uChuck E. Cheese Trying To Woo Parents By Tweaking Its Food, Expanding Beer & Wine Optionsr

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  After getting new owners last year, animatronic pizza wonderland Chuck E. Cheese is trying to lift flagging sales by aiming at a new — albeit very familiar — target demographic. We’ll give you a guess — it starts with an “M” and rhymes with “shmillennials.”

  Now that private-equity firm Apollo Global Management is in charge, the restaurant is switching its focus from appealing to kids (pretty easy to do thanks to pizza, arcade games and those robot animals playing guitars) to trying to get parents on board. Specifically, notes Bloomberg News, millennial moms, that younger generation that goes for higher-quality food than the usual fare at Chuck E. Cheese.

  The chain is remaking its pizza, pumping up the salad bar and adding more options to its beer and wine lists, as well as giving Chuck himself a new look — he’s less cartoonish and more computer-animated looking, and without that backwards baseball cap the chain added in recent years:

  

  “Her kids know it’s a fun place to go, but millennial moms want to provide that great experience without sacrificing for themselves,” Greg Casale, the head chef at CEC Entertainment, Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company, told Bloomberg. “Before she was a mom, she was going to places like Panera and those concepts. She wants something that fits into her millennial lifestyle.”

  CEO Tom Leverton said company research showed that on average, kids want to go to Chuck E. Cheese 11 times a year, but they only get to go three times. Why? Mom and Dad don’t want to eat what’s on the menu.

  “For my kids, it could do no wrong, but I wasn’t very excited about going,” Leverton, who has two children, said. “We want to protect and enhance what we do for children, but wildly improve what we do for adults.”

  For what it’s worth, I’d suggest giving adults special glasses that completely block out the animatronic creatures, so they won’t be reminded of all the nightmares they had as kids after a trip to Chuck E. Cheese. Those things haunt you forever.

  Chuck E. Cheese’s Latest Tune: an Ode to Millennial Moms [Bloomberg News]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uAldi Has Removed Hydrogenated Oils, Artificial Colors, And MSG From Its Storesr

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  For restaurants and packaged food brands,the current hot trend is eliminating additives and ingredients that the public has come to see as unhealthy or unnecessary. These include things like trans fats, artificial colors, and artificial flavors. Restaurant chains like Panera and food companies like Campbell Soup have pledged to not sell products with these substances in them, but Aldi is pledging to do so store-wide.

  The substances that are no longer allowed in Aldi’s products are certified synthetic colors, partially hydrogenated oils, and added monosodium glutamate. “Since more than 90 percent of the products we sell are under our exclusive brands, CEO Jason Hart said in a statement, “eliminating these ingredients will have a real impact on the over 30 million people who shop in our stores.”

  As their CEO points out in the announcement that these ingredients are off the menu, Aldi mostly sells its own private-label items to keep prices low. It also gives them significant control over what’s sold in the stores, which is how a discount grocer can make a change that most people would associate more with a health food chain. They didn’t make the announcement until the substances were already out of their products until they had already been removed.

  (via Supermarket News)

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

uAirlines Eager To Offer Flights To Cuba, So What’s The Delay?r

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  Now that U.S.-Cuba relations are thawing, a lot of Americans would love to visit the nearby island nation that had been a no-go zone for five decades, and U.S. commercial airlines really want to start regularly scheduled flights to Cuba. But it’s not as simple as flipping a switch.

  The Miami Herald reports that U.S. and Cuban officials have been hard at work hashing out how to open up routes between the two countries.

  If it were just a matter of giving U.S. carriers more access to Cuba, we might have a timeline for when we could expect regular flights. But, explains the Herald, Cuban airlines want to be able to offer service stateside, which brings up some legal issues.

  After Fidel Castro came to power, many people fled or were exiled from Cuba. Some of these folks filed civil suits in the U.S. against the Cuban government for its abuses. Because Cuba never defended itself in these cases, billions of dollars in judgments have been granted against the country.

  So if a plane operated by Cubana de Aviación, which has been run by the Cuban government since 1959, were to land in the U.S., it could possibly be seized as payment for some of these judgments.

  One official tells the Herald that this is a “theoretical possibility” that has come up in the discussions with Cuban aviation officials.

  One possible solution would be for the Cuban airline to lease planes for its flights to the U.S., but that may not be a tenable long-term answer. The U.S. could also try to have the lawsuits vacated, but that would be both a drawn-out process and politically unpopular among those who support the judgments against Cuba.

  For now, some U.S. carriers are continuing to offer limited charter service to Cuba. JetBlue has even been leasing its planes to charter operators as a way to get its brand seen by Cuban travelers for when regular flights do start operating.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uToday In Trends We Didn’t Know Existed: Beard Transplants Are All The Rager

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  Whenever one of the men in my family says he’s growing a beard, I can’t help but laugh — anytime they try it, the result is a patchy, sparse thing that looks like they fell in a pile of hair at the barbershop with glue on their face (sorry, family). There’s hope for the follicle-challenged faces out there, however: because we’re living in a time where you can get exactly the look you want, it’s not surprising that there’s been a recent uptick in beard transplants.

  Yes, you read that right — guys are getting hair from their heads transplanted onto their faces, one follicle at a time, to go from baby-faced to swarthy lumberjack with a visit to the surgeon.

  Though the idea of a beard transplant might conjure up images of the awful hair plug jobs you may’ve been witness to in the past, the popularity of such procedures has surged partly due to advancements in the transplanting process, reports the New York Times: in the past, hair was transplanted in clumps of about 15 follicles, resulting in pluglike grafts that looked… not great, and not something you’d likely want on your face.

  Now, however, surgeons harvest thousands of individual hair follicles from hairy spots to bare ones, whether scalp or beard, resulting in a look that’s more natural, and can be shaved and grown just like real hair.

  Business in the lumbersexual era is booming: One doctor who has offices in Miami and Manhattan told the NYT he used to perform four or five facial hair transplants per year, a decade ago. Nowadays, it’s more like three per week. To that end, beard transplants have grown from 1.5% of all hair restoration procedures around the world in 2012 to 3.7% in 2014, according to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, a nonprofit medical association.

  One recent beard transplant patient paid about $7,000 to get the works — from sideburns to chin — because his bare face made people think he was younger than he is.

  “It does play a role in me looking more mature, more manly, and just kind of getting respect from people,” he told the NYT.

  But come on — can they really look like a natural beard? Yes, said another transplant patient.

  “No one suspected,” he told the NYT. “It’s like I was never a beard guy, and now I grew a beard, so I would say it was pretty stealth.”

  Baby-Faced Men Opt for Beard Transplants [New York Times]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uWalmart Employee In Trouble Over Facebook Video Of Shoplifter Scuffler

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• We’ve told you before of Walmart employees who were fired for intervening in violent or potentially dangerous situations at the store, but here’s a story of a Walmart worker who’s in trouble for not stepping in. Of course, it doesn’t help that he posted video of the incident along with his wisecracking running commentary.

  CBS Dallas has the tale of the Arlington, TX, Walmart employee who posted a video on Facebook of what appears to be a customer attempting to steal items during the self-checkout process. As he films the shopper, the employee mocks her efforts at thievery.

  He then follows along as she tries to leave the store.

  “Have fun,” he taunts, as someone grabs the bag containing the allegedly stolen items. “Have a good day.”

  The cashier-cum-cameraman also got footage of the wannabe shoplifter getting into a scuffle with another woman in the parking lot.

  Other employees stepped in to try to break up the fight while the cashier continued capturing it all on video.

  That’s when he says something that probably sealed his fate at the retailer.

  “Yup, and I let it happen,” he says to his own camera, “on the Walmart clock.”

  Rather than just show the footage to pals privately, the employee posted it on his own Facebook page.

  Not surprisingly, this didn’t go over well with Walmart HQ.

  “This type of behavior by a Walmart associate is completely unacceptable,” the company tells CBS. “We are conducting an internal investigation into this matter at this time and will take action as appropriate.”

  The employee who shot the video has apparently “resigned” from his gig at the store. No word on whether or not any other workers will be penalized.

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uVerizon Tells Judge: Porn Copyright Troll Is Wasting Everyone’s Time With “Defective” Subpoenasr

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  Porn producer Malibu Media, which has filed more than 4,000 copyright lawsuits since 2009 — several times more than any other company — is currently trying to compel Verizon to reveal the identities of Internet users Malibu believes are illegally sharing its movies. But lawyers for the telecom titan are telling the court they’ve had enough of Malibu’s “defective” and “unenforceable” subpoenas.

  As is the usual tactic with porn copyright trolls, Malibu has filed lawsuits against “Doe” defendants. It has issued subpoenas to Internet service providers like Verizon to get the ISP to translate anonymous IP addresses to actual customer names.

  Once identified, these customers will then be approached by the troll’s legal team with the offer of paying a cash settlement to keep their potentially embarrassing porn predilections out of the public record.

  Verizon, like some other ISPs, is tired of being involved in these questionable legal actions and is telling one federal court that Malibu is abusing the system.

  In a filing [PDF] this week regarding one ongoing Malibu copyright case, Verizon’s lawyers explain to the judge that the company’s time is being wasted on subpoenas from the porn purveyor.

  “Plaintiff’s subpoena of Verizon is defective on its face and would impose an undue burden on Verizon, which has been required to respond to many hundreds of subpoenas from Malibu Media alone,” reads the letter.

  The lawyers accuse Malibu of dumping the subpoena on Verizon less than a week before the deposition date, while also seeking “a wide range of information from Verizon that is not discoverable.”

  Beyond that, Verizon says the subpoena in this case is “unenforceable” as federal rules on subpoenas limit the distance Malibu can compel someone to appear for a deposition.

  In this case, Verizon says Malibu is trying to force Verizon employees who work in the D.C. area to travel to San Angelo, TX, with only a few days notice — and for these employees to bring relevant documents with them to the deposition.

  And Verizon argues that some of the documentation sought by Malibu — correspondence between Verizon and the subscriber, information about the rental of modems or other equipment, and Verizon’s general policies and procedures — is “either irrelevant, more properly sought from a party to litigation, or outside the scope of discovery contemplated by the Cable Act.”

  That law prohibits cable operators from disclosing, among other things, the “extent of any viewing or other use by the subscriber of a cable service or other service provided by the cable operator, or… the nature of any transaction made by the subscriber over the cable system of the cable operator.”

  “This is precisely the information Malibu Media seeks from Verizon,” the company’s lawyers argue. “The information is not discoverable and an extension of the discovery cut-off to pursue it should not be permitted.”

  [via TorrentFreak]

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uChicago Residents Want City To Buy Their Homes, Claiming Living Near O’Hare Airport Is A Noisy Nightmarer

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  A group of residents living near O’Hare International Airport are suing the city of Chicago, seeking to make the city buy their homes. They claim their houses have become unlivable after a spike in jet noise from O’Hare, after a new runway opened two years ago.

  About 50 homeowners have joined the cause, saying that since the new runway opened, there’s been a major shift in flight patterns that has forced them to live with the drone of jets flying above their homes night and day.

  “They now have a volume of eight or nine hundred planes literally coming over the treetops of their houses,” the homeowners’ attorney tells CBS Chicago. The noise from a “constant barrage” of jumbo jet airliners, cargo carriers and commercial aircraft has turned their lives into a nightmare, he added.

  The area had few planes overhead before the new runway opened in October 2013, prompting new flight patterns at O’Hare that have sent hundreds of flights over their homes, which don’t lie within the existing O’Hare noise contour map. That guide hasn’t been revised since the first new runway opened at O’Hare in 2008. Those homeowners included within the contour map qualify for taxpayer funded soundproofing.

  They can’t sell their homes because of the near constant jet noise, the group’s attorney says, so Chicago should buy them out.

  “You’re saying the city essentially condemned your property without giving you compensation,” the lawyer said. “The city of Chicago has essentially wreaked havoc on their lives, and diminished the property value, and just made the area unlivable.”

  The lawsuit seeks to force the city to buy their homes at fair market value — based on what they were worth before the new runway was installed — at a cost estimated at between $10 million to $15 million.

  Bensenville Residents Sue City, Claim O’Hare Noise Makes Homes Unlivable [CBS Chicago]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist