By Colleen Rothe

The conservative members of my family are going to disown me.

In their eyes, I marched down the middle of Pike Street wrapped in the Chinese flag, denouncing my American citizenship because I’ve now been recruited to support the Chinese Red Army, which is funded fully by the China Off-Shore Trading Company, otherwise known as Costco.

Despite the fact that it’s well known that Costco is actually headquartered in the United States, Issaquah, WA to be exact, the urban legend that Costco is secretly run by the Chinese Government still persists. However, dear consumers (whatever your political leanings), there is no China connection involved with Costco, except like many retailers throughout the world, some of the products sold in their warehouses may have originated there.

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Here at Consupo, we often hear from people who have experienced, well, less than satisfactory customer service, and who are not always sure how to go about sharing that experience. The simplest way is to post a case on Consupo.com, and that is usually where we refer them. But sometimes, we get stories emailed to us that just have to be shared. The following is by Tamela Terry about the IKEA in College Park, MD.

On October 14, we purchased 4 large media storage units on clearance, spending over $1000. They were already assembled, so we arranged to have them delivered. The process took awhile, but we patiently waited through the whole thing with our two children (ages 6 and 8) in tow.

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By Your Consumer Curmudgeon

The news isn’t good, not to be redundant. But truth is, this recession is déjà vu all over again. I wasn’t around for the Great Depression, but my parents were. And I got through several very nasty recessions in my lifetime so this is nothing new. And maybe, for most of us, it won’t even be worse than those other times. Several of my neighbors have been laid off, but they are hanging in there. Others have been given work furloughs. Yet they haven’t changed their lifestyles, as far as I can tell. At least not yet.

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By Colleen Rothe

You’ve read the reports. Mortgage rates for 30-year home loans are the lowest ever. So it’s natural to think this is the perfect time to buy a house.

Not so fast.

Now, before the wonderful consumer readers start commenting with flames for my trying to single-handedly ruin any economic recovery from the New Depression, please do read the reasons why I say you might want to cool your future homeowner jets.

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By Linsey B. Knerl

Getting dinged with a hefty fee for early cancellation of your cell phone contract is a common practice. It’s what’s kept many of my friends and family in unsatisfactory agreements for up to two years. (Who can afford a couple hundred bucks just to escape?) This latest class-action lawsuit puts some of those fees back into the hands of the customers. Could you be affected?

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By Your Consumer Curmudgeon

We all have so much at stake now, it's almost too much to bear. Martin Luther King Day, followed by Inaugural Day. It's almost like we've entered a new dimension. Let's hope it's true.

Last night, my family and I watched Forrest Gump. It was a nice lesson in history. Or at least, history as one very creative team of artists might have imagined it. And as with all good art, there was plenty of imagination, but a lot of truth.

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By Colleen Rothe

There was an editorial in my local paper during the height of the holiday shopping season, asking folks to keep their business in their local community. It made me think about an old system, one they used in lots of places during the Great Depression, that uses area-specific currency or coupons that provide certain perks for the local consumer. Perks like discounts or free items. Then as I sat down to decide what I would write to all you savvy consumer readers, I found an article that was touting this exact system in Massachusetts.

The Associated Press just featured the “BerkShares,” a colorful currency encouraging people to spend close to home in the state’s Berkshire region. Customers who use the money also get a built-in 10 percent discount, since they can get 100 BerkShares for just $90 at local banks. The currency is printed by a nonprofit group.

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By Linsey B. Knerl

Rarely have I seen such an ambiguous disbursement of settlement funds as in this recent case involving several makeup companies and retail stores. The actual class-action lawsuit involves a time period going back as far as 1994, but this recently authorized “settlement” gives me the impression that many more than just the “victims” will be clamoring for some freebies.

What’s it about? It’s really hard to tell, at first glance. The actual website doesn’t give the usual rundown of links (including the official notice, FAQ’s, and court documents). It is a one-page summary of the benefits assigned to those who fall into the class, which could, theoretically, include nearly EVERYONE.

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By Your Consumer Curmudgeon As the economic downturn continues, the industry most responsible for this mess is resorting to ever more aggressive and resourceful scams and schemes to separate the public from what’s left of its money, apparently unsatisfied with the dizzying scale of fraud and theft they’ve thus far perpetrated.

I’m talking about the largest Ponzi scheme in history, otherwise known as the Real Estate industry. Why is real estate a Ponzi scheme? Because it was all built on a house of cards, literally. The utterly fraudulent (and how obviously so, looking back) premise that prices would keep rising forever, so why worry?

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By Linsey B. Knerl

Many times, class-action lawsuits get a bad rap for being frivolous, reaching, or just plain unnecessary. They can usually take forever, and sometimes don’t even offer up any monetary or tangible compensation. Then there are the lawsuits that leave me scratching my head, wondering why these people weren’t arrested. This is one of those lawsuits.

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By Your Consumer Curmudgeon

One of the things I never quite understood about the mentality behind the Wal-Mart phenomenon, one that created a national retail economy consisting of one family of billionaires and a zillion low-paid workers barely getting by, was the fact that Wal-Mart had managed to create an entire consumer class, in effect, that could not afford to shop anywhere except (you guessed it) Wal-Mart. Small surprise that Wal-Mart was the only major stock that showed gains last year other than the energy giants, of course.

True, quite a few Wall Street Gordon Gekkos, robber baron bank financiers, and WMD war marketeers still live and lurk among us here and there in their gated mansions and communities, but by and large we have now been reduced to a Wal-Mart economy of a lot of low-paid workers and a few well-heeled owners.

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