Фазенда Биз - Отдых и Банкет на Киевском море

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(Nate Grigg)

Pharmacy chain CVS charged about 11,000 customers who have health insurance small copays when they picked up some recent prescriptions. What’s wrong with that? Those prescriptions were for generic contraceptive pills, which should be dispensed with no copay at all under the federal Affordable Care Act. Now those customers are due a refund.

CVS says that the erroneous copays were due to a glitch in the system that involved customers of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, an insurer in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. The issue first came to public attention because of a letter from California Congresswoman Jackie Speier. One of her staff members in Washington had to fork over an erroneous $20 copay, and she sent a letter about the matter to the CEO of CVS.

“I am concerned that most women who are likely not familiar with their rights under the ACA may go without this essential family planning service that is supposed to be guaranteed to them under law,” she wrote. Not everyone is a Congressional staffer, after all.

For now, the problem appears to be limited to one insurance company and one pharmacy chain, but Rep. Speier’s office has received some complaints from her California district about similar problems, and CVS is investigating any complaints that it receives.

CVS says that they will issue checks to affected customers in early October, and customers of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield are no longer being charged copays they don’t owe.

After Glitch, CVS Gives 11,000 Birth Control Refunds [Kaiser Health News]

CVS illegally charging women for generic birth control [UPI]

morez срочный автовыкуп by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

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Service dogs are able to help people with a wide variety of problems, from diabetes to seizure disorders to blindness. Whenever there’s a controversy over whether a service dog dog should be allowed inside a business, we frequently hear that an employee told the disabled person, “you’re not blind!” Recently in California, though, a blind man, his family, and his service dog visited a restaurant and were told that Dogs Are Not Allowed.

Normally, service dogs are allowed to go anywhere that their owners are, including taxis, stores, and restaurants. Technically, a business owner can ask an animal to leave, but only if the dog isn’t housebroken or is being disruptive in some other kind of doggy way.

When the family visited this Indian restaurant in South Sacramento, they were asked to leave. Well, the dog was. “No dog. Get out. Just get out,” he recounted to the TV station. They decided to investigate for themselves. Instead of attaching a camera to the same customer, they sent in their own blind guy/service dog team. They were asked to leave, but pushed back by quoting the relevant parts of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It turns out that the restaurant’s owner and staff simply weren’t familiar with the laws surrounding service dogs, and didn’t know that there are circumstances under which dogs have to be allowed inside. That could be an expensive lesson: the kicked-out customer could have sued them for not allowing him to bring the dog inside.

Call Kurtis Investigates: Sacramento Restaurant Denies Blind Man’s Service Dog [CBS Sacramento]

morez срочный автовыкуп by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

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What’s in a name? Well, if that name happens to be PODS about $62 million. That’s how much the storage and moving company was awarded in damages from a trademark infringement lawsuit against U-Haul.

The Tampa Bay Times reports the award was made after a jury ruled U-Haul infringed on PODS’ trademarks, causing confusing and hurting business for the company.

Clearwater-based PODS delivers containers to homes and businesses to be filled and transported to storage centers.

PODS sued U-Haul International in U.S. District Court in Tampa back in 2012 alleging that U-Haul “improperly and unlawfully” used the PODS trademark on its website as a way to divert sales. The company sought an estimated $170 million.

At the time the suit was filed officials with U-Haul say the company used the word pod to describe its U-Box product.

However, the jury found that U-Haul unjustly gained from mentioning the term in its marketing and advertising materials and started using the work only after PODS became a prominent business.

The ruling in PODS’ favor was a significant win over “genericide,” over “genericide,” the term used to describe what happens when a trademarked product morphs from a single product identified under a name to an entire product category. such as happened with aspirin, trampoline and cellophane.

In all, the jury awarded PODS about $46 million in damages and another $16 million in profits attributable to U-Haul using the word pods.

An attorney for PODS tells the Times that based on the verdict the company plans to seek an injunction to get U-Haul to stop using pods and pods.

It was unclear if U-Haul plans to appeal the ruling.

PODS wins $62 million award in trademark infringement lawsuit against U-Haul [Tampa Bay Times]

morez срочный автовыкуп by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

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“Meine dispatcher says there is something wrong with deine kable?“

Comcast has an image problem… mostly because its customer service is consistently ranked among the worst — not just of cable companies, but of all customer-facing businesses in the U.S. So maybe that’s not so much an image problem as it is a systemic rot that has been allowed to fester because the company has virtually no competition. So how to deal with this problem? Promote someone and claim that he’s going the answer to all your problems.

