One of the great bargains that shoppers can get is when an electronic item is refurbished. Sometimes these are even brand new products but sold in plain brown boxes so as not to compete with the manufacturer’s own regular line.

The downside of buying a refurb is that it typically only comes with a 90-day warranty. And to add insult to injury, most credit cards with an extended warranty benefit (that doubles the manufacturer’s warranty) excludes refurbished items. Grrrr.

*MOUSE PRINT:

However, while perusing the fine print of the recently published credit card benefits booklet for the Chase Freedom Visa card, MrConsumer discovered a terrific change. While the standard language excluding used and pre-owned items is still there, Chase made an exception and is now covering refurbished goods that come with a warranty.

*MOUSE PRINT:

And as an added bonus, unlike most policies that merely double the manufacturer’s warranty, which on a 90-day warranty only would add three months, the one from Chase Freedom adds a full year extra.

Thanks, Chase.

As part of its agreement to merge with Sprint, T-Mobile promised to offer a really cheap basic plan. And they have launched it earlier than planned to help people who are watching every penny in these tough times.

While this is one of the cheapest plans ever offered directly from a major carrier and the extra data provided each year is a valuable extra benefit, buried in the fine print is a nasty surprise.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Fine print shown ACTUAL SIZE

This is just part of a huge block of virtually unreadable fine print that appears on the offer page.

The key part says that after you use up your two gigabyte monthly data allowance, your data completely shuts off rather than just decreases to a crawl as almost every other plan does these days. (You can buy extra data at an unspecified premium price, however.)

Note that Tello offers a 2-gb plan with unlimited calls/texts for just $14 and it slows speeds if you run out of high-speed data. You must use a Sprint-compatible phone for that service. ++

++ Consumer World will earn a small commission if you sign up for Tello using referral code P3F3SR3J .

Most of us usually don’t have the time or patience to read a website’s “terms of service” (TOS) agreement. We simply click “agree” if we are even asked in the first place to consent to their various conditions. But now that we are all cooped up at home, we actually have the time to review those contracts. I know, you’d rather clean your kitchen counter one more time and wipe down all your groceries instead.

Some of those policies are ridiculously long. The Microsoft TOS agreement, for example, runs over 15,000 words — just slightly shorter than Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

So, to help you visualize what a daunting task it would actually be to read the TOS agreements from 14 of America’s leading companies and websites, the Visual Capitalist created this infographic. It depicts the comparative length of each company’s policy and how long each would take to read.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Scroll down the chart OR Click to enlarge.

These companies rely on the laziness of their customers who rarely take time to read the fine print of what they are agreeing to. And most times, the terms benefit the company more than you.

In his quest to find protective masks after Amazon and eBay removed most of their listings on account of price gouging, MrConsumer turned to AliExpress — the eBay/Amazon of China.

While masks there were likely double or triple their pre-pandemic prices, some third-party sellers on the site offered fast four to seven day delivery from sources in the United States (at a higher price than the same masks if shipped from China).

So MrConsumer ordered these masks on April 11. The package was shipped two days later with a USPS tracking number from New Jersey and should certainly arrive in Massachusetts in just a matter of a day or two, or so I thought.

*MOUSE PRINT:

While the USPS tracking number was issued on April 13, two days after ordering, as of May 4 – three weeks later – the post office still had not received the package from the company.

The tracking information screen showed that the item was being shipped from one United States location to another, however, a hidden tracking number indicated the real origin was China. See that inconspicuous link at the bottom that says “Data Provided by CAINIAO?” That takes you to a Chinese shipping company with the real tracking information.

*MOUSE PRINT:

The package was actually shipped from Shenzhen, China on April 21 — 10 days after the order was placed, and three days after it should have already been received.

What is going on here? It appears that this company and others that play this game on AliExpress, eBay, and perhaps Amazon Marketplace, make customers believe their shipment originates domestically when in fact it is coming from overseas. A USPS shipping and tracking number is issued at the outset to further mislead customers about the shipping timing and origin. At some point, either in China or when the package arrives in the US at the transfer point, the USPS label is slapped on the package indicating the final leg of its journey to the customer.

MrConsumer used the AliExpress dispute process because the goods had not been received during the buyer protection period. The company authorized a full refund on May 2.

Back in 2017, several consumers sued Dunkin’ Donuts in a class action lawsuit alleging that the company’s Angus Steak and Egg sandwich really contained a ground beef patty rather than a solid piece of steak.

In commercials for the product, Dunkin’ repeatedly referred to the sandwich as containing “steak.”

*MOUSE PRINT:

None — they did not make any type of disclosure that it really was a ground beef patty.

The consumers in the case argued that this was a misrepresentation, they didn’t get what they paid for, and they would have paid less had they known they were going to be served a chopped meat sandwich rather than a solid piece of Angus steak.

The lower court dismissed the suit, and the appeals court agreed in a March 2020 decision. That court quoted the definition of steak from the dictionary, in part saying:

Moreover, while the word “steak” can refer to “a slice of meat,” it is also defined as “ground beef prepared for cooking or for serving in the manner of a steak.” Classic examples of ground beef served as “steak” include chopped steak, hamburger steak, and Salisbury steak.

The court concluded that no reasonable consumer would expect to be served a piece of solid steak for the $2-$4 price that Dunkin’ was charging:

As the television advertisements themselves demonstrate, the Products are marketed as grab-and-go products that can be consumed in hand, without the need for a fork and knife. A reasonable consumer purchasing one of the Products from Dunkin Donuts in that context would not be misled into thinking she was purchasing an “unadulterated piece of meat.”

MrConsumer has to disagree. If he walked into a sub shop and ordered a steak and peppers sub, he would expect to get solid pieces of meat, or at a minimum shaved slices of beef, but not hamburger meat. Dunkin’ had to know that by calling their product a steak sandwich, some number of customers — maybe even the majority — might reasonably believe they would be getting a solid meat sandwich.