Tag archive: Walmart

Apparently, Santa brought a few unlucky Canadians lumps of clay over the Holidays. Thanks to a new scam, customers who bought iPads from various retail chains in the country were treated to bags of modeling clay when they opened up their iPad 2 boxes. According to CTV News, the scam artists had bought the Apple tablets with cash, removed the devices from the packaging and then resealed the boxes with modeling clay to replicate the weight of the… Read More

Earlier this week, both Amazon and eBay had a public debate in Washington in front of the House Judiciary Committee about the creation of a standard Internet sales tax that could be adopted by any state seeking increased tax revenue according to CNNMoney. Recently on the opposite side of the argument, Amazon is currently arguing in favor of a standardized tax in order to simplify the tax collection process. It's likely that Amazon wants… Read More

Gift giving just got a little more high-tech this holiday season, thanks to the first-ever Facebook app from Walmart, which tells users which gifts they should buy for their friends and loved ones. The app, dubbed Shopycat, analyzes data from Facebook pages, and then estimates who a user's top 10 friends are. It then recommends which gifts a user should give to those friends, based upon information available about the people through… Read More

Ten minutes before the Porter Ranch Walmart opened in Los Angeles, California, a mother of two used a can of pepper spray to attack other shoppers waiting in line for the early, Black Friday door-buster sales according to the Los Angeles Times. The woman was specifically looking to get the $100 discounted price on a Xbox 360 as well as a few Xbox 360 games. With both children in tow, she began spraying other customers as soon as the store… Read More

The basics If you've never done Black Friday before there are some things that you should know and think about before you make your plan. First, if you're going to go, you should make a plan. Second, you should expect craziness and no less. Don't get up at 4 am on friday morning thinking that just because you're an hour early you'll get exactly what you want with no problems at all. No matter where you are, there… Read More

Designed for the traveler, Vudu now allows users to download movies that have been purchased on the service. Previously, the service would only allow users to stream content over a PC or mobile device to watch a film or television show. This allows users to download an entire film similar to iTunes and watch at a later time. This also allows users with slower broadband connections to download an entire film instead of waiting for buffering… Read More

Renamed the ”Marketplace Fairness Act”, a group of bipartisan senators is expected to introduce an alternate version of the “Main Street Fairness Act” in order to appease Web companies like eBay. Rather than taxing all transactions on the Internet, the new bill focuses on large retailers and allows smaller transactions to remain free of taxes. The bill is designed to give states the option of collecting the new tax. Some… Read More

One of the biggest problems with cell phone plans today is that carriers are charging more and more for data and messaging, but aren't offering any flexibility when it comes to their talk plans, which start at $40 per month. T-Mobile and Walmart are changing this, at least, for a while. Today, the mega retailer and wireless carrier announced a “$30 unlimited web and text monthly 4G prepaid service plan,” which will be… Read More

Price cuts; you know you want them. The Wii was first to fall earlier this year, and with the PS3 price drop announced last week at Germany's Gamescom the Xbox is expected to follow in order to stay competitive. That Xbox price drop may actually be happening quite soon as rumors are circulating that the console will get $50 shaved off next week at Walmart. Over at Joystiq, they published a Walmart newspaper flyer advertising a $50… Read More

Most people probably think the Internet is awash in online stores and businesses willing to sell something to consumers via the Web—and while that may very well be true, a new report from Companiesandmarkets.com finds the worldwide online retail marketplace is actually very consolidated. According to the report, during June 2011 fully half of all online retail visits worldwide went to just three companies: Amazon.com, eBay, and… Read More

Walmart-owned Vudu moved into third place for video streaming as reported by IHS today. In the first half of 2010, Vudu only had about one percent of the market, but leaps to just over five percent in the first half of 2011. This catapults Vudu over Amazon's streaming service as well as video streaming on the Sony PlayStation 3. While Amazon's market share slightly increase from 4 percent in 2010 to 4.2 percent in 2011, Sony's… Read More

Mega-retailer Walmart has decided not to develop a native iPad app for its Vudu video streaming service, opting instead to launch an iPad-optimized version of the Web site that enables customers to rent, buy, and watch video titles from Vudu—without having to hand over 30 percent of their revenues to Apple. With the iPad-optimized site, Walmart becomes the latest major content distributor to choose to bypass Apple's in-app… Read More

Walmart has issued a memo to all music licensing partners and informed them that the digital music store at “mp3.walmart.com” will be shutting down on August 28, 2011. All music content will no longer be available for download and users are urged to download DRM-free tracks before becoming unavailable. After the store closes up, tracks containing DRM will still be supported and will continue to work as the DRM servers are being kept… Read More

Nintendo surprised us all a few weeks ago when it announced an $80 price cut on the 3DS portable gaming device less than six months after launch. The price change officially goes into effect on August 12, though those who purchase (or purchased) the device before then will be automatically included in a rewards program bringing them 20 downloadable eShop games — 10 NES classics and 10 GBA titles — for free by the year's end.… Read More

That Tien Truong Nguyen, age 34, was sentenced today for his role in designing websites to mock financial institutions and using those sites to scam over 38,000 victims. He worked with Romanian scammers to help drive people to the sites through email phishing. Nguyen sold the data containing the identities stolen from the fake sites to Ryan Price and Stefani Ruland. These two men setup lines of credit at GE Capital kiosks at Walmart in Northern… Read More