Kabletown announced today that it has promoted Charlie Herrin (who looks kind of like a laboratory hybrid of Wings’ Tim Daly and Thirtysomething’s Peter Horton) to be the company’s Senior VP of Customer Experience.

“Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us,” writes Comcast Cable president Neil “no, it’s not Smith” Smit. “While we’ve made progress, we need to do a better job to make sure those interactions are excellent… from the moment a customer orders a new service, to the installation, to the way we communicate with them, to how we respond to any issues.”

That all sounds great Neil. Why didn’t you think of doing any of that for the last few decades while you gobbled up smaller cable companies without raising alarm bells at the FCC?

“The way we interact with our customers – on the phone, online, in their homes – is as important to our success as the technology we provide,” continues Smit, ignoring the fact that Comcast does everything it can to get you off the phone, uses scripted online chat that is hard to distinguish from a machine, and rarely shows up to your house when it’s supposed to. “Put simply, customer service should be our best product.”

Again, no duh.

The manure-spreading continues.

“Our customers deserve the best and we need to work harder to earn their trust and their business every day by exceeding their expectations,” writes Smit, again glossing over the fact that Comcast customers may indeed deserve the best, but they probably aren’t going to get it, at least in markets where there is no competing service for pay-TV and broadband.

Without competition, Comcast has no reason to actually back up this “we love our customers” sentiment. What are you going to do, switch to slow DSL service from your local phone company that hasn’t maintained its copper wire network in years? Or maybe you can get wireless broadband and pay the same amount as Xfinity for 1/70th the amount of data each month.

In spite of what Comcast and Time Warner Cable would have you believe, those are not alternatives.

“Transformation isn’t going to happen overnight,” admits Smit, in the post’s first real sign of anything resembling humility or honesty. “In fact, it may take a few years before we can honestly say that a great customer experience is something we’re known for. But that is our goal and our number one priority … and that’s what we are going to do.”

And that’s apparently where Herrin comes in.

In addition to being a “partner” with the heads of other groups, like customer service, technical operations, sales, marketing, training and development, and product innovation, Herrin is tasked with the unenviable task of listening to “feedback from customers as well as our employees to make sure we are putting our customers at the center of every decision we make.”

Herrin’s even got a pair of Emmy awards (who doesn’t?) gathering dust next to Comcast’s two Golden Poo statues for Worst Company In America. We had no idea they gave Emmys for this sort of thing, but Herrin got his back in 2011 for the Xfinity TV iPad app and another in 2013 for the X1 user interface.

The only way that Comcast will truly begin to treat customers better is when they stand to lose those customers. But rather than fight proactively to keep those subscribers by providing better service, Comcast would rather lobby against municipal broadband and exploit loopholes in net neutrality rules to squeeze tolls out of high-bandwidth content companies like Netflix that directly compete with Comcast’s pay-TV service but rely on its Xfinity broadband to reach consumers.

If Comcast truly believed that customers were the most important thing, it would welcome competition and show that its product would still be bought even after people were given a choice.

[via DSLreports.com]

morez срочный автовыкуп by Chris Morran via Consumerist

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Dunkin’ Donuts decided consumers weren’t getting enough coffee in their coffee, so they’re now offering coffee-flavored granola bars.

There’s obviously some kind of Frankenstein-like science experiment happening at the nation’s coffee and donut shops. First Starbucks began testing a beer-flavored coffee, and now Dunkin’ Donuts is pedaling a coffee-flavored granola bar. What happened to regular coffee and breakfast items? Are they just not enough anymore?

The Los Angeles Times reports that Dunkin’ Donuts is venturing into the protein bar market with its new coffee-flavored granola bar; because you can’t have enough strong coffee flavor in the morning, can you?

The new Dunkin’ Go Bar, a pre-packaged chewy granola bar, was designed to taste like the chain’s Original Blend Coffee.

Go Bars will be available in select Dunkin’ stores nationwide starting Monday.

And don’t worry about heading to the office with overpowering coffee breath for much longer. Dunkin’ reports it is partnering with Wrigley Foodservice to offer Orbit gum and Altoids mints starting October 1.

New granola bars at Dunkin’ Donuts. And of course they’re coffee-flavored [The Los Angeles Times]

morez срочный автовыкуп by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist