Customer Service

About 160 China Eastern Airlines passengers remained stranded in Los Angeles on Tuesday night, more than two days after their flight to Shanghai was delayed because of problems with the plane's landing gear. The Airbus A380 was originally scheduled to take off at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, but mechanical problems arose as the plane began to taxi. Passengers remained onboard for about four hours as repairs were made, but they were eventually told to disembark.

U.S. airline delays in November fell for the third consecutive month as carriers took steps such as canceling flights rather than let late-arriving planes clog airports. The on-time arrival rate was 80%, up from 77% a year earlier, according to a U.S. Transportation Department report Thursday. "It looks like the airlines are acting more proactively to the snowstorms," said Jack Kies, who oversaw national airspace for the Federal Aviation Administration.

They must be slapping themselves on their backs at the Texas headquarters of Container Store Inc., retailer of boxes, shelves and other "storage solutions." For when Alex Frankel, the author of "Punching In," tried to get a job at Container Store by posing as a storage fanatic, he failed to get past the first interview.

Helen Nunci went to the Disney Institute looking for inspiration on how to create winning personal touches at the island retreat she runs, beyond the hand-lettered welcome cards she props on pillows and the playful antics of her staff. Nunci's business isn't in the resort industry: It's the Veterans Administration hospital in Puerto Rico, the busiest in the U.S. military system, with 66,000 patients a year, many of them returning wounded from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Karl Goetz looked at his Prada-branded cellphone Friday morning and saw a message he had never seen before. "Rejected connection." It was another way of saying his high-end phone was suddenly as useful for making calls as a pair of Prada pumps. But fashion was not to blame. The problem was with the premium cellphone service Voce, which mysteriously shut down Friday.

Sharon Vaughan had been warned that cellphone reception was notoriously bad in this wealthy Central Coast town of art boutiques and touristy shops selling pottery and seashells. But the reality of cellularless living didn't really sink in until she moved to her first apartment in town two years ago. "The only place I could get a call out was on a wooden deck outside my apartment," said Vaughan, a restaurant manager at Cambria Pines Lodge.

Starbucks Corp. and AT&T Inc. will start offering a mix of free and paid wireless Internet service in most of the international coffee retailer's U.S. shops, beginning this spring. The move announced Monday ends a six-year partnership with T-Mobile, which did not include free Wi-Fi and charged higher fees than AT&T will. Starbucks said it would give customers who use a Starbucks card two hours of free wireless access per day. More time than that will cost $3.99 for a two-hour session.

So let me ask you a question about the tip jar. I had a little thing with the calzone guy this week. I go to drop a buck in the tip jar and just as I am about to drop it in, he looks the other way. And then when I am leaving, he gives me this look [like] thanks for nothing. I mean if they don't notice it, what's the point? -- George Costanza, "Seinfeld," 1996 -- It may be a hand-painted tin can, a stray paper cup or a corporate-issue plexiglass cube, but it's becoming a fixture: the tip jar.

Buyers of this year's most advanced televisions might notice a curious new feature -- a little jack that connects the sets directly to the Internet. For now, the capabilities are modest. Viewers can't surf the Web as they can on their computers, but they can use their remote controls to get updated local weather forecasts, personalized stock quotes, on-demand access to a handful of TV shows such as "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and thousands of YouTube videos.

Heathrow has always been the bad boy of European airports, an international crossroads that periodically morphs into a black hole of chaos and delay with no more provocation than a good English fog. Even by Heathrow's standards, though, the debut of the long-awaited Terminal 5 -- the spacious, $8.