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It’s not much of a leap, after all, as Google has simply teamed up with a slew of online food delivery services to add the ordering option to its results, depending on where you live.
Searching for a nearby restaurant on your phone will pull up the option to order. Tapping on that will bring hungry folks to a selection of delivery services — depending on what operates in your area and works wwith that restaurant — taking users to that website to complete the order.
The six providers on the U.S. list for services include Seamless, Grubhub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu and MyPizza.com, with Google noting that it’s looking to add more eventually.
It’s unclear whether this functionality will also roll out for those using desktop browsers to search Google, however, or if it’ll stick strictly with mobile devices.
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The big box locations that once served as Target stores in Canada now have a new tenant: Walmart.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Walmart will acquire the retail and distribution locations vacated by Target earlier this year.
In all, the retailer will add 12 store leases and one owned property, as well as one distribution center to its roster of 395 stores already operating in the great North.
“Walmart is committed to the Canadian market, and this agreement helps us accelerate our growth plans,” Walmart Canada Chief Executive Dirk Van den Berghe tells the WSJ.
Walmart’s plans to take over the locations and property comes about five months after Target announced it would cease operations in Canada.
This is the second expansion in Canada for Walmart this year. Back in February the company announced it would open 29 supercenter stores in the country.
Wal-Mart to Buy Canadian Locations From Target [The Wall Street Journal]
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Here are twelve of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last two weeks, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.
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.
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We really recommend that you head over and read the entire series, but here are ten things that we learned from the first part.
As a consumer, what can you do? Note that salons offering cheap prices are taking that money out of someone’s pocket…and it’s probably their lowest-level workers. The Times offers some tips for being an ethical manicure customer: you can talk to your manicurist and hope that she tells you the truth, or look for signs of actual legal compliance, like time cards. Handing everyone who works on you a cash tip isn’t necessarily the best way to help them: some owners take a portion of these, too.
The Price of Nice Nails [New York Times]
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While CBS Corp. didn’t provide any pricing details today on the long-hinted-at standalone Showtime streaming service (a la HBO Now), the company did confirm that it will indeed be giving consumers this new cable-free option at some point in the coming months.
The confirmation was made during CBS’s Thursday afternoon quarterly earnings call, where the company touted the success of its CBS All Access streaming service, which provides live online access to the network feed. The $6/month service is now available to 55% of the country, thanks to a growing number of deals made between the network and local affiliates that it does not own. All Access is expected to be available in 75% of the country by year’s end.
CBS has not yet announced a name for the Showtime service, referring to it instead as Showtime Over-the-Top, nor has it given any indication of a price point. The company did say that it was encouraged by the success of HBO Now, perhaps hinting that a Showtime offering would be priced similarly.
The company did predict that a standalone Showtime service would be a “meaningful driver of our cable results in the near future” because there is a “large underserved market” of people who want to watch Showtime but don’t want the hundreds of basic cable channels they often have to get in order to access premium networks like HBO and Showtime. When pressed on the price by an analyst, a company exec answered that “numbers are continuing to be worked out.”
In terms of how standalone Showtime will be sold, the company says it will “deal with our existing partners and new partners,” implying that at least some pay-TV companies will be selling directly to their broadband customers.
Additionally, CBS spoke well of Verizon’s recently launched “skinny” Custom TV bundles that give subscribers options to only pay for those types of channels that they want to watch.
While competitors like Disney are taking issue with this attempt to carve up traditional basic cable channels into niche offerings, CBS says that the skinny bundle model benefits the company financially. The company says that by being a large piece of a smaller bundle, it gets more money from each subscriber.
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When buckling in for an hours-long flight, travelers might choose to pass the time by reading a book, listening to music or enjoying a few television shows or a movie via the in-flight services connection. While those are all viable options, the latter is typically only available under certain circumstances. But one woman says that wasn’t made clear, and now she’s suing United Airlines for $5 million.
NorthJersey.com reports that the woman filed the hefty class action lawsuit [PDF] in federal court alleging that the airline defrauded customers by not disclosing that WiFi and DirecTV services were inoperable while the plane was traveling outside of the U.S. or above water.
The ordeal began back in February when the traveler – who was flying from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Newark, NJ – paid the $7.99 fee to watch in-flight DirecTV during the four-hour trip. However, she claims the service only worked during the final 10 minutes of the flight.
According to the lawsuit, this service failure was due to the fact that the flight traveled, for the most part, outside of the continental U.S. and over large bodies of water.
“Despite this known limitation, United sells these services to passengers on the flights and fails to disclose that the services will not work as advertised when the aircraft is outside the continental United States or is over water,” the lawsuit states. “It is not until they have crossed U.S. borders or are over water, with no service, that customers learn that their DirecTV and/or WiFi service will not work for all or part of the flight.”
The woman claims that at no time before or during the process of purchasing the DirecTV service was she informed that the service would not work on her particular flight.
“In fact, throughout the representative Flight (substantially all of which is over water) United advertised to passengers via the TV screen to ‘SWIPE NOW” to receive over 100 channels of DirecTV’,” the suit states. “Nowhere does United disclose that this advertisement is intentionally false, made to induce passengers to swipe their credit card in-flight, knowing that the services passengers thought they were purchasing were unavailable.”
Chicago-based United Airlines denied the lawsuit’s allegations, and filed a legal memorandum seeking dismissal of the case, NorthJersey.com reports.
The airline maintains that passengers are informed of the services’ limits by notices displayed on back-seat monitors that reads, “Live DirectTV programming is not available while the aircraft is outside of the continental United States” and that “Wi-Fi service is available over the continental U.S.”
NJ woman sues United over disclosure [NorthJersey.com]
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