uVerizon Knows More About What You Watch On FiOS Than You Dor

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  (Bart)

  
  Verizon isn’t a cable company. Its FiOS product doesn’t spring from decades of guaranteed local monopolies, which means most FiOS customers can, if they get annoyed enough, jump ship to a competitor. But you leaving is bad news for Verizon. They want to keep their subscribers. And they have an enormous mountain of highly personalized data on hand to try to do it with.

  Quartz points us to a presentation a Verizon executive gave this week at a conference of, basically, data nerds.

  Data is great! It’s cool! It tells you all sorts of things that you can then use to improve your business and how it operates. But there’s a line somewhere, a border separating “useful” from “creepy.” That line is “privacy,” and Verizon’s customer behavior tracking at the very least seems to tap-dance right along that line.

  When you call FiOS to complain, downgrade, or cancel, the rep on the other end of the line can now argue back at you with all of your own data: how much you download in a month, what channels you watch, how many hours you spend watching, and more.

  So, for example, let’s say money’s tight and you want to cut back. You call and ask for a smaller, less expensive bundle of channels. “I never really watch them anyway,” you say. But the Verizon rep on the other end of the phone can see that you watch a solid 30 channels in any given month, and that you spend 8 hours a week watching premium channel content. You probably enjoy that content. Perhaps they can entice you to stay on board for another year if they give you HBO and Starz for free?

  Or perhaps you’re more into broadband than TV. You use a lot of data in a given month — and because you rely on cloud storage or peer-to-peer file sharing, you have a fairly high volume of uploaded data, too, not just downloaded. Maybe the way for Verizon to keep you on board is to offer a small broadband discount and to remind you very strongly that their network is symmetrical, so your upload speeds will continue to match your download speeds.

  Armed with that level of personalized data, there are thousands of ways Verizon customer service agents can personalize their pitch to convince you to cancel or switch providers.

  Verizon executive Mahmoud El Assir told Quartz that giving CSRs all of that data when the customer calls in certainly works out in Verizon’s favor. “Customers are four times more likely to upgrade their DVR boxes to newer versions that record more shows when we bring up the data on recording conflicts,” El Assir told Quartz.

  Praising the personalization of data, El Assir called it “a more educated conversation with the customer.”

  “Now when an agent gets a call, instead of blindly resizing customers cable packages, agents can tell them how they might lose these two channels and how often they watch them,” El Assir said.

  Verizon also monitors customer service calls for certain key words and can have supervisors leap in to save the day if they hear certain things — like, for example, “Cablevision,” “Time Warner,” or “Comcast,” competitors frustrated subscribers are likely to say they will switch to.

  All the personal data that Verizon FiOS uses to keep you from canceling [Quartz]

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist

uDear Sonic: Please Don’t Store Any More Hamburger & Hot Dog Buns Next To The Toiletr

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  (Photo: Josh Benteman/Facebook)

  Imagine you’re at a fast food joint and you’re taking your young child to the bathroom. Of all the possible things you could find in the lavatory, one of the least-expected would probably be whole trays of buns for hamburgers and hot dogs.

  For a man visiting a Sonic Drive-In in Topeka, KS, this wasn’t an imaginary scenario, but a reality that he documented with his camera and posted to Facebook.

  “Welcome to the bathroom in Sonic,” he wrote in the caption to the photo.

  The customer, who says he and his family left the restaurant without ordering anything, was later told that the Sonic’s maintenance folks had moved the buns into the bathroom.

  The company tells the Topeka Capital-Journal that this was an “innocent mistake” and that these buns were thrown out after the storage issue had been brought to their attention.

  [via Eater]

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uSelf-Driving Cars: Fewer Accidents, But More Motion Sicknessr

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  (Neal Fowler)

  
  Cars increasingly drive themselves. If tech companies have their way, then entirely autonomous vehicles will be the future as soon as possible. But that future isn’t exactly primed to be glorious for everyone. For those of us at all prone to motion sickness, that future — despite being lower on accidents and higher on energy efficiency — is not going to be fun.

  Quartz reports on a recent study conducted at the University of Michigan that points out something many of us have been avoiding: if you’re not driving the car, you’re going to need to do something else with that time. And if you’re reading, watching a video, or doing a whole host of other stuff, you’re drastically upping the chances of a motion sickness episode.

  Most people who are prone to motion sickness have more trouble as passengers than as drivers. When we’re controlling the car and focusing our attention ahead of us, we mainly do okay. But when we’re passengers in a vehicle of whatever sort, the dissonance between what we’re looking at and where we’re going can create a, well, gut reaction.

  Researchers asked what most people plan to do while their car is driving itself and while a surprisingly high number answered that they’d stare at the road, about 37% said they’d be using that time about the same way folks commuting by conventional mass transit do: reading, working, typing, watching videos, and so on. And all of those activities are more likely to increase motion sickness.

  The verdict? Somewhere between 6% and 10% of Americans riding in self-driving cars will probably experience motion sickness more often than not. Biking to work is suddenly starting to look a lot more appealing.

  Driverless cars are going to make some people puke [Quartz]

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist

uCostco Misses Out On $40M/Year Because Of $5 Rotisserie Chickens, And It’s Okay With Thatr

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  (Mike Mozart)

  When you buy a jug of mayonnaise or a mammoth pack of toilet paper rolls at Costco, you understand that you’re saving by buying in bulk. But then there are the $4.99 rotisserie chickens that you don’t have to buy by the dozen to get that low price. In fact, Costco is the one getting the short end of that deal, missing out on millions a year by keeping the price low.

