In a press release touting its online deals that will start on Thursday, the chain announced that the deals will only be online, and the stores will stay closed. ”

“On Thanksgiving Day, customers can shop from home on Staples.com and then continue their shopping in stores starting at 6 a.m. on Black Friday,” the company’s president of North American stores and online shopping, Demos Parneros, said in a statement.

When it has opened on Thanksgiving Day, Staples has at least limited its hours, opening at 9 P.M. in 2013 and 6 P.M. to 10 P.M. in 2014.

Companies choosing to stay closed on the holiday harvest at least some online goodwill and good publicity, which may or may not be worth the loss in sales. Black Friday weekend sales are actually falling, so maybe other retailers will take the hint too.

Some banks have faith in Americans, though. Not many, but some. One example is First Niagara, a regional bank in upstate New York: they took over many of HSBC’s consumer branches when HSBC decided to quit the consumer banking market.

They don’t have very many credit card customers: only about 250,000 cards, which is tiny compared to the Bank of Americas and Capital Ones of the world. However, First Niagara has faith in their customers. They’re the largest bank requiring their credit card customers to use PINs instead of signatures for transactions.

A few smaller banks are using PINs, including First Premier, a bank catering to less creditworthy consumers that has some notoriously terrible cards. Target also plans to require customers to use PINs once they get around to re-issuing EMV cards for their store cards.

Here’s the catch: customers won’t be allowed to use the same PIN on both their credit and debit cards. Will they be able to remember four extra digits? I have faith in the American people. Maybe.

Bank Bets Americans Can Remember Another PIN [Wall Street Journal]

She told her story to local news hoping to warn others away from the same scam. She says that a well-dressed man driving an SUV came up to her in a Winco grocery store parking lot and offered to sell her an iPad mini 3 for $200, which is $150 below the starting list price for that model. She haggled the price down to $80, and probably felt like she was getting a great deal.

Well, until she opened up the box and found a bubble-wrapped piece of tile in place of an iPad. She decided to speak out to local media, even though she felt stupid, because the man’s vehicle was packed with other electronics. “He had TV, other iPads and Xbox Ones and also phone boxes,” she told Victor Valley News. That’s a lot of potential victims. Be careful out there, everyone, and stay away from the Some Dude In A Parking Lot electronics store.

Woman Buys Fake Ipad Outside Winco in Victorville [Victor Valley News]

It’s illegal for colleges to pay per-student commissions for recruiting agents if those students get federal financial aid. But this sort of arrangement is perfectly legal if an agent is rewarded for attracting foreign students who aren’t eligible for that aid.

The Wall Street Journal reports that an estimated 1-in-4 colleges now pay independent overseas recruiters to identify and woo applicants.

Wichita State University in Kansas pays up to $1,600 per enrolled student to these agents. As a result, it has seen foreign student applications shoot up “precipitously” since 2013.

And while it might make sense both financially for schools to target international students who often pay higher tuition, critics say the independent recruiting system is rife with fraud and other problems.

Wichita State acknowledges that it had to cut ties with an agent it suspected of faking transcripts. The school rejected those applicants but continues to use agents.

Dickinson State University in North Dakota stopped using agents after it was sanctioned by its accrediting body. An audit of the school found that agent-recruited students weren’t fulfilling graduation requirements.

It’s not just schools that are hiring agents. A large number of students in China looking to attend U.S. schools also hire these same recruiters. That means the agents may be getting paid twice for doing one job.

A U.C. Berkeley student from China tells the Journal that his family paid around $30,000 to have an agent redo his application essay. He says he was told that “no one knows about the whole application process better than they do so I had no choice.”

A student at NYU, the school with the highest percentage of international students in the U.S., admits to paying $26,000 to have her essay ghostwritten. The story told in her essay — about her father reforming his life after being dragged out of a gambling den — didn’t actually happen to her.

Amazon appears to be taking a page out of Apple’s playbook by removing competitors’ products from its virtual shelves. The e-commerce giant said today that would prohibit the sale of video-streaming devices from rivals Google and Apple that aren’t compatible with its own Prime video service. 

In an email to marketplace sellers, Amazon said it would stop selling Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast, Bloomberg reports.

The online retailer said that sellers would be prohibited from posting new listings for the products starting immediately, while current postings will be taken down Oct. 29.

According to Amazon, the decision to remove the products came about because of difficulties streaming Amazon’s Prime service on Chromecast and Apple TV.

“Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime,” Amazon said. “It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

Amazon will continue to sell devices that work with Prime, like the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles.

While it might make sense to stop selling products that don’t work with your preferred system, not all Amazon customers are Prime members and have access to the streaming service.

“Fewer than 20% of Amazon customers are Prime members,” Michael Pachter, a financial analyst, tells Bloomberg. “What about the 80% who want an Apple TV to stream Netflix? I think that the excuse of avoiding customer confusion is a not-so-veiled attempt to favor Amazon first-party products over third-party products, and think it was a bad move.”

Amazon to Ban Sale of Apple, Google Video-Streaming Devices [Bloomberg]

GM is kicking off the pilot program — called Let’s Drive NYC — for residents of an apartment complex in Times Square, offering rentals either for $10 per hour or $75 per day, the company said in a press release. Customers in the test program can opt for either a Chevrolet Trax compact sport utility vehicle or Chevy Equinox small SUV.

If the test is successful, the company could roll it out to elsewhere — there are already plans to give it a go in another U.S. city that GM isn’t identifying.

“We view evolving consumer preferences, such as car-sharing, as real business opportunities,” President Dan Ammann said.

Let’s Drive NYC starts today and costs less than Zipcar, which charges $12.75 per hour during the week and $94 for a day and more on weekends. Residents of the apartment complex included in the pilot program will also get three hours of free rentals per month when they make their rent payments.

GM isn’t the first to introduce a car-sharing program, albeit this one is a bit different: Ford launched a peer-to-peer service in six cities recently that allows individual car owners to rent their vehicles out to strangers via an app.

Passes for Yosemite in California, for example, will jump from $20 to $30 for a single vehicle entry, the Rocky Mountain in Colorado will see an annual pass go from $40 to $80 and an annual pass for the Everglades will now cost $40 instead of $25.

Fees for camping, showering, paddleboating, and cave tours at 176 parks will also see a hike, reports the Washington Post.

The National Park Service needs $11.5 billion to do all the repairs necessary to keep up with the 293 million people who visit the parks each year, National Parks director Jonathan Jarvis told the Associated Press.

“We cannot greet them with rundown facilities,” he told the Associated Press.

Most parks haven’t seen entry fees go up since 2008, or some, since 2006. Fee increases were put on hold during the recession, so people would still show up.

If you’re not into paying entry fees, there are two days coming up where all parks will be free to access: on Oct. 8, to celebrate “Senior Skip Day,” says a rep from the NPS, as well as Veterans Day, Nov. 11. If you want extras like camping or boats, you’ll still have to pay for those services and reservations.

Bob Brown at Network World gave the box a try for a month and couldn’t tell his readers whether a subscription would be worth their time because he doesn’t have the box yet. The box for July.

“I guess I should have been concerned about NBB from the start when I received email on July 28 informing me that my box would arrive in mid-July,” he wrote. “Oh, maybe they meant 2016?” That’s a lot of lead time, so probably not.

He’s not alone, though. The startup’s Facebook page is full of posts from customers complaining that they haven’t received July or August boxes, and September’s hasn’t shipped yet either.

The company claims that they’ve had problems sourcing their products and with “fulfillment,” or actually getting the boxes shipped out.

Reddit-inspired Narwhal Bacon Box is fizzling, not sizzling [Network World]

For the second time this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has flexed its muscles when it comes to reining in unscrupulous indirect auto loan financiers. Just days after taking action against Fifth Third Bank for auto-lending discrimination, the Bureau ordered a Los Angeles-based finance company and its auto title lending subsidiary to pay $48.3 million in fines and relief to affected borrowers stemming from a laundry list of allegedly illegal debt collection practices.

A proposed consent order [PDF] accuses Westlake Services and Wilshire Consumer Credit of using a variety of legally questionable tactics since at least 2010.

These include: using phony caller ID information; falsely threatening to refer borrowers for criminal prosecution; and illegally disclosing information about debts to borrowers’ employers, friends, and family.

Westlake Services, which specializes in purchasing and servicing auto loans, including many subprime and near-subprime loans, purchased loans from auto dealers nationwide. Wilshire Consumer Credit, a wholly owned subsidiary of Westlake, offers auto title loans directly to consumers, largely via the Internet, and services those loans. The company also purchases and services auto title loans made by others.

An investigation by the CFPB found that starting in January 2010, the companies’ debt collectors began using a web-based service called Skip Tracy — which allowed them to change the phone number and caller ID that recipients see — to place calls to more than 137,000 loan borrowers.

The Bureau found that collectors altered the calls to make it appear they were coming from other entities, including repossession companies. The debt collectors would then pretend during the call that they were calling from repossession companies and make threats that the borrowers’ vehicles were in immediate danger of being repossessed.

Collectors also allegedly used Skip Tracy to make it appear as if other businesses were contacting customers, with IDs showing things like “flower shop.” The collectors then kept up the ruse by posing as a flower shop employee in order to trick customers into disclosing their location or the location of their vehicle.

In other instances, the complaint states that the companies used the phone service to make it look as if they were calling from investigation or enforcement divisions.

“The companies explicitly and implicitly threatened to file criminal charges against consumers even when they had not decided to refer the borrowers to criminal authorities,” the CFPB says.”These tactics likely misled consumers into believing they needed to make a payment urgently to avoid an investigation.”

From January 2010 to April 2014, Westlake and Wilshire called consumers whose vehicles had already been repossessed and used Skip Tracy to make it appear the calls were coming from a party associated with the word “storage.”

During these calls, collectors falsely implied that the that the vehicles would be released if the borrowers made a partial payment on the account. In reality, the companies would actually only release a repossessed vehicle after a borrower paid the full amount due.

The companies also illegally contacted borrowers’ employers, friends, and family members about overdue debts.

According to the CFPB complaint, the companies paid a third-party repossession company to make debt collection calls to borrowers, even when the companies had not decided to repossess the consumers’ vehicles or the companies had no reason to believe repossession was imminent.

“This tactic likely misled consumers into believing that they needed to make a payment urgently to avoid repossession,” the CFPB claims.

In addition to deceiving consumers with illegal debt collection practices, the CFPB found Westlake and Wilshire violated consumer financial protection laws with advertising, customer relations and account servicing.

From Jan. 2010 to Sept. 2010 the company deceived borrowers about the effects of due date changes or extensions to loan terms, as well as hid the true cost of credit.

Specifically, the CFPB found that Wilshire used monthly interest rates or other interest rates in advertisements for auto title loans in 2012 and 2013, without disclosing the loans’ annual percentage rate as required by law.

Monthly rates advertised by Wilshire only appeared in small print on its website. Representatives speaking with prospective borrowers on the phone would answer questions about the cost of loans by providing monthly rates or other rates instead of the annual percentage rate.

Under the terms of a proposed CFPB consent order, Wilshire and Westlake must provide $44.1 million in redress to affected borrowers. The funds will be issued in the form of $25.8 million in cash, while the remainder will come from balance reductions to open accounts.

The company must also pay a $4.25 million civil penalty to the CFPB’s Civil Penalty Fund, as well as end deceptive debt collection practices, protect consumers’ private information and end unlawful advertisements.

Getting a new drug on the market is a costly and time-consuming process, which is why brand-name drugs have exclusivity windows that last for years. The lack of competition lets them determine the price, recoup their expenses, and make a profit.

Creating a generic equivalent used to also require significant time and effort to get FDA approval, but the 1984 Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act (aka Hatch-Waxman Act) abbreviated the process so long as the generic was equivalent to the original.

Additionally, for decades states have allowed pharmacists to substitute “AB-rated,” therapeutically equivalent generics for brand-names unless the patient or physician demands otherwise. But for a drug to get that AB rating from the Food and Drug Administration it must, among other factors, not only contain the same active pharmaceutical ingredient as the brand-name drug, but also the same dosage and form.

And this is where “product hopping” comes in.

Imagine you’re the head of a drug company that’s bringing in a pile of cash for your popular brand-name product Morranicillin. You know that the patent on this wonder drug is set to expire in the not so distant future and that GenericCorpUSA is waiting in the wings to introduce a cheaper equivalent that will immediately decimate your market share because most pharmacies will automatically start swapping out the new generic.

But in order for that generic version of Morranicillin to be auto-swapped at the pharmacy, it needs to be virtually identical. So in advance of the generic launch, you tweak the dosage of standard Morranicillin, or switch the standard version from tablets to capsules.

Each time you do this, GenericCorpUSA needs to revise its generic to match. At the same time, the makers of Morranicillin stop selling the older, slightly different version of the drug and flood doctors’ offices with free samples of the version for which there isn’t a ready generic equivalent.

Studies show that doctors often don’t think about the cost of a particular drug they prescribe.

“Doctors’ ignorance of costs, combined with their tendency to underestimate the price of expensive drugs and overestimate the price of inexpensive ones, demonstrate a lack of appreciation of the large difference in cost between inexpensive and expensive drugs,” concluded the authors of one 2007 study.

Additionally, once doctors find something that works, many tend to stick with that brand even when a generic becomes available.

In a brief [PDF] filed with a federal appeals court this week, the Federal Trade Commission argues that, through product hopping, a “brand-name manufacturer’s well-timed tweaks to its drugs can thus create an ever-retreating horizon of generic competition at the expense of consumers.”

The FTC’s brief is related to a lawsuit between two drug companies — Warner Chilcott, maker of brand-name acne drug Doryx, and Mylan, which is seeking to release a generic version.

Mylan accuses Warner Chilcott of violating federal antitrust laws by engaging in three different product hop reformulations of Doryx. The suit claims these changes were or no therapeutic benefit to patients and only served to delay the release of a true generic equivalent for Doryx.

The FTC isn’t necessarily siding with Mylan in this lawsuit, but the agency does believe that the U.S. District Court judge erred in granting summary judgment to Warner Chilcott.

In granting that judgment, the court ruled that Doryx was readily interchangeable with other oral tetracyclines and therefore no reasonable juror could believe that Warner Chilcott had monopoly power.

And even though the court accepted Mylan’s argument that the Doryx product hopping was done “primarily to defeat generic competition,” it also said that Mylan could have invested money to advertise and market its generic product if it wanted to compete with Doryx, rather than relying on the “regulatory windfall” provided by automatic substitution at the pharmacy.

The FTC counters in its brief that the District Court exhibited a “basic misunderstanding of the special characteristics of the pharmaceutical marketplace.”

The agency argues that automatic substitution is necessary to address the “disconnect between prescribing physicians and payors” that “often insulates brand-name prescription drugs from effective price competition.” It contends that without the ready availability of an AB-rated generic, “a given drug may be priced at monopoly levels even if other drugs are therapeutically similar.”

And while product hopping might not be illegal, the FTC says it can sometimes be evidence of monopoly power.

“The manufacturer of a brand-name drug generally undertakes a product hop to preserve high profits that generic versions of the same drug would undercut but that no alternative drug, competing in the same market, has yet disciplined,” explains the brief. “If such a broader market existed, competition from those alternative drugs should already have driven down the price for the brand-name drug, and a brand company would thus normally have little incentive to make minor product changes solely to defeat generic entry.”

The FTC points to the recent Second Circuit opinion [PDF] in a lawsuit filed by the state of New York against drug maker Actavis. The drug company was accused of pulling nearly all of its Namenda IR Alzheimer’s drug from the market shortly before the patent expired, and making a push on the new Namenda XR drug with a patent that protects the company through 2029. By shifting doctors away from prescribing IR, Actavis took away opportunities for generic drug makers to offer a lower-cost version of the original.

In that case, the Second Circuit concluded that the forced switch was anticompetitive because it had the “effect of significantly reducing usage of rivals’ products” in order to protect the Namenda monopoly.

This ruling, argues the FTC, contradicts the conclusion of the lower court in the Mylan case.

The Second Circuit also held that to make an antitrust case, “generics need not be barred ‘from all means of distribution’ if they are ‘bar[red]… from the cost-efficient ones,'” and that when it comes to generic drugs automatic substitution is “the only cost-efficient means of competing available to generic manufacturers.”

Whether product hopping is a matter of legally trying to protect one’s investment or a predatory, anticompetitive practice will likely be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court at some point. Regardless of whether it’s legal, it does highlight the importance of talking to your physician to make sure you’re not being prescribed a brand-name drug just because they haven’t thought about a possible lower-cost generic.