Don’t Buy Your Magazines From Door-To-Door Salesmen This Summer [Tips]

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A couple of years ago, the New York Times did a piece on the poor treatment of teens hired to travel the country and sell magazine subscriptions door-to-door, but they’re not the only ones getting the raw end of the deal.

The Better Business Bureau says:

In the last 12 months alone, BBB has received complaints from consumers in nearly every state who bought magazine subscriptions from crews of young adults selling door-to-door. According to complaints, the young sales reps might claim to be neighborhood youth trying to raise money for charity, a school trip, or even for troops in Iraq. The victim pays with a check on the spot, but the magazines never arrive.

Here’s basically how it works:

• The companies employ “crews of high school and college-age people who are trying to earn money over the summer.”
  [See a list of offending companies here.]
• The youths will claim they’re selling magazines for all sorts of heart-melting reasons:
  • to get their lives back on track
  • to raise money for a charity
  • to pay for a school trip
  • to raise money to support troops in Iraq
• In some cases, they’ll use hard-sell tactics, including becoming angry if you don’t buy something.
• You’ll be asked to pay for the subscriptions immediately by check.
• That will be the end of it. By which we mean, you won’t receive your magazines.

We think there are better ways of buying magazine subscriptions and of supporting teens, charities, and troops, and there’s no reason the two worlds need to be mashed together on your front porch without warning. The BBB takes a slightly more nuanced view of the subject, however, and they provide some tips for those of you who want to buy door-to-door magazines but don’t want to get ripped off. The most important one is the person selling should always provide the following two things:

• a receipt
• “a completed cancellation form that customers can send to the company to cancel the agreement”

The BBB notes that “by law [the FTC’s Three-Day Cooling-Off Rule], the company must give customers a refund within 10 days of receiving the cancellation notice.”

“BBB Warns Against a Summer Scam Going Door-to-Door Nationwide” [BBB]
(Photo: Listener42)

Deal of the Day: The Star Trek Blowout TV Sale

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Amazon.com is currently having a huge sale on all its Star Trek TV series box sets. Most of them are at around 50% off, so if you’re looking to build up your collection with complete series of the different shows, now is the time to do so.

[The Star Trek TV Sale]

Firefox Actually Cleans Windows Of Bugs [pic]

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submitted by manixrock to pics [link] [15 comments]

New Handshakes For The Swine Flu [Swine Flu]

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To help prevent swine flu, here are some new handshakes that minimize direct human contact.

New Handshakes For The Swine Flu [Swine Flu]

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To help prevent swine flu, here are some new handshakes that minimize direct human contact.

Milwaukee Police Chief Says to Hell With the Rule of Law

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After Wisconsin’s attorney general said it’s legal to open carry in his state, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn responded:

“My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we’ll put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether you have a right to carry it.”

Milwaukee’s first problem is that it has a police chief who refers to the city’s peace officers as “my troops.”

No wonder the city’s force includes cops like Det. Kent Corbett, who actually wrote a letter to the editor of National Review in defense of the Maryland raid on Mayor Cheye Calvo. Not in defense of the use of SWAT teams or drug raids in general, but of the specific (and violent, and mistaken) raid on Calvo.

Download Nine Free Short Audiobooks from Barnes & Noble

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Want a little (legally) free audio reading for your commute? Barnes & Noble is giving away nine free audiobooks in unrestricted MP3 format, so you can play or convert them for any use. Kurt Vonnegut, Jonathan Lethem, and even Mark Twain's full "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" are represented in the collection. Add them to your shopping cart (even though they're listed at $0.01, they're free at checkout), provide a credit card number or select to pay by PayPal acount (whether or not you really have one), and you're on your way. It's like a fire sale on the net this month! [Audiobook Free Downloads at B&N via The Cheapskate]

Comedian Louis CK Gets BitTorrent Content Removed By Asking Nicely

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A reader, who prefers to go by the name Angry Young Man, points us to an interesting set of comments on a torrent of a recent stand up comedy performance by the comedian Louis CK, where it appears the comedian himself showed up on Mininova and asked nicely for the content to be removed, even explaining his reasoning:

HI. I’m Louis CK. Can you please take this down? This show is a work in progress and was not intended to be passed around the internet. I have absolutely no problem, personally, with file sharing, and if you take everythign I have on the market on DVD, CD, and put it up for free downloading, I don’t care. But this is an artistic and personal request. Please take this torrent down. thanks.

Following that, the guy who uploaded the torrent complied:

Sorry Mr. CK, I have taken down the direct downloads and asked Mininova and ViPeers to remove the torrent. I thought you would have preferred the reverse, your live concerts in ****ty audio quality would be ok, especially for what you said about NBC taking down your Late Night appearance, and your high quality DVDs and stuff wouldn’t be ok since you need ***** for that stuff. I sincerely apologize for the torrent and the misunderstanding.

And people say that those putting up torrent files don’t respect artists?

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Burger King Invents New BK WTF Burger [We'd Probably Eat It]

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Shared by shay

WANT!!!!!

An anonymous tipster just sent us this screen shot he grabbed while completing a consumer survey for Burger King. He writes, “I don’t think there has been a more horrendous idea for a burger than what I just saw. It’s a sloppy joe inside a fried shell. Wow. I thought Friday’s mac-and-cheese-nuggets were over the top, but this is gross.” Burger King, we implore you to make this real and add it to your menu, so we can write more posts about it.

Pot vs. Alcohol

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Retired Seattle police chief Norm Stamper:

Over the past four years I’ve asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I’m talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

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