Category Archives: Consumer issues

Some bad news for early morning park users

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There’s grumbling among users of Waialae Beach Park over a change in parking lot hours. Instead of being opened at 6 a.m., it will now remain locked until 7.

The change doesn’t affect us, since we walk to the park, but lots of others who come to the park from farther away are impacted.

This although Honolulu’s Department of Parks and Recreation website claims the parking lot is open at 5 a.m.

Park hours

That’s a fantasy!

For some time, the parking lot has been unlocked about 6 a.m., and it is common for there to be a line of cars on the street waiting for the 6 a.m. opening.

But recently park users have found themselves waiting in vain as the parking lot isn’t being opened until much later.

One early morning regular at the park phoned the city to complain, and shared his experience with me.

He was told that the parking lot will now scheduled remain closed until 7 a.m. due to staffing shortages.

If it is unlocked earlier, that’s just a lucky bonus, he was told.

And it appears this new policy applies to other city parks as well.

I went looking for any mention of this change in the city’s Docushare system, where you can find all manner of city council records, including communications to and from the various city departments. I found nothing recent about park hours, park closures, etc. Nothing in the minutes of the city council committee that is tasked with parks issues. It isn’t clear whether members of the City Council are aware of the change, or the contours and broader impact of the department’s staffing shortage.

I haven’t dug down deeper to figure out whether this is the result of unfilled positions or budget cutbacks, or a combination.

Maybe someone who follows city budget issues can chime in.

Shrinkage

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[See the note at the bottom of this post.]

Auwe, Diamond Bakery!

I was standing in line at the Kahala Long’s store last weekend and spotted a display of soda crackers at what appeared to be a good sale price. So I grabbed a box and tossed it into the cart with the other items.

It was only later that I realized I had not been shopping defensively enough and had been tricked!

Although the new box looked at first glance like the standard Diamond Bakery soda cracker box, but it was actually much smaller. That became clear when seen side-by-side with the older box already in our pantry.

The old box contained 8 packages of crackers with a total weight of 13 ounces. The new box boasts the same 8 packages, but it weighs only 8.5 ounces.

The difference is that the new crackers are significantly smaller than the traditional Diamond Bakery soda crackers, as you can see in the photos below.

There was no indication on the box that the contents were not the traditional Diamond Bakery crackers, but rather a new, mini version that weighs 35% less than the crackers sold up until now.

Is the company doing to its soda crackers what it previously did to saloon pilots? Passing off a small, inferior version as a suitable replacement for the traditional cracker?

I truly hope not. Just raise the price, don’t wreck the product.

**Note: One of the first comments received added new and important information. Tracy wrote:

Aloha Ian! I think you’re comparing two completely different items. The soda crackers are the larger box and larger cracker but the second one is lightly SALTED soda crackers which were always smaller than the soda crackers.

So I’ll be off to the store to check this out!

A bit of fresh Air

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Well, I traded in my two year old iPhone 15 Pro for a new super-thin iPhone 17 Air! I justified the expense to myself by remembering that I didn’t give in to the recent temptation to buy an expensive new camera that I’ve had my eye on.

The iPhone shopping happened late on Sunday afternoon at the Kahala Apple Store.

It’s only 2/3 the thickness of my old phone, and much thinner than my Apple Watch (see photo to the right). It’s really a pleasure to handle, although after using it for a while and wearing the new off, it will just feel like another phone.

This Air model has been criticized for having less battery capacity than the other iPhone 17 series, but that misses the point. It’s will run considerably longer on a charge than the phone it is replacing! That’s plenty! And its camera lacks all the bells and whistles of the latest 17 Pro models. But I’ve got a drawer full of cameras and don’t need the latest/greatest iPhone camera. The one in the Air is, again, more than good enough!

Migrating to a new phone is usually straightforward. I’ve made most of these transitions at home without any major problems. This time I decided to go to the Apple Store to see the phone before buying it, and that led to a few glitches in the process. I won’t describe them here, but it meant that we were trapped waiting at the store for too long, and even then I finished the process later at home.

There have been a couple of other hiccups while reinstalling a few things in my phone’s Apple Wallet. No major issues, at least not yet.

Meda is still using her iPhone 12 Mini, although I’m tempting her to upgrade as well. So if you would like to buy a used iPhone Mini, let me know (email ian@ilind.net).

A top-notch experience on our Hawaiian flight back to Honolulu

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Yes, we were disappointed by Alaska’s version of flying between Hawaii and the west coast, in our case to Seattle.

Yesterday’s Hawaiian flight back was a wholly different experience, service at a far higher level.

Unlike Alaska’s crew, which mostly disappeared after the meal service in first class, the Hawaiian crew yesterday stopped by repeatedly to check if I needed anything, to offer more drinks (I stopped after two), and generally to make sure I was doing okay. Meda had the same treatment from the flight attendant working the other aisle.

The meal was very good, and it came with salt and pepper folded inside a tiny paper aloha shirt! Dessert and a glass of Courvoisier followed.

Although Hawaiian doesn’t provide for pre-ordering a preferred meal from a list of options, we had not problem getting what we wanted. Interestingly, we were able to select our meal in advance on the Alaska Air flight to Seattle the week before.

We had a moment of panic after figuring out that the originally scheduled aircraft, a 737, had been replaced by new and quite luxurious 787-9. But in the change, our seats moved from 4A & 4B to 4C and 4G. We worried that the new seat assignments meant that we wouldn’t be sitting together. But as soon as we boarded, I saw that the configuration up front was 1-2-1, with each seat in its own enclosure. So Meda and I were seated next to each other, and could lower the divider between our seats. The only “problem,” an a minor one, was that the seats were offset by 90 degrees (the one on the left 45 degrees to the left, and the one on the right about 45 degrees to the right. But that was a very minor problem, given the comfort of the seating and the attentiveness of the flight attendants.

The question is whether the merge airline will emulate Hawaiian’s high level of in-flight service, or drop down to the kind of service we had on the Alaska flight to Seattle.