Category Archives: Consumer issues

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.

More on our Alaska/Hawaiian airline experience

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Our little adventured with Hawaiian/Alaska Airlines continues.

Late Wednesday afternoon, I checked in online for our Thursday afternoon flight back to Honolulu. Check in was easy. When the check-in process was done, I clicked on the link for boarding passes.

I was on alert, since on our flight from Honolulu to Seattle, Alaska’s boarding passes failed to contain our TSA PreCheck eligibility, and we were rejected at the PreCheck screening point.

So…the link displayed both of our boarding passes, properly displaying the PreCheck logo. And it then displayed a link to add the boarding passes to my Apple “Wallet,” which collects various things, from boarding passes to credit cards, in one easy-to-access place. So I did just that.

The problem is that the version of the boarding passes that appeared in my Apple Wallet was different than the one displayed on the airline app. The PreCheck logo was missing on the wallet version. It isn’t clear to me whether this is another glitch in the airline’s merger process or an independent issue.

The workaround is to access the boarding passes from the Hawaiian app rather than use the version it added to my wallet. Not a big deal, I guess, but less convenient and a glitch nonetheless.

But then I got more disappointing and somewhat aggravating news. Although Alaska Airlines has three—yes, THREE—lounges in the Seattle airport, none of them are located near the gates used by its Hawaiian Flights.

So although lounge access is a perk advertised as a benefit of our decision to splurge on First Class tickets, it’s a “make believe” perk because lounge access isn’t actually available in practice.

And then a hint to the new Alaska/Hawaiian airline. It really doesn’t help to direct passengers to the “southern end of the main terminal.” I’m sure that we’re not the only ones who don’t know which way is south. Wouldn’t it be simple to just display a small map of the terminal with a pointer to the Alaska/Hawaiian area? It would make these two flyers more comfortable to know in advance where we are headed.

Yes, I know. With the world crumbling all around us, this is all manini stuff and, besides, all these little indignities may be in the past once the merger of the two former rivals is completed, but that won’t be for a while yet.

In the meantime, I’m afraid we’ll be jumping back over to United. Yes, it has its own problems, but the overall experience is much better than what we’ve had with Alaska/Hawaiian on this journey.