Consumer Watchdog, Associate
Illinois PIRG Latest Blog Posts
1/17/2022
1/15/2022
You may be setting aside those cloth or surgical masks and shopping for some N95 masks or KN95s that are supposed to be widely available. But . . . there unfortunately are lots of counterfeit products out there too.
1/14/2022
A major new CFPB report assails the Big 3 credit bureaus for a series of excuses, “deficiencies” and failures. CFPB found that “Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion routinely failed to fully respond to consumers with errors.” Wow.
Cover graphic “Epic Fail” by Dunk via Flickr, some rights reserved.
1/12/2022
Switching from one dirty fuel source to another isn’t the public health or climate progress we need.
1/11/2022
Google’s parent company, Alphabet*, faces shareholder proposal because of history of repair restrictions
1/6/2022
Many of us use this time of year to reflect on what we want to do differently in the year ahead. One resolution that could really help the planet? Reducing your foodprint.
1/6/2022
Buy now, pay later apps give consumers the flexibility of paying for purchases in installments, but that convenience comes at a cost. Besides being unregulated and full of fine print, these companies have one ultimate goal: get you to buy more stuff, and go into debt to do it.
1/6/2022
Across the country, the Right to Repair movement is diverse, bipartisan, and growing. What unites us is simple: we just want to fix our stuff.
1/5/2022
My mom, a tailor and small business owner, fixes clothes so that it doesn’t need to be thrown away. This is possible because the tools for clothing repair are available to anyone and there is little that clothing manufacturers can do to prevent independent repairs. Anybody with the will has the option to repair their clothes or to hire a tailor. This is not true in industries like consumer electronics, farm equipment, and life-saving medical devices. Customers are withheld the option to repair the things they own because the equipment is intentionally designed to be impossible to repair.