When you go to retailers and ask if you have any rewards money to apply to your purchase, you’re told you need to go their website to sign up for their rewards program again there. It happened at Office Depot and Rite Aid, companies where I’ve been in the rewards program for years. At Office Depot, I asked the staff to help me sign up for the new program.
Most Americans don’t know how often they’re stripped of their rights through widely-used arbitration clauses are found in the fine print of click-through agreements, terms and conditions, and other contracts, a new study says. Arbitration requires consumers with complaints to settle issues through arbitration rather than filing a lawsuit.
Does it matter that there are too many residential real estate agents? Yes, says a consumer group. More than 1.5 million residential agents, including brokers, compete for home sales usually totaling 5 to 6 million annually. The plethora of real estate agents comes with costs, according to a study by the Consumer Federation of America, that include:
The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law a year ago, has many benefits for consumers. It began making corporations pay their fair share in taxes while investing more in helping the middle class such as creating good-paying jobs, combating corporate price gouging, slashing the deficit, lowering prescription drug costs, and reducing carbon pollution.
The Food and Drug Administration has decided that food manufacturers can keep using phthalates, a class of toxic chemicals, in food packaging and food production equipment. It disregarded requests from health and environmental advocates to reconsider that decision based on evidence that phthalates in food are harmful to health.
It’s not surprising that men are succumbing to the same advertising on looking good that has enticed women to buy for decades. The average adult man in the U.S. uses 11 different personal care products every day, nearly twice as many as 20 years ago, according to a survey. The survey also showed that women use 13 products daily, up from 12 in 2004.
Consumers with poor credit pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars more every year for basic auto insurance coverage required by state laws, new report shows. On average, a consumer with poor credit has to pay twice as much for auto insurance as a driver with excellent credit, even if everything else, including their driving safety history, are the same.
The approval of a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease is controversial. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the drug lecanemab (Leqembi) Thursday to treat adults with Alzheimer’s disease. In January, Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, urged the agency not to approve the drug.
American International Group is planning to curb homeowners insurance sales for owners at high risk of floods, storms, or wildfires in 200 zip codes across the United States, according to a report in the Wall St Journal. AIG is the third major insurer in recently to announce cuts to homeowners insurance.