  Speaking this week to analysts about the wholesale club’s quarterly earnings, Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti answered a question about the company’s philosophy on the cheap chickens.

  “I can only tell you what history has shown us: When others were raising their chicken prices from $4.99 to $5.99, we were willing to eat, if you will, $30 to $40 million a year in gross margin by keeping it at $4.99,” he explained, according to the Seattle Times. “That’s what we do for a living.”

  In 2014, Costco sold 76 million of these chickens, just about one per club cardholder. Just like the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo (and other low-priced menu items) at the Costco in-store snack bars, they appear to be helping to get customers in the doors where they can make purchases on higher-margin items.

  The price of chicken has remained flat in the last year, but that might change due to a recent outbreak in avian flu, though many of the chickens that have died or been euthanized were raised for egg production.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uUber Proposes Simpler Privacy Policy, Will Let Riders See Their Ratingsr

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  (Adam Fagen)

  One feature of ride-hailing app Uber that’s meant to keep riders from acting like complete jerks is mutual rating: passengers rate their drivers, sure, but drivers also rate passengers. Secretly. Users can’t see their own ratings, but they could prevent someone from being picked up at a busy time. The company has promised to clarify its privacy policy and allow passengers to see their own ratings.

  They aren’t doing this to win over new riders or just for funsies: it’s at the recommendation of an outside law firm’s review of their privacy policies. Last year, people began to have some very understandable concerns after the existence of what’s called “God mode” within available to select employees. This mode serves as a sort of Marauder’s Map of real life, showing where every user of the service is in real time.

  Last year, people began asking questions about Uber’s privacy policies after one of the company’s executives answered a reporter’s questions about the service by e-mailing her excerpts from logs of her own Uber trips, something that she didn’t give him permission to do.

  The new privacy policy makes it much clearer that Uber collects certain information about its users, which includes their location at any time (even when the app isn’t running) and that the company will store information about people in your address book that you share with the app.

  Uber Broadens Rider Privacy Policy, Asks for New Permissions [Bloomberg News]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

uSwiss Cheese Has Been Losing Its Holes, And Now Science Knows Whyr

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  (Ruby Nguyen)

  
  The 21st century has not been kind to the trademark texture of Emmental cheese. To Americans, that’s Swiss cheese: the stuff with all the holes in. But the holes have been vanishing and the cheese becoming smoother over time. Scientists determined to find out why. The answer? Modern cheese is just too clean.

  The AP reports that a Swiss government-funded agricultural institute delved into the mystery of the nation’s most famous cheese and found that holes need hay. Or, more specifically, that “microscopically small hay particles” that make their way into the milk are responsible for the holes when that milk becomes cheese.

  When a dairy farm is all manual labor, with people doing their best to keep rooms clean but using pre-industrial tech, some of those airborne particles will make their way into milk and there’s nothing you can do about it. But the transition from traditional milking methods into fully-automated industrial systems means there’s less stuff in the air, and that means fewer holes in the cheese.

  The solution? More hay. “In a series of tests,” the AP reports, “scientists added different amounts of hay dust to the milk and discovered it allowed them to regulate the number of holes.”

  Mystery of disappearing holes in Swiss cheese solved [Associated Press]

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist

uAmazon Brand Coffee And Cereal May Soon Be Coming To An Internet Near Your

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  (Nazra Z)
  

  
  Amazon really, really wants to be your everything store. They do tech, they do digital goods, they do groceries, they even do same-day delivery. So perhaps it seems inevitable that they’re no longer just interested in selling other people’s stuff, but coming up with their own house brand for everyday items too.

  The Wall Street Journal reports that, like basically every grocery and big box store out there, Amazon is planning to launch its own in-house store-brand line of items under the Amazon Elements label.

  Amazon’s first foray into the Amazon Elements brand was not without its challenges. They started late last year with diapers and baby wipes, but had to yank the diapers off the virtual shelves less than two months in to the experiment because customers basically hated them and said they didn’t work properly. (And if there is one baby care product you really, really want to work properly, it is a diaper.)

  At this point, the only Elements-branded product Amazon sells are the baby wipes. But, the WSJ reports, they could soon be joined by not only other personal care and home care items like razors and cleaning products, but also by your standard grocery-store staples like coffee, soup, water, pasta, and pet food.

  Sales of generic (store-brand) items are on the rise, the WSJ points out, and it makes sense for Amazon’s bottom line that they would want to enter that market. The WSJ points out that Amazon’s Elements brand is likely to compete with Costco’s Kirkland line and Target’s Archer Farms and Up & Up lines. Private-label items have a higher profit margin for retailers, despite the fact that they generally cost consumers less.

  But customers like generics mainly because they cost less. Not only did the Elements diapers not work particularly well, but also Elements baby products were framed as an upscale, higher-end option for parents to consider — on par with the biggest brand names, and more expensive than existing generic options. If Amazon wants Prime members to sip a cup of Amazon Brew with their Amazon-Os in the morning, they’ll probably have to make sure that their products cost less than some Starbucks and a box of Cheerios.

  Amazon Plans to Add Its Own Line of Food [Wall Street Journal]

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist