uFrom The Heart Or Wallet: Get The Most Of Your Last-Minute Charitable Donationsr

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  Whether it’s the lingering holiday spirit or just the desire to lower your annual tax burden before the deadline, you might be feeling a bit of a tug to donate your time, money, food, clothing, or other items to charity.  But before you make your last-minute gift, make sure you’re doing it right.

  As we’ve previously noted, there are a number of ways to not suck at charitable giving.

  GOING THE FOOD BANK ROUTE
  If you’re doing a little winter pantry cleaning to make room for all those holiday-themed products you scooped up at the grocery store, you might be tempted to make a donation to your local food bank. But before you head over with your cans of tartar sauce and sardines in oil, keep a few things in mind.

  • Why has this product been in your cupboard so long? If the answer to that question is that you would never dream of consuming it, then other people probably don’t want it either.

  So instead, xoJane’s Deb Martinson suggests, would-be donors should think of it like this: What would you want to eat, using only nonperishable foods?

  • Not everyone has the same things available to them that you might. For instance, some people might not have can openers or microwaves. That means some of the better items to donate might be things that would help produce on-the-go meals like peanut butter, tuna (with pop-tops) or crackers.

  • Just Ask.  If all else fails and you just feel completely unknowledgeable about what others would like to eat, simply call the local food bank. Many donation centers have a specific list of foods that are in constant need, some might not even be food but other necessities like toilet paper, soap, and diapers.

  (For more suggestions on how to donate to a food bank, check out our story from last year that offers many helpful guidelines.)

  DONATING TO A CAUSE OR ORGANIZATION
  When it comes to larger donations, consumers might pick a cause or organization that is near-and-dear to their hearts. While this is always a great option, there are certain things we should all remember before signing the check.

  • Is it a legitimate organization? If you’re giving to charity because you’re a good person, and because you want to lower your tax burden, then you must consider how you donate. To include a donation on your 2015 return, you must give to a legitimate, qualified organization — like, for example, Consumerist — before December 31.

  Consumerist’s “How Not To Suck,” column previously suggested that consumers readying to give a donation double-check that their charity of choice is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions exempt with the Internal Revenue Service.

  • You can’t deduct contributions to individuals. While we would never suggest you don’t help out an individual in need, consumers should keep in mind that those types of donations can’t be deducted. This also includes donations to political organizations and candidates.

  GIVING YOUR TIME
  While it is admirable for consumers to provide financial donations to charities, there may be no donation more valuable than your time.

  • How far will you time donation go versus your monetary donation? WalletHub has a calculator to help consumer determine what a charity can accomplish with their cash donation. By using the calculator, would-be donors could compare their time contribution to their financial one.

  • What skills can you offer the charity that they might be lacking? Consumers might be able to offer a volunteering donation that can’t be matched by a financial donation. For example, if you’re web-savvy, you might be able to help the organization revamp their online presence – a gift that could continue giving for years to come.

  • Donations of time can also provide tax deductions – kind of. Consumerist previously reported that consumers can deduct $0.14 a mile if they drove to the organization. You can also add the cost for tolls and parking. Make sure to keep good records. While the travel costs can be deducted, you can’t actually deduct an hourly rate for your volunteering since you’re not actually being paid.

  BE AWARE OF TIME AND PROCESSES
  • There’s A Deadline: With the end of the year just days away, our colleagues at Consumer Reports remind would-be donors to make sure they’re aware of important tax-related deadlines tied to charitable giving when it comes to sending checks in the mail or transferring investment securities to their favorite charities.

  • Is The Tax Deduction For You? While it might be nice to get a little break on your taxes for all that charitable giving, it’s important to remember that such deductions must be itemized. So if you don’t already itemize your taxes, it might not be worth seeking the tax benefit. After all, it’s really all about giving right?

  DON’T GET TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF
  No matter how you decide to give this holiday season, make sure your donation is put to good use by checking that the organization is genuine.

  Parts of your donation might not go to the rightful pockets. A report from New York state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman last year found that only about 38% of all donations collected by telemarketers actually went to the charitable organizations.

  If you’re contacted by a person over the phone soliciting charitable donations for a non-profit organization, it might be best to resist giving on the spot.

  Instead, do your homework by researching the charity before you give. The National Association of State Charity Officials provides information on who to contact in your state to research information about charities and fundraising companies.

  Additionally, keep in mind that some charities have been found to use donations for other costs, such as paying administrators instead of those in need.

  The past year was rife with ne’er-do-wells that promised to give collected donations to those in need, but lined their own pockets instead.

  In May, four cancer charities were accused by federal regulators of swindling donors out of $187 million.

  The Cancer Fund of America, Inc. (CFA), Cancer Support Services Inc. (CSS), Children’s Cancer Fund of America Inc. (CCFOA) and The Breast Cancer Society Inc. (BCS) allegedly deceptively raised $187 million in donations by portraying themselves as legitimate charities and told prospective donors that funds would be used for help cancer patients by providing direct support and needed medical assistance.

  In reality, the regulators and state officials, claim the charities spent just 3% of the donations on actual cancer patients.

  Just two months ago, NY AG Schneiderman reached a settlement with a for-profit company accused of collecting donated items, like clothing, and then selling them for a profit. Under the settlement, Thrift Land USA agreed to pay a $700,000 in penalties.

  To better ensure your donations are ending up in the right hands used these tools offered by CharityNavigator.org, GuideStar.org and the Better Business Bureau to do some sleuthing.

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

uThis Year’s Avalanche Of Online Orders Won’t Be So Great For Retailers When Everyone Starts Returning Giftsr

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  While many retailers were surely over the moon with an increase of online sales this year, that same burst in orders will have one effect that likely won’t make companies happy. Because when it comes time to return gifts purchased online, retailers are often on the hook to cover the costs involved.

  It’s always been costly to handle returns, but when customers shop online, there’s invariably going to be a lot more gift returns, especially when it comes to clothing that the recipient hasn’t had a chance to try on. According to a Bloomberg report citing Customer Growth Partners, shoppers are expected to return 30% of clothing and shoes bought online, which is twice the return rate of items purchased in a physical store.

  Those costs will add up for the 80% of retailers who offered free shipping on returns over the holidays, with companies shelling out $5 to $7 for shipping, along with the cost of process a return. That can come to about $5 in credit-card fees and labor costs to get an item ready to resell it.

  Even if the retailer does manage to sell off that returned item, they’ll likely lose money in the process as many items won’t be in the right season any more. Heck, getting even $0.20 on the dollar for returned goods is a good price, Johnson explained.

  In addition to all of that, there’s a lot more fraud these days: 3.5% of holiday returns, or $2.2 billion worth, will be bogus, compared to 3.5% in 2014, says the National Retail Federation.

  “Return fraud remains a critical issue for retailers with the impact spanning far and wide, in-store and online,” Bob Moraca, vice president of Loss Prevention for the NRF, said in a statement. “While technology has played a significant role in deterring many in-person fraudulent transactions that would have otherwise gone unseen, there is little that can be done to prevent a determined criminal who will find a loophole one way or another.”

  Online Surge Means Many Not-So-Happy Returns for Retailers [Bloomberg]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uWhen The Biggest U.S. Airlines Try To Compete With Low-Cost Carriers, Travelers Winr

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  Usually we wouldn’t be fans of fighting, but when it comes to companies vying for consumers’ hard-earned dollars, the more they try to one-up each other, the better it is for us. So it’s cause for celebration now that the three biggest airlines in the U.S. are paying attention to their low-cost rivals, bringing down ticket prices for everyone.

  American, Delta, and United are all responding to moves by the likes of Spirit and Frontier, which offer fares on the cheap in exchange for charging fees for things like printed boarding passes and seat assignments. Spirit has been growing in scope, doubling its seats in Chicago since 2012, and added 27% in Dallas notes the Wall Street Journal, while another cheaper option, Southwest, has grown its capacity in Dallas.

  The Big 3 are taking note: instead of avoiding broad fare battles with their low-cost rivals, they’re responding more aggressively now that fuel is so cheap. For example, a round-trip flight from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to New York’s LaGuardia Airport starting out Jan. 15 and returning Jan. 14 was $87.19 on Spirit, $116.20 on United, $136.20 on American and $206.20 on Delta.

  An associate from a firm that tracks about 300 big domestic routes from the three largest airlines estimates that the lowest leisure fares in late December were down 24% on average from a year ago. In Chicago prices were down even more at 54%, while Philadelphia saw a 48% drop and Dallas fares dipped 40%.

  For the entire year, prices didn’t drop quite as dramatically: a study by Expedia and Airlines Reporting Corp found that most North American economy-class ticket prices fell 5% through the first 10 months of 2015 compared to the same period a year before.

  Southwest wasn’t included in the study, but told the WSJ its average one-way fare dropped 4% in the third-quarter over last year.

  But although the big carriers have been under pressure by politicians, the government, and consumer groups who claimed they were colluding to keep fares high, executives say they’re just responding to market dynamics.

  “We are being price competitive really across the board,” Scott Kirby, president of American told the WSJ. “And that has been an evolution.”

  He noted that the company’s response to discounters is now “more comprehensive” than the former “hit or miss approach,” because 87% of its customers — representing half of American’s revenue — fly once a year or less and are very sensitive to price. That group can’t be ignored, he says.

  United’s chief revenue officer Jim Compton said recently as well that his airline felt the heat after American started trying to price-match Southwest at O’Hare, by cutting fares at Chicago’s Midway Airport.

  “Once a large competitor does that, it’s a lot of inventory at O’Hare that’s exposed competitively,” he said.

  For its part, Delta has been offering “Basic Economy” fares on some routes that overlap with discounters as a defensive move, the company’s chief revenue officer Glen Haunstein says. Those low fares are now available on about 450 routes.

  Airlines Challenge Low-Cost Foes on Fares [Wall Street Journal]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uDOJ Investigating Blue Bell Listeria Outbreak, Could Result In Criminal Chargesr

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• Is it a crime to knowingly ship food to customers that may be contaminated with deadly foodborne pathogens? Earlier this year, executives from the Peanut Corporation of America were sentenced to federal prison for their roles in an outbreak that made thousands of people sick, killing nine. The beloved ice cream brand Blue Bell may be back on store shelves, but federal investigators are currently asking whether anyone should be held criminally responsible.

  CBS reports that the Department of Justice has started to investigate the company, trying to determine what the company’s leaders knew and when they knew it. Front-line workers told reporters that they had tried to call bosses’ attention to unsanitary and potentially unsafe conditions, including water leaks onto ice cream processing equipment.

  An investigation by the Food and Drug Administration earlier this year turned up evidence that the company found Listeria bacteria on surfaces in the plant, but elected not to do anything about it and kept the ice cream lines churning.

  Dept. of Justice investigating Blue Bell for deadly Listeria outbreak [CBS]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

uFCC Report Finds Cable Internet Is Getting Faster, But DSL And Satellite Still Likely To Miss The Markr

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• The FCC’s job — well, one of the FCC’s jobs — is to make sure that everyone has access to decent broadband connections. You can’t understand what you can’t measure, though, so as part of that, the commission has to measure just how broadband is holding up. They issue a report, called Measuring Broadband America, roughly once a year to share their findings. The new one, the fifth, has just been released and while there’s still a lot of room for improvement, on the whole it seems to be a high note on which to end the year.

  The last time the FCC updated this report, in June, 2014, the FCC found that while the news was, on the whole, trending positive, some ISPs were still falling short on delivering consumers what they paid for. Over a year later, the new report shows that there’s been some improvement… but some users, particularly DSL customers, are still being left behind.

  Let’s lead off with the happy part: for many of us, the internet is getting faster. Over the past five years, cable and fiber ISPs have promised and delivered significant technological improvements that boost the available network speeds dramatically, and even DSL has seen a slight increase. Unfortunately for rural subscribers, available satellite internet speeds, on the whole, have stayed level or even fallen.

  

  Those speeds, of course, are what ISPs say they’re delivering to you — but consumers’ reality may be different from the one businesses push on paper. And that brings us to the FCC’s other key question: are you getting what you’re paying for?

  The FCC compares an ISP’s actual speeds to its advertised speeds to find out. If a company promises you 50 Mbps download speeds, and you get 50 or higher, that’s 100% or more. If that company promises you 50 Mbps download speeds, and you get 40 Mbps or less, that’s less than 80%, and it’s no good.

  On average, though, cable and fiber companies are indeed coming very close to the promised mark for most consumers’ download speeds, and they’re even more likely to hit or exceed that mark for upload speeds. Satellite companies are underpromising and overdelivering hugely, which is great for consumers… but DSL companies, with a couple of exceptions, appear to miss the mark rather broadly.

  

  Of course, sometimes crap happens, and so the FCC doesn’t ask ISPs to meet a perfect standard. Those advertised rates are “up to” for a reason, after all; even the best-maintained, most-robust network is sometimes going to have too many people using it, or weather interfering, or whatever. Instead, the commission want companies to deliver at least 80% of the speed they promised you, at least 80% of the time. For cable and satellite customers, ISPs are pretty consistently meeting or exceeding that standard. For DSL and even some fiber ISPs, though, the results are a lot less good.

  

  Hughes satellite consumers are seeing their ISP significantly overperform the promised level of service, which is great. ViaSat/Exede customers are, well, not so lucky. That huge gap between the two bars, for those that service, indicates that the download speeds consumers get are pretty wildly inconsistent and hugely variable, based either on when or from where subscribers access it.

  In general, though, things are looking up. “Today’s report confirms that advances in network technology are yielding significant improvements in broadband speeds and quality,” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in a statement. “Faster, better broadband will unleash new innovations and new services to improve the lives of the American people. This comprehensive assessment of broadband performance helps to keep consumers informed and hold ISPs accountable.”

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist

uNetflix “Making A Murderer” Documentary Inspires Viewers To Seek Justice… Through Yelpr

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• Netflix recently premiered a 10-part true-crime documentary Making A Murderer, about controversial murder investigation in Milwaukee. Some viewers of the show have been so moved by what they’ve watched that they’re forming virtual picket lines on Yelp and other review sites.

  This feels incredibly wrong to write this, because I’m not sure how one can “spoil” a matter that’s in the public record and has been the subject on ongoing news coverage — some of it national — for more than a decade. BUT, if you know nothing about the Steven Avery case and don’t yet want to know how the documentary concludes, then maybe go read something else.

  Ken Kratz, the special prosecutor who handled the Avery trial, continues to use the case to promote his private law firm in Wisconsin, boasting on his site that he “Successfully tried one of the largest and most complex homicide cases in Wisconsin history” —
  

  And even including news articles about his performance in the case and his involvement in the prosecution of Avery’s nephew Brendan Dassey, who was convicted of taking part in the murder despite a lack of physical evidence:
  

  Anyone who has seen Making A Murderer knows that Kratz does not exactly come across well in the documentary. He claims — in spite of the fact that the crew spent a decade filming just about every aspect of this case — that he was not given an opportunity to provide his side of the story for the series, a claim the producers deny.

  With the Avery and Dassey cases in legal limbo — both have exhausted their state-level appeals — viewers who are convinced that the two men are victims of prosecutorial misconduct (or who just don’t like Kratz) have taken their protest to the virtual sidewalk of his law firm’s Yelp page.

  Below are just a smattering of the more than 100 Avery-related reviews posted:

  

  

  

  It’s gotten to the point where visitors to the page now see an “Active Cleanup Alert,” indicating that some of the reviews you read might be motivated more by headlines than by, per Yelp terms, actual business dealings with the firm:

  

  Len Kachinsky was Brendan Dassey’s perma-grinned defense lawyer. In the documentary, he is depicted as being convinced of his client’s guilt, to the point of having his investigator talk the teen into a written confession (complete with explicit stick-figure drawings that don’t mesh with the physical evidence). While his law firm’s Yelp page has not yet been demolished by angry viewers of the show, there are more than a handful of protest posts:

  

  In fact, according to the Inquistr, since the release of the documentary, his firm has scrubbed Kachinsky’s name and bio from its website.

  Interestingly, the firms for Avery’s two prominently featured defense attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerry Buting, show no signs of any criticism or praise on Yelp. In fact, we couldn’t locate a Yelp page for Strang’s firm in Madison, Wisconsin.

  One company that is receiving 5-star reviews from viewers of the documentary is the Avery family salvage and auto repair business in Two Rivers, WI. While it only has about a half-dozen Yelp writeups at the moment, they are all positive and supportive of the family.

  The outpouring of pro-Avery sentiment is even more noticeable when you look at the Google reviews, where more than 200 have been written in the last week, nearly all of them voicing outrage over the case or support for Steven’s family:
  

  
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by Chris Morran via Consumerist

uUnited Airlines Flight Slides Off Chicago Runway After Landingr

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  Winter storms have wreaked havoc on post-holiday travel this week, canceling thousands of flights across the country. Perhaps hardest hit was Chicago, where nearly half the flights in and out of the city were canceled Monday. Issues continued at O’Hare International Airport on Wednesday when a United Airlines flight slid off the runway.

  ABC 7 reports that United flight 1977, which was arriving from Seattle, landed safely around 8 a.m. before suddenly sliding into nearby grass.

  A passenger says that things were going smoothly on the landing when the two front wheels of the plane seemed to glide off the pavement.

  Chicago fire officials say that no one was hurt in the incident and passengers had to sit on the plane for about an hour before emergency equipment was able to push the aircraft back onto the runway.

  One passenger Tweeted that the wait on the plane was the result of the runway being too icy to move the plane from its spot on the grass.

  @almacponce this is what is happening right now. Runway is to icy to move the plane. http://pic.twitter.com/3sZSds9LS2

  — eagle raider (@angiostud) December 30, 2015

  Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration say they are investigating the incident.

  While snow was falling at the airport this morning, it’s unclear if weather played a factor in the incident.

  United Airlines Plane Slides Off Runway At O’Hare Airport [ABC 7]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist