Flushing our Environment down the Toilet

I was looking at the plastic packaging from the Earth First toilet paper we recently purchased, trying to determine if the plastic was recyclable. Generally, recyclable plastic bags have a recycling symbol with a number that tells you exactly what it is, and which lets you know if it is one of the types taken locally. But all I saw was the symbol on the package saying 100% recyclable.

Did that refer to the package, or just to the contents?

Then I noticed on the package in small print something saying that the plastic was designed to be environmentally friendly, and would expire in 18 months.

I had no idea what that meant. Would I have to bring it back to he public library, or what?

So I called the number on the package. I thought about pretending I was Gene Weingarten, but decided to play it straight.

The operator I talked to listened to my question and was flummoxed, and she sent me to customer service. The customer service agent had also never heard the question before, and said she'd get back to me after talking to the factory.

Just about this point in the conversation, I finally saw it -- the number 4 recycling symbol on the plastic wrap. So, that was my answer. Recyclable after all! I decided to not tell the person on the phone what I'd seen, mostly out of embarrassment.

When the phone call came a hour or so later and the caller ID said "Royal Paper," I ignored it, thinking it was some kind of telemarketing call. But my wife picked it up, and it was my agent calling back to make sure she had the details of the query. What brand of toilet paper was it exactly I was looking at?

Well, it turns out that Earth First is the environmentally friendly brand used by Royal Paper, I guess to differentiate it from their eco-disaster brands, like Soft & Silky and Petalo.

And when they finally called back with the answer, we found that the bag was not a recyclable number 4 plastic, but a decomposable number 4. That means that the bag decomposes over a small number of months.

But decomposable doesn't mean compostable. It doesn't turn into organic material, so we can't put it into the compost. It's not regular plastic and can't be recycled. If it ends up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it will turn into microscopic plastic bits that will make their way up the food chain. It has to go into the landfill.

Plus, the confusing packaging makes it likely that the bag will be thrown in with the rest of the plastic bags being turned into fleece or lumber, and may contaminate the entire load.

Royal Paper, how has your greenwashing (or greenwiping) helped anybody, except helping you market your green brand to gullible environmentalists?

It's Defeatable

I have in the past written about problems with TurboTax's It's Deductible product. So, in all fairness, I need to post the workaround that I discovered for my problem (with no help from Intuit).

My problem is that there is no way to get the charitable donation valuation data out of It's Deductible unless you are using Intuit's sister product, TurboTax. And, since my tax situation is outside of TurboTax's capabilities, I can't retrieve the data without purchasing a copy that I won't be able to use.

Here's the workaround: Start a tax return with TurboTax Online. You won't be charged until you either file or print your taxes, and you won't have to do either one of those. Go directly to the charitable donations section and load your data from It's Deductible. Then go back and revisit the section again. You will be able to view all of your donations, including valuations. You can't print the form (I suppose print screen would work), but I just copied down the numbers by hand. Then I just give that sheet to my accountant to complete that section of my tax return.

Pretty simple, eh? Too bad Intuit couldn't tell me that.

I wonder if they will remove the ability to do this in future years?

It's Debatable

Mr. Bob Meighan of Intuit has challenged me on the facts of It's Deductible, so I thought I should state what has transpired over the past two years very clearly here for anybody who cares. Then you can judge whether I'm being unreasonable or whether Intuit is engaging in unfair business practices.

My wife and I have been loyal customers of Intuit for over a decade. Our Quicken records go back to at least 1996, and I have a copy of the manual (remember when software publishers included manuals for their products) for Quicken version 2. We just upgraded to the latest release of the most expensive version of Quicken. According to my Quicken records, I first purchased TurboTax in 1997 (for tax year 1996). I've purchased at least one product from them every year since, usually the "Deluxe" or "Premier" version. I've convinced more than one friend to switch to doing their own taxes using TurboTax, rather than paying an accountant.

I'm sure that our family is exactly the type of customer that Intuit wants to court. We take charge of our own finances. When they came out with It's Deductible, we bought it, one of the first years it was available (2003). We always bought the desktop versions of all the products. One, it gave us control over our data, and, two, online software just didn't provide the same user experience.

In 2006, Intuit changed the way they marketed their tax product line. They eliminated the product rebates, which effectively raised the price. But they included more things. One of the things they included was It's Deductible. I no longer have the product packaging, but according to Amazon.com (where TurboTax 2005 is still available), TurboTax Premier 2005 with State (the product we bought) "now includes ItsDeductible software to help you accurately value donated items (for a bigger deduction!)."

When we received the disk, however, It's Deductible was not on the CD. After querying Intuit, we found out that what they meant was that we could use It's Deductible Online. If we wanted It's Deductible Desktop, we would have to pay extra.

That was misleading promise #1.

Rather than falling for the bait and switch, we decided to give ID Online a try. So, for the rest of 2006, we entered our donation information into the product. Indeed, the online version wasn't as good as the desktop version, but it was usable.

So, 2007 came around, and we continued to log our donations online. Then we purchased TurboTax Home and Business 2006. Again it was marketed as coming with It's Deductible: "Includes ItsDeductible software to help you accurately value items donated to charity." The TurboTax box did not say what Mr. Meighan said in his comment: "TurboTax 2006 provided a free copy of ItsDeductible Desktop (that was included on the TurboTax CD) for use with the 2006 TurboTax software. Its use was for tracking AND valuing your 2006 contributions. That was the offer."

Go back and read that again. The tax product we bought in 2007 came with software for tracking our 2006 charitable contributions. That's nothing short of idiotic. 2006 had come and gone, and any tracking that was going to happen had already happened. We were already using ID Online and in any case weren't going to support Intuit's bait and switch by switching to the desktop version.

But then we went to do our 2006 taxes. And TurboTax would not / could not import the data from It's Deductible that we had spent 12 months entering. In fact, we had no way of going into ID and even seeing the data so we could enter it by hand into TurboTax. At some point, they had surreptitiously removed any display of valuations from any displays. Nothing we had ever seen or agreed to had ever prepared us for the fact that Intuit now claimed ownership of the valuation data and would not provide it to us except via TurboTax Online. We were floored. Obviously, Intuit was doing everything they could to get people off the desktop versions of their product, and customer expectations had nothing to do with it.

Selling us ID as a bundle with TurboTax and not telling us that the data produced was not compatible or even available to that application was misleading promise #2.

Obviously, we were not the only ones so affected. TurboTax had posted instructions on their support site for a workaround. This workaround involved starting a free tax return using the online version of TurboTax, loading the It's Deductible data into it, and them manually copying the data into the desktop version.

So, in summary, Intuit had made a bad mistake, but they had provided customers with a workaround. Plus, they fixed TurboTax the next year so that it would be able to read data from the online version of ID. A bit reactive rather than planning their products, but at least they were responding. They've been there before, one year with reports that they included spyware as part of TurboTax, another year with reports that many people couldn't install without disabling their firewalls. But I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Which brings us to the present day. We've been using It's Deductible for another year. I'm thinking about doing our taxes. But now, our tax situation has become complicated enough that we can't use TurboTax. TurboTax is apparently the only way to unlock our donation data. And this time no workaround has been offered.

So, to summarize: We felt screwed by Intuit last year, but I was willing to forgive them, since they provided a workaround and since I understand how hard it is to release a new complex consumer product every year on a tight, non-flexible schedule. However, now I feel like Intuit is abusing their position of power. Nothing in any It's Deductible document I've ever seen has or agreement I've ever made has said that I have to use the next year's version of TurboTax to extract the data. No, implicit in the providing of a product to value donations is the promise to actually provide that data.

In a comment a couple days ago, I suggested that Intuit's actions might be a violation of federal antitrust law. In fact, I'm not an attorney, but look at the facts. I am being forced to buy a second product in order to enjoy the benefits of the first product I bought. In fact, this is worse than the standard tying or bundling. Customers who buy the first product don't know they have to buy the second product until they have invested a full year in the first product, and the information that went into that product is irretrievable. Who remembers what that sweater looked like that they donated eight months ago, or could even guess what it might be worth after that amount of time had passed?

I'm not asking for much. I just want the information that Intuit has promised me. And I don't want to have to shell out money on a product I can't use just to get it.

It's Detestable

It's the New Year, and what does that make you think about? Well, taxes, of course. And, specifically, tax avoidance strategies.

One thing we've always done is donate things around the house we no longer want to charities, and deduct the value of those donations from our income when doing our taxes. We win by getting rid of stuff and decreasing clutter, plus by getting a tax deduction. The charities win by selling what we donated.

A few years ago, we started using a program called "It's Deductible". It's created by the same folks, Intuit, that create Quicken and TurboTax, both of which we've become addicted to. You simply enter in each item being donated, and they miraculously figure out how much it is worth, so you can figure out your deduction. Easier, and more defensible to the IRS. It worked out pretty well, and its data was importable into TurboTax when we did our taxes.

Well, in the last couple of years, Intuit has changed their marketing strategy on this product, and in the process completely screwed over their current customers, including us. First, they started packaging It's Deductible with TurboTax. Buy TurboTax and get It's Deductible for free. Sounds like a good deal, and we fell for it.

We bought TurboTax, but there was no It's Deductible. It turned out, even though we bought the desktop version of the tax software, the free product was the online version of ID. Not what we expected, but ok, we'll try it. We can use it, even though it's not as convenient as having the software installed on our home computer and having the data right there.

Then the end of the year came up, and it turns out that TurboTax desktop cannot read the data from ID online. Get this. The product that was given away for free with TurboTax was not compatible with that very same product. Not only that, we could not even go into It's Deductible and get a report of the value of the items we gave away. You could not extract (or even just view) that data without loading it into a tax return prepared by TurboTax online! So, we created a fake return in TurboTax online, imported the ID data, and then manually typed the data into our real return.

That was last year. For some silly reason we decided to try it again. Surely, they would get it right this year.

In a way, they did. You can now load It's Deductible online data into the desktop version of TurboTax. But now our taxes have become complicated enough that we are hiring an accountant rather than using TurboTax. It feels good to tell Intuit that their stupid business practices are driving us away as customers. However, they have our data about donations trapped on their servers, and we have no way to get it out.

That's right. Intuit has created and marketed a product that let's you enter and track a year's worth of data. At the end of the year, they hold your data hostage to using their product. If you don't use their tax preparation software, you can't get your data back. Sounds like blackmail, false advertising, and other things that I won't print here (and I don't censor my blog).

I think Intuit is counting on the fact that a class action lawsuit is too costly and won't get us our data in time to file our taxes. But clearly as consumers we shouldn't have to take this kind of abuse by a company that we have patronized for many, many years.

If anybody has any ideas on how to deal with Intuit and get our data back, please let me know. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you don't start using any of their products, as they clearly don't put any value on protecting their customers' data.