Did you ever wonder why so many retailers have chip-readable machines for credit cards, but tell you to swipe your card anyway? This article explains this frustrating issue for retailers. Questions: 1. Merchants have spent incredible amounts of money to get new chip-reading machines, so what is the reason for not using them? 2. Since… Read more »
Posts Tagged: Expenses
Lucky Pets
According to the article, a small but growing number of dedicated food pantries have sprung up to help people feed their pets. This is in response to pleas from people who see their pets as family and will spend their last dollar on pets, despite going hungry themselves. Questions: 1. What is the ASPCA? 2…. Read more »
Circumventing the Courts with Nine Words
Banning class action suits have essentially disabled consumer challenges to practices like predatory lending. Additionally, a Wall Street-led coalition of credit card companies and retailers, have also engineered blocks on class action suits. In this article, various companies’ efforts to protect arbitration are discussed. Questions: 1. Why has the “birth of a thousand clauses” taken… Read more »
A Model of Innovation or Intimidation?
According to the New York Times, white-collar workers at Amazon are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues… Read more »
What you are doing and how fast you are doing it?
A new generation of workplace technology is allowing white-collar jobs to be tracked, tweaked and managed in ways that were difficult even a few years ago. While the programs are meant to foster connections and sometimes increase productivity among employees who are geographically dispersed and often working from home, questions are piling up about the… Read more »
So the 20% charge is not a tip?
The restaurant, Per Se, must distribute $500,000 in compensation to current and former employees as ordered by the settlement struck with the New York Attorney General. The Manhattan eatery is notable for its $300-plus prix-fixe menus. Questions: 1. How did the restaurant violate New York labor law and how did they remedy this situation for… Read more »
College a Commodity?
Unfortunately, most everyone now evaluates college in purely economic terms, thus reducing it to a commodity like a car or a house. There is now a cottage industry built around such data. Questions: 1. According to the author, what does the value of a degree depend upon and why should it be set apart from… Read more »
Beware of Convenience Checks!
he price of tapping credit through a cash advance, which lets people borrow from their credit cards by writing a check or withdrawing money from an ATM, is much steeper than it would be for a traditional credit purchase. It’s also much harder to avoid fees when a cash advance is involved. Questions: 1. What… Read more »
A Legalized Scam?
Most people do not shop around for title insurance when they buy a home. Instead, they usually just go to the title insurance company that the real estate agent recommends.This article highlights the problem with this model. Questions: 1. Using the fraud triangle, discuss what factors are at work in the title insurance industry. 2…. Read more »
An Expensive Glitch
On April 24, a computer outage hit 7,000 U.S. Starbuck’s company-owned stores and 1,000 Canadian company-owned Starbuck’s locations. The outage was resolved Friday night after several hours. Questions: 1. Did all locations deal with the problem in the same way? What did they do? 2. Why do you think that the outage did not affect… Read more »