Drug Varieties: Is There No Relief?
Why take one medication when five will do? After years of pushing all-in-one remedies, the drug industry is touting remedies for specific ailments in order to boost sales.
This winter, Sandoz has Night Time Thera Flu to go with its regular Thera Flu. Bristol-Myers has brought out Nuprin Backache. Johnson & Johnson has Tylenol Extra Strength Headache Plus. Rhone-Poulenc Rorer offers two versions of its antacid Maalox: Gas Relief Formula or Heartburn Relief Formula.
Sterling Drug is selling five versions of its Bayer Select pain reliever; four contain the pain reliever acetaminophen and one contains ibuprofen, also an analgesic. There’s a Bayer Select for headaches, another for unspecified pain, and others for menstrual cramps or sinus pain or nighttime pain.
Is all this necessary? To find out, we checked the label on old-fashioned Bayer aspirin. It promises “fast relief” for all of the above ailments.
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Low card rates: Only six financial institutions in California offer credit card rates below 16%, a new survey from Consumer Action shows. Getting one of the cards is another matter.
According to the survey, the Bank of Lodi and Sacramento Savings Bank offer their cards only in Northern California. The Exchange Bank markets its card only to people who live in Sonoma County, while First Northern Bank markets its cards only in Yolo, Solano and Sacramento counties. Wells Fargo’s 15.4% variable rate card is for preferred customers.
The only low rate card available to consumers statewide is issued by the Bank of Canton of California. The rate is 13.5%, with an annual fee of $15.
For many California consumers, getting a low-rate card means going to an out-of-state institution. Among the larger institutions with widely available low rates cards are AT&T; Universal, First National Bank of Chicago, Norwest Financial and Wachovia Bank, the survey said.
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In case you missed it the first time: The ghost of furniture sales past is lurking this holiday season.
RB Furniture, shuttered months ago after a controversial bankruptcy sale, has surfaced in connection with a “lease assumption” sale. It seems Hall’s Furniture, based in Inglewood, has taken over the leases of two former RB locations in Northridge and Glendora. A few weeks ago, Hall’s distributed flyers proclaiming “RB Furniture . . . final liquidation” of inventory worth $1.875 million.
This seems a bit mysterious to us, since RB had already been liquidated, using some of the proceeds to settle false advertising charges. The Los Angeles County district attorney had charged that RB and its liquidator had deceived consumers by inflating furniture prices before marking them down.
We called Hall’s for an explanation of its RB liquidation sale, but no one was available to speak with us.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, which enforces laws regulating liquidation sales, commented: “We’ve seen the flyers, and we have some concerns.”
