Business

Patty Neal reports it was more than just disconcerting to hear Christmas music today at the Mall at Chestnut Hill:

Too soon!

The mall heard Patty and responded not long after:

Sorry, someone must have put it in too soon! It's supposed to start playing just before Black Friday.

Keurig, the Reading-based maker of single-serving coffee machines, is suing a California company that makes knock-off K-cups.

In a lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, Keurig says the Rogers Family Co.'s OneCups violate two Keurig patents (here and here) for a "brew chamber for a single serve beverage brewer."

Filene's Basement will close all remaining stores and liquidate by the end of January 2012. As will the chain's current parent, Syms (which once had its own store on Summer Street, a block away from Filene's).

The Globe reports that this is the Basement's third bankruptcy filing in little over a decade -- and presumably the last.

It's also the second high-profile liquidation to afflict the Newbry (New England Life) building in Back Bay, which recently saw the closure of Borders Books.

When the guy picked out several bottles of vodka and rum at Bradley's Liquors on Boylston Street and gave manager Steven Steinberg his Pennsylvania driver's license, Steinberg compared the photo to the guy's face, saw it looked just like him, then ran the license through a scanner designed to detect fakes. When the machine said the ID was real, Steinberg took his money and let him walk out - right into a pair of Boston detectives, who quickly determined the guy was not, in fact, 21.

Steinberg's lawyer, Stephen Miller, told the Boston Licensing Board this morning Steinberg was the latest student-ghetto victim of Chinese companies that now churn out fake US driver's licenses so realistic they come with embedded microchips able to fool some of the scanners used by local bars and liquor stores to keep kids from getting their hands on booze. For $200 or so, a student with a longing for liquor can get a license that even has his or her picture - no more relying on older sibling's IDs.

Newer scanners can detect made-in-China IDs, but relatively few places have them yet - and they cost $3,500 apiece.

Pennsylvania licenses seem particularly vulnerable, Miller said.

Three animal groups say lobster pots and fishing lines used off the Massachusetts coast are killing endangered North Atlantic right whales and other large whales.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, the Humane Society of the US, Defenders of Wildlife and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society demand the government do something to stop the deaths - several of which they say occurred after the National Marine Fisheries Service released studies last fall that lobstering and large-scale fishing offshore were not jeopardizing right, humpback, fin and sei whales:

Atlantic large whales are in danger of entanglements from [lobster] trap/pot gear because they feed and travel in many of the same areas as the Fishery operates. The risk of entanglement occurs year-round, though the risk may be greatest during the summer and fall, when both whales and the lobster gear are the most concentrated in the same area.

The suit cites similar problems with lines and nets from fishing boats in search of fish in the area offshore from Maine to North Carolina.

The Globe reports the store where the Hi-Lo used to be opened today instead of its announced Wednesday date.

That didn't fool Whose Foods, though. Patty Neal tweets:

The 20-something protestors at WF have a drum circle! The customers are shouting at them "We love Whole Foods!"

NorthEndWaterfront.com reports that Mint, the New York-based car-rental service (as opposed to Mint, the personal-finance service or Mint, the coin-making service), has put some rental cars in the North End, to go along with its cars in downtown and Back Bay locations.

The state Architectural Access Board has ordered Converse to close its year-old store at 348 Newbury St. because the entrance does not comply with state accessibility regulations.

In a cease-and-desist order issued yesterday, the board said the sneaker vendor has repeatedly refused to do anything about the lack of access and said the store can only reopen after an inspection shows the store is actually handicap accessible. The store says it has been unable to do the work because of more pressing problems fixing leaks from the neighboring Hynes Green Line station.

Boston Granite Exchange, which is not actually based in Boston, has sued Greater Boston Granite, which is also not based in Boston, to get it to stop using that name.

Channel 4 reports Daddy's Junky Music has shut all its stores.

Neither community opponents nor union picketers could stop it, the Jamaica Plain Gazette reports.

Boston World Partnerships is planning a rolling networking event on the Red Line this Thursday: They're going to use the last car of the first inbound train out of JFK/UMass after 1 p.m. for a meet 'n' greet:

Join us in the last car of the Red Line as we travel from JFK/UMass to Davis and back to Kendall Square's Cambridge Innovation Center, with stops along the way to hear from and meet Boston and Cambridge’s most innovative people.

Don't even think of asking what happens if the train gