пятница, 8 января 2016 г.

uBlue Bell Still Finding Listeria In Factories, Not In The Ice Creamr


4 4 4 9
  • (kusine)
    Beloved ice cream brand Blue Bell is still expanding its distribution again after last year’s Listeria contamination and massive recalls. The company issued an update last night about its production facilities with some potentially frightening information: there’s still Listeria in certain spots in their production facilities that can’t be eradicated. However, they assure the ice cream-eating public that new ice cream isn’t contaminated.

    In their “facilities update,” the company explains that since Listeria is present in the environment, it’s impossible to eradicate it from a building entirely. What they can do is identify those areas and sanitize them frequently while also conducting tests to check for new sites of bacteria in the factory.

    They also want customers to know that every batch is being tested. This is so important that they mention it twice in the update, and is clearly meant to reassure the public. While fans are happy to have the products back in stores, it’s understandable that customers might be skittish after recent reports about alleged conditions inside facilities and management cutting corners and failing to listen to employee concerns.

    Listeria happens to be a foodborne pathogen that can survive being frozen, which is why its presence in ice cream is a particular threat. The Blue Bell outbreak killed three people and sent twelve to the hospital. In healthy people, infection with listeriosis causes fever and muscle aches, along with diarrhea and abdominal pain. Infection can be life-threatening to people who are elderly, young, or who have compromised immune systems.

    Listeriosis is especially dangerous for pregnant women, since the infection generally goes beyond the intestinal tract (causing those muscle aches) and can affect the fetus, leading to miscarriage or stillbirth.

    An update on our enhanced procedures at our production facilities [Blue Bell Creamery] (via Food Safety News)



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


uConsumerist Friday Flickr Findsr


4 4 4 9
  • Due to Christmas and New Year’s Day falling on Fridays, it’s been two weeks since our last installment of Flickr Finds. Let’s see what treasures have been submitted to the Consumerist Flickr pool in that period. Selection here were picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.

    (jbjelloid)
    (Lucy Rendler-Kaplan)
    (ash)
    (Freaktography)
    (Bjarne WinklerBjarne Winkler)
    (Karen Chappell)
    (seth albaum)
    (Chris Goldberg)

    Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the lace 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.



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


четверг, 7 января 2016 г.

uFinish Line Will Close 150 Stores Over The Next Four Yearsr


4 4 4 9
  • (Mike Mozart)
    Finish Line, a mall retailer that sells athletic clothes and sneakers, has had a rough year. Specifically, they’ve had supply chain and order management issues that began in the fall and lost them an estimated $32 million in sales. Today, the company announced that they’ll be closing as many as 150 stores over the next four years, almost a quarter of the chain.

    In typical corporatespeak fashion, they call this a “Store Profitability Improvement.” That’s true: while many “sneakerologists” will lose their jobs, the company notes that the closing stores are all under-performers, with an average of $1 million in sales per year. According to Buzzfeed News, that’s about half what the average Finish Line store takes in. The company’s leaders assume that business from those stores will either migrate online or to a Finish Line store at a nearby higher-end mall.

    That’s what this is really about: high-end malls are thriving, but midrange malls are… not. In your area, the mall with Nordstrom and a Cheesecake Factory is probably doing a lot better than the mall with JCPenney and a Friendly’s, or regional equivalents.

    Macy’s announced late yesterday that they plan 36 store closings this year; interestingly, the two chains have partnered up, and there are Finish Line mini-stores in some Macy’s locations.

    Finish Line Reports Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2016 Results [Finish Line]
    Finish Line Is Closing 150 Stores But The Mall Isn’t Dying [Buzzfeed]



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


uWe May Never Know What Caused Chipotle’s E. Coli Outbreakr


4 4 4 9
  • (Mike Mozart)

    A month after an E. coli outbreak was linked to Chipotle restaurants in the Northwest, health officials believed the culprit was a vegetable of some kind. Now, nearly three months later, an exact cause still hasn’t been uncovered, and some analysts say it might never be. 

    Business Insider reports that after thousands of tests, both by Chipotle and state and local health officials, health investigators are no closer to determining the source of a nine-state E. coli outbreak that sickened more than 50 people.

    Infectious disease specialists say that it’s unusual for the cause of a foodborne illness to remain unresolved after months. In fact, five other major outbreaks in the last decade were resolved rather quickly.

    The passage of time and the number of tests already run don’t exactly bode well for Chipotle, Dr. William Schaffner, infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Business Insider.

    He believes the cause of Chipotle’s problems may never be found, as most of the tests conducted by various agencies are so rigorous they would have already discovered the source if it were going to be found.

    Still, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that even if tests found the food that was the cause of the outbreak, it might not make much difference.

    “When a food is identified as the source of an outbreak, up to 50% of the time a specific food item is not pinpointed as the cause,” Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the CDC, told Business Insider. “What is making this particular outbreak difficult to pinpoint is you have lots of different food items that are going into the product that consumers are buying.”

    Part of the problem is Chipotle’s menu. Because most people eat a combination of the same ingredients, it’s harder to pinpoint which one was contaminated.

    Adding to the mystery of Chipotle’s foodborne illness problems is the fact that a second strain of E. coli was found to have sickened five people in two states months after the outbreak in the Northeast.

    “The fact that Chipotle has an outbreak is not in and of itself unusual, but there are some unusual features,” Schaffner tells Business Insider. “Even the E. colis are different and then they had this norovirus outbreak. One of the questions that comes up immediately is: Is this a coincidence or is this a systematic problem of food handling distribution at Chipotle?”

    To that end, Chipotle announced last month that it would revamp its cooking procedures to ensure food is handled safety.

    The mystery of Chipotle’s E. coli outbreak is stumping scientists and fueling conspiracy talk [Business Insider]



ribbi
  • by Ashlee Kieler
  • via Consumerist


uHere’s How To Recognize A Fake Couponr


4 4 4 9
  • krogernoFake coupons: you’ve seen them online. Maybe you’ve even tried to print or share them. Yet at best, you won’t get a discount. At worst, you’ll end up with malware on your computer. How can you tell the difference between a coupon that’s fake and a legit printable online coupon? Here are a few hints.

    These tips come from the seasoned deal-hunters over at Rather-Be-Shopping, and will help you identify bogus coupons that you might see on the Web or passed around through e-mail.

    It defies common sense. Applying common sense to online couponing is apparently harder than it seems at first glance, but the temptation of getting 50% off everything you buy at Target, Kroger, or whichever fake coupon is circulating this week is simply too great. Before you click, though, ask yourself whether the coupon you’re looking at is an actual thing that a business that wants to make a profit would put online. For most fake coupons we’ve seen, the answer would usually be “no.”

    It’s for a free item. Sometimes companies offer free item coupons when they introduce a new product, but they generally are for small items and aren’t circulated online.

    It doesn’t come from the company’s site. Is the coupon on a survey site, and not on some variation of Target.com, or a legitimate coupon site like Coupons.com or Smartsource.com? Run away!

    It appears on the CIC blacklist. Yes, there’s a list of fake coupons circulating, and you can find it at the Coupon Information Center. It probably won’t work for the very newest fake coupon that your high school lab partner’s ex-wife just shared on Facebook ten minutes ago, but the list is good for identifying coupons that have been circulating for a while, and it also gives you a sense of what kinds of too-good-to-be-true deals are out there so you can recognize similar ones in the future.

    8 Ways to Spot a Fake Coupon…Everytime [Rather-Be-Shopping]



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


uT-Mobile CEO John Legere To Critics Of Binge On: “Who The F**k Are You?”r


4 4 4 9
  • Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.43.15 PMEarlier today, I predicted that there would be further slinging of words between T-Mobile and critics of its Binge On video streaming program. What I didn’t know at the time was that T-Mo CEO John Legere would go on Twitter to respond to, and profanely insult, those critics.

    At issue, as detailed in the earlier stories, is the way in which T-Mobile’s Binge On downgrades streaming video feeds over the company’s cellular networks, even for content providers that are not part of Binge On, like YouTube, which has been very public about its concerns.

    Earlier this week the Electronic Frontier Foundation — a 25-year-old non-profit that has been instrumental in supporting things like net neutrality and cellphone unlocking — released the results of tests that raise doubts about T-Mobile’s claim that it is “optimizing” streams for mobile users.

    This afternoon, EFF Tweeted a question at Legere, asking him “Does Binge On alter the video stream in any way, or just limit its bandwidth?”

    As you’ll see in the video below, Legere’s response starts out reasonable, with the MIT- and Harvard-educated CEO explaining that Binge On “includes a proprietary technology” that will “not only detect the video stream, but select the appropriate bit rate to optimize to… the mobile device.”

    Then Legere shifts gear abruptly for “Part B” of his answer, choosing a tactic you won’t see in most CEO handbooks:

    “Part B of my answer is: Who the fuck are you anyway EFF? Why are you stirring up so much trouble and who pays you?”

    With regard to who pays the EFF, the apparent implication is that T-Mo’s competition is footing the bill. That seems unlikely, given how strongly the telecom industry opposes many of the EFF’s most staunch positions — more privacy, net neutrality, increased corporate transparency. Would AT&T or Verizon fork over big bucks to an organization that could just as easily use that money to make their lives more difficult?

    The answer to some of Legere’s question is already available on the EFF website, where its 2014 revenue breakdown shows that corporate donations only account for about 4% of all the money it brought in that year.

    A number of people were surprised either by Legere’s apparent ignorance — or simply trolling — of a high-profile, pro-consumer organization like the EFF:

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.52.09 PM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.24.23 PM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.24.14 PM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.35.08 PM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.35.21 PM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.35.29 PM

    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 4.35.37 PM

    We’ve certainly cheered on Legere’s brash pronouncements in the past, but this sort of schoolyard posturing in response to a reasonable question only makes it look like he’s not prepared to answer what is being asked of him.



ribbi
  • by Chris Morran
  • via Consumerist


uWalgreens “Nice!” Orange Slices Recalled Because Glass Shards Have No Nutritional Valuer


4 4 4 9
  • ucm480648If you shop at Walgreens, you’re probably familiar with its “Nice!” line of house-brand products, which includes bottles of mandarin orange slices. Unfortunately, some of those bottles might contain something that isn’t very nice: pieces of glass.

    The FDA and Milky Way International Trading — the company that provides the oranges to Walgreens — have announced a nationwide recall of 8-ounce bottles of Nice! Mandarin Oranges in Light Syrup after learning of three complaints — including one injury — from customers who found pieces of glass in the bottles.

    The recall specifically involves bottles with the lot codes listed in the chart below. Lot codes can be found printed on the neck or lid of the bottle.
    Screen Shot 2016-01-07 at 3.42.56 PM

    According to the recall notice, Walgreens has already removed affected product from store shelves. If you have any of these oranges, you should call Milky Way International immediately at (562) 921-2800, Monday to Friday between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. PST.



ribbi
  • by Chris Morran
  • via Consumerist