.
“I decided to accept the refund and move on with my life,” he tells Consumerist.
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
jikVirginia’s Got The Fastest Broadband In The U.S., But South Korea’s Still The Speed Fiend’s Place To Bede
Akamai’s top 10 worldwide best average internet connection speeds for the end of 2014.
It’s that time again! Internet company Akamai keeps a sharp eye on the state of broadband at home and abroad, and delivers a quarterly report lining up just how we’re doing. But despite a whole huge pile of brand new data, the story remains the same: the U.S. still has a lot of catching up to do if we want to consider ourselves among the global broadband elite.
The new report (PDF) has the usual mixed bag of news. The good bit: improvement is widespread, year over year. All 51 states (the report includes the District of Columbia) saw increases by the end of 2014, as compared to the end of 2013.
However, the rest of the world is improving, too. And in many cases, faster. While the U.S., on average clocked in at 12th globally in the first half of 2014, by the year’s end we find ourselves sitting at #16.
As usual, of course, comparing a country with an enormous web of state-level governments and a 3.8 million square mile footprint against a compact city-state like Singapore may not be the most useful metric. But rankings within the U.S., at the state level, don’t reveal that much better a picture.
The U.S. top 10 for the end of the year mostly included the usual suspects, but in a new order. In the third quarter of 2014, Delaware held the fastest average speed, followed by Washington, Connecticut, Utah, DC, Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and New Jersey.
While the nation’s capital and the northeast are still good places to be for the best broadband, other states have now broken into the top 10 as well. Virginia now holts the number one position for average broadband speed, clocking in at 17.7 Mbps. Delaware’s dropped to number two, with DC, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington, Oregon, North Dakota, and New York rounding out the top ten. Delaware holds on to top average peak speeds in the nation, however.
Delaware also remains at the top for penetration of speeds above 10 Mbps, with 68% of connections meeting that threshold. The entire top ten list is at 50% or higher.
Arkansas has, unfortunately, maintained its last-place position despite an increase in average connection speeds in that state. Residents in The Natural State, according to Akamai, get an average connection speed of under 8 Mbps.
The U.S. is number one regionally speaking, at least; in the Americas, Americans’ average of 11.1 Mbps (a 15% increase from the end of 2013) beats out Canada’s 10.7 Mbps, with Uruguay coming in third and the other nations of South and Central America continuing from there.
For national “high broadband” access — speeds at or above 10 Mbps — the U.S. comes in at 17th globally, with about 39% of connections meeting that threshold. The good new is: that’s a 20% increase from this time last year.
The bad news is: that doesn’t meet the FCC’s new, aspirational threshold for “broadband” access — and it’s still not even 40% of the internet connections in the country.
These figures are important to keep in mind when we talk about broadband policy, like net neutrality or the Comcast merger. Fewer than 2 in 5 Americans with broadband access have connections that support most of the big, bold new connectivity features that companies and individuals alike tout as the cornerstone of the 21st century economy.
For teleworking, distance learning, and remote medicine — the great supposed benefits of the connected age — only a fraction of existing connections support seamless use. And that’s aside from entertainment, where 15Mbps is indeed the minimum “4K ready” threshold.
For now, we can clearly get by. Because we are getting by. But as the future continues to become ever more reliant on flawless, omnipresent internet access, it will become ever more crucial to make sure that all of us, in every state, can access infrastructure that keeps up.
by Kate Cox via Consumerist