LOTTOMIKE's Blog

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SEATTLE (July 7) - Cingular Wireless Corp. promised to provide uninterrupted service to AT&T Wireless customers when it acquired that company in 2004, but instead it nickel-and-dimed them and degraded their reception in an effort to persuade them to sign new contracts, a federal lawsuit says.

   


An attorney displays cell phone records of Amy Frerker, who says her service worsened after AT&T Wireless merged with Cingular Wireless in 2004. "It's like purchasing a Mercedes and getting a Hyundai," she said.

   

The lawsuit, which alleges breach of contract and violations of consumer protection laws, seeks class-action status on behalf of the more than 20 million customers AT&T Wireless had at the time of the merger. Many paid $18 "transfer" fees to switch to Cingular plans and were required to buy new phones or pay other fees, said the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.

"Everyone who signed an AT&T contract had their service degraded," attorney Mike Withey said at a news conference Thursday.

Atlanta-based Cingular acquired Redmond-based AT&T Wireless Services Inc. for $41 billion in October 2004, and promised in advertisements and news releases that the customers of both companies would see uninterrupted and even improved service as a result of the "combined network."

   
   
Withey argued that instead, Cingular stopped maintaining AT&T Wireless network facilities. In addition to the accounts of his clients, he cited news articles in which industry analysts said Cingular appeared to be investing little or nothing in the AT&T Wireless network. That breached the contracts AT&T Wireless had with its customers, he said.

Cingular spokesman Clay Owen said Thursday the company had not had a chance to review the lawsuit. He acknowledged the company eventually plans to phase out the older cell phone technology used by the AT&T Wireless network, called TDMA, but insisted that it is still maintaining that system for now. The overwhelming majority of Cingular's 55.8 million customers use a newer GSM system, and many companies no longer make TDMA-compatible phones, he said.

Cingular spent $6.5 billion on network improvements and integration last year, and has budgeted the same amount this year, Owen said. He did not have figures for how much of that was spent maintaining the AT&T Wireless network.

One plaintiff, Amy Frerker, a 28-year-old Seattle architect, said that shortly after the merger she began noticing that she no longer had cell reception in areas she once did. Over the next year and a half, she said, Cingular told her she would have to sign a new contract; live with her current cell service, which was being phased out; or pay a $175 termination fee to get out of her contract.

   


   
Finally, last week, the company let her out of her contract without charge, Frerker said. She switched to T-Mobile.

"On my commute to work I started to notice I was getting more dropped calls," she said. "It's like purchasing a Mercedes and getting a Hyundai."

Last month, a California state appeals court upheld a $12.1 million fine against Cingular for signing up customers faster than it could provide service and for imposing hefty cancellation fees without a trial period. The court also said Cingular must refund up to $10 million to people who were forced to pay as much as $550 to cancel their contracts.

Five of the seven named plaintiffs in the Seattle lawsuit are California residents. The lawsuit, based on complaints received by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Santa Monica, seeks up to treble damages for fees and charges paid by the AT&T Wireless customers.

July 7) -- We collect them in dusty jars, lose them under couch cushions and ignore them on the ground as we rush by.

Once considered a good luck charm, the penny for many has become more of a copper-colored nuisance that has outlived its usefulness.

Although the majority of Americans want to keep the penny in circulation, support for elimination of the 1-cent coin is building. Fueling the momentum: For the first time in history, it costs more than a penny to manufacture a penny, thanks to soaring metals prices.

When the government loses money on making a coin that for many people holds little value, it's time to turn off the presses, argue some prominent economists.

"It's really becoming completely pointless," says Francois Velde, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and co-author of The Big Problem of Small Change. He argues that the metal in money must be worth less than a coin's face value, because otherwise people will hoard coins, melt them down and sell them for cash, which happened in the 1960s when quarters were made partly of silver.

All cash transactions would be rounded to the nearest nickel, according to legislation that will soon be introduced by Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz. That would effectively eliminate the need to produce the penny.

"Times change, you have to adapt to those changes," he says. "A penny should be thought of not as some nostalgic thing but as ... currency. And it simply has no use as a medium of commerce."

But eliminating the penny would disappoint Deborah Reed, 56, a retired teacher in Crittenden, Ky. Her church collects pennies to help send orphans to camp every summer.

"I wouldn't be happy," she says.

Ending production of the penny, which today is produced almost completely from zinc with a copper coating, would not be without precedent. The half-cent was scrapped in 1857 because manufacturing costs rose for the largely unpopular coin.

Finland has stopped producing the 1-cent and 2-cent euro coins. The Netherlands and Belgium are both considering a similar move. European countries that use the euro produce their own coins, which can be used in all member nations.

But Kolbe's efforts to eliminate the penny have been unsuccessful in the past, most recently when he introduced similar legislation in 2001. Such proposals have failed in part because proponents to keep the penny can point to polls showing most Americans still back the 1-cent piece.

Fifty-five percent of Americans say the penny is "useful" and should be kept, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of 1,002 adults taken June 9-11. Although a majority, the percentage in favor of the 1-cent coin was down from earlier surveys. In 1993, 64% of those polled by ABC News called the penny useful.

Support in the latest poll was split along gender lines. Sixty-three percent of women called the penny useful vs. 46% of men. Lower-income people support keeping the penny more than those who are wealthier.

All those pennies you see on the sidewalk? More than three-quarters of adults say that they pick a penny up when they see one on the ground, according to the USA TODAY/Gallup survey.

Retired firefighter Sylvester Neal, 62, says eliminating the penny would be "like losing part of our American history."

Although Neal's opinion is shared by many, he is a bit biased: He has 700,000 pennies in his garage - $7,000 worth - and is shooting for the 1 million mark. This is after he cashed in 800,000 pennies five years ago when he moved from Alaska to Washington state and couldn't find a way to transport them.

"It's therapy for me," he says. "When I get a little uptight, I go into the garage and turn on my music and turn on my lights and play with my pennies. It's like being in hog heaven."

Would he ever cash in his current stash? "Not as long as I'm alive," he says.

Losing Money-Making Pennies

But while Americans say they pluck pennies from the ground, they also say they are happy to ditch them when they can. More than two-thirds say that when they see a "take a penny, leave a penny" dish at the cash register, they are more likely to leave their pennies behind for the next customer.

   

   
To former White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman N. Gregory Mankiw, that proves pennies are not an effective tool of exchange, which is the point of money.

"Pennies are so small that you see people leaving them at cash registers all the time now," says Mankiw, now an economics professor at Harvard University. "At the end of the day, I have pennies in my pockets and they're an annoyance. Like lint."

The U.S. Mint produced more than 7.7 billion pennies in 2005, accounting for about half of all U.S. coins made. At 38.5 million pounds, the heft of pennies made last year equal the weight of more than 2,500 male African elephants. But a large number of those pennies and other denominations aren't in circulation. About $10.5 billion, or $93.75 per household, is sitting idle, according to Coinstar, which hosts coin-counting kiosks in grocery stores, banks and other locations.

Until recently, the Mint made money on every penny it produced. That's because the Mint sells coins to the Federal Reserve, which distributes money to banks, at face value. If a coin costs less to manufacture than the face value, the Mint makes a profit.

Faced with skyrocketing metals costs, the Mint estimates it will cost 1.23 cents to produce a penny this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, the agency told members on Congress in May. The cost of producing a penny, which also includes transportation, labor and other expenses, has risen 27% in the past year.

The value of the metal in the penny is hovering around 1 cent - still not high enough to make it worth someone's time to melt the coins, separate the metals and then sell them.

Last year, the Mint's coin-making profit was $730 million. Mint officials estimate the added metals expenses for all coins will reduce the agency's profit this year by $45 million.

More Than One Argument

But the cost of making the coins is just one, and the most recent, argument the penny opponents use.

Because of inflation, a penny is worth a lot less than it used to be. Something bought in 1956 for one penny would take seven pennies today to purchase, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. That has made the penny a less-valuable part of the monetary system, some economists say.

"It's just a waste of good effort. And it's a waste of metal," National Federation of Independent Business chief economist William Dunkelberg says.

Carl Carreca, who owns 17 Pizza Hut franchises in Tennessee and Kentucky, calls pennies "a big pain." He says when people pay with pennies, it means the coins have to be counted by the wait person and the cashier. They then have to be counted again as they are put into rolls and taken to the bank. That adds up to a lot of time and lost productivity, he says.

"It's a hassle," Carreca says.

But a large number of people are pro-penny.

Americans for Common Cents has lobbied to keep the penny in circulation since the group was formed in 1990. About 40 companies, organizations and individuals, including zinc producers, fund the organization, executive director Mark Weller says.

His group five years ago spent $160,000, or 16 million pennies, in lobbying fees to defeat the coin's elimination, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Weller argues that efforts to eliminate the penny will fail again because Americans want the 1-cent coin.

"Change that is imposed without the public's support is going to fail miserably," he says. "The penny is so embedded within our social and commercial fabric and within American society ... that there has to be a pressing need to change what we have now, and there is no pressing need to eliminate the penny."

Weller's group argues that metals prices will likely fall, making the penny once again a profitable venture for the U.S. government.

And at least one economist says eliminating the penny would hurt the poor. When prices are rounded, most of the amounts will be rounded up, not down, argues Pennsylvania State University economics professor Ray Lombra, who has testified before Congress in support of the penny. For those who have little money, those pennies will add up.

"Certainly the working poor - many of them still do not have checking accounts, credit cards - they are conducting their transactions in cash. So they are the ones who are going to bear most of the burden," Lombra says.

Interest in Keeping the Penny

Others have an interest in keeping the penny:

--Charities. Some charities use penny drives to raise money. Children in New York City collected more than 65 million pennies last year for a total of $655,508.54, according to organizer Common Cents.

"It is a very powerful symbol of the potential we have to turn our wasteful society into a caring and recycling and reciprocal society," Common Cents founder Teddy Gross says.

--Companies. Salem, N.H.-based CTM Group for 15 years has been making the machines seen at parks and other tourism sites that squish pennies into oblong-shaped souvenirs. CTM owns 2,000 machines in North America.

"If (the penny's elimination) ever did happen, God forbid, we would retrofit to ," CTM co-founder John Cweiber says. "It would be costly."

--Lawmakers. Some lawmakers, including those from zinc-producing states, have traditionally backed the penny. And the Illinois delegation has supported keeping the penny, which features the face of Abraham Lincoln, who was born in Kentucky but lived in Illinois for much of his adult life.

One issue that may complicate efforts to eliminate the penny: The 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth is in 2009. In December, President Bush signed legislation ordering the Mint to produce four new pennies in 2009 that will commemorate Lincoln's life.

But Jim Svetz, owner of the Muddy Cup Coffee House, still says the time is right. He has set his prices in 25-cent increments at his four locations in New York state, including tax, so he doesn't have to handle pennies. In fact, he won't even take them. "I don't think there's a need for the penny anymore," he says.

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ATLANTA (July 5) - Three people were charged by federal prosecutors on Wednesday with stealing confidential information, including a sample of a new drink, from The Coca-Cola Co. and trying to sell it to rival PepsiCo Inc.

The suspects include a Coke executive's administrative assistant, Joya Williams, who is accused of rifling through corporate files and stuffing documents and a new Coca-Cola product into a personal bag.

Williams, 41, of Norcross, Ga., and 30-year-old Ibrahim Dimson of New York and 43-year-old Edmund Duhaney of Decatur, Ga., were arrested on charges of wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling Coke trade secrets, federal prosecutors said.

They are expected to appear before a federal magistrate judge on Thursday in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola is based.

Pepsi spokesman Dave DeCecco said his company did what any responsible company would do in cooperating with Coke and the investigation.

"Competition can sometimes be fierce, but also must be fair and legal," DeCecco said. "We're pleased the authorities and the FBI have identified the people responsible for this."

Coke's chief executive, Neville Isdell, said in a memo to employees Wednesday that the company is cooperating with federal authorities.

"Sadly, today's arrests include an individual within our company," Isdell wrote. "While this breach of trust is difficult for all of us to accept, it underscores the responsibility we each have to be vigilant in protecting our trade secrets. Information is the lifeblood of the company."

He said Coke will review its information protection policies, procedures and practices to make sure it safeguards intellectual property.

According to prosecutors, on May 19, Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo provided Coke with a copy of a letter mailed to PepsiCo in an official Coca-Cola business envelope. The letter, postmarked from the Bronx in New York, was from an individual identifying himself as "Dirk," who claimed to be employed at a high level with Coca-Cola and offered "very detailed and confidential information." "Dirk" was later identified as Dimson, the FBI says.

Coca-Cola immediately contacted the FBI and an undercover FBI investigation began.

Prosecutors say Williams was the source of the information Dimson offered to provided Pepsi. They say that "Dirk" provided an FBI undercover agent 14 pages of Coca-Cola documents marked classified and confidential. The company confirmed that the documents were valid and highly confidential and were considered trade secrets. Williams works for a senior Coke manager, though the company would not say Wednesday which one. The company also would not say if she has been fired.

Prosecutors say "Dirk" requested $10,000 for the documents.

Later "Dirk" produced other documents that Coca-Cola confirmed were valid trade secrets of Coca-Cola and highly confidential. He also agreed to be paid $75,000 for the purchase of a highly confidential product sample from a new Coca Cola project, prosecutors said.

Then on June 27, an undercover FBI agent offered to buy other trade secret items for $1.5 million from "Dirk." The same day a bank account was opened under the names of Duhaney and Dimson, and the address used on the account was that of Duhaney's Decatur residence, prosecutors said.

Video surveillance showed Williams at her desk at Coke headquarters going through multiple files looking for documents and stuffing them into bags. She also was observed holding a liquid container with a white label, which resembled the description of new Coca-Cola product sample before placing it into her personal bag, prosecutors say, adding that Coca-Cola later verified the sample was genuine and is in fact a product being developed by the company.

Dimson, Williams and Duhaney were arrested in Atlanta on Wednesday, the day the $1.5 million deal was to take place, prosecutors say.

If tomorrow all the things were gone I'd worked for all my life,
And I had to start again with just my children and my wife.
I'd thank my lucky stars to be living here today,
`Cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can't take that away.

And I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.
And I'd gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
`Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land God bless the U.S.A.

From the lakes of Minnesota, to the hills of Tennessee,
across the plains of Texas, from sea to shining sea,

From Detroit down to Houston and New York to LA,
Well, there's pride in every American heart,
and it's time to stand and say:

I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.
And I'd gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today.
`Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land God bless the U.S.A

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