Customer Service

Long before banks started locating branches inside supermarkets, grocery stores acted as informal financial establishments, cashing payroll checks and personal checks to provide ready cash for their customers. That's starting to change. Whole Foods Market Inc. is considering banning the use of personal checks at its stores and this month stopped accepting checks at two stores in Los Angeles County and one in Arizona as a test. Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, the California division of British retailing giant Tesco, won't take personal checks at any of the 70 stores it operates in California.

More airlines are allowing passengers to check in for their flights using their cellphones and other mobile devices so they can avoid long lines and save time. Singapore Airlines passengers can now check in for any flight from anywhere in the world using their mobile phones. They can even change or select a seat. Later the airline plans to allow passengers to book tickets and view schedules, features that Southwest Airlines recently added to its mobile tool.

When Clifton Moore ran the Los Angeles airport system from 1968 to 1993, there wasn't much emphasis on dining and shopping for people waiting for their planes at LAX. About all they could get were the basics: a newspaper, a cup of coffee, cafeteria fare and a preflight libation. The mantra was "We are an airport, not a shopping mall," and people on the staff were proud that Los Angeles International Airport had the least concession space of any major airport in the United States. Not anymore.

Capping a day of dueling announcements from rival cellphone service providers, AT&T said Tuesday that it would allow users of Apple Inc.'s popular iPhone to make Internet telephone calls over its wireless network. Hours earlier, Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest mobile carrier, said it was teaming up with Internet search giant Google Inc. to release a family of cellular devices powered by Google's Android software, whose capacity to run a vast array of "apps" is widely thought to represent a threat to the iPhone.

Undercooked chicken. Poor customer service. A bug in the guacamole. For years, users on the popular review website Yelp have had the final -- and only -- word when reviewing their most-loved or most-hated local restaurants, clothing shops and beauty salons. Now business owners are getting their chance. And talking back is sweet. This month, Yelp will open up its site to public responses from businesses, a first for the 5-year-old San Francisco company.

Google Inc. made two changes to its search results pages Tuesday that it said would help more effectively direct users to the information they were seeking. The search engine giant said it was launching a technology to better understand what people were looking for online. It also will give longer lines of text, or snippets, after the search title, with relevant words in bold.

If you received a TV, DVD player or other electronic device for the holidays, you may find yourself wrestling with wires and cables trying to connect the new equipment to what you already have. Wirewize aims to help, offering connection instructions for your exact combination of electronic components. At the home page, click on "Get started."

Over the last year, the technology world has been enamored of the possibilities of moving into the cloud. That's the latest trend in computing that enables consumers to forget about storing their software and data on local hard drives -- where it can be zapped by electrical surges and soft-drink spillage -- and let companies such as Amazon .com Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. worry about keeping it safe on a network of remote servers. The cloud computing concept is so appealing that the city of Los Angeles is considering scrapping its current e-mail system and replacing it with a cloud-based offering from Google, joining more than 2 million businesses already using that company's system.

The Lakers just won the NBA championship, and Southern California celebrated with them, with hundreds of thousands of fans attracted to a parade down Figueroa Street and a rally at the Coliseum. There are 122 teams in the NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball. And Southern California is home to the team that best repays its fans "for all the emotion, money and time fans invest," according to an ESPN study to be unveiled today. That team is not the Lakers. That team is the Angels.

The post office doesn't deliver mail to Steven Stark's Santa Maria home anymore. It's not that Stark, the 36-year-old owner of an Internet company, is unpopular. He just decided that he'd rather deal with all of his correspondence online. Millions of Americans receive online versions of their bills and bank statements. But Stark is one of tens of thousands who have decided they don't need any physical mail, be it love letters or advertising come-ons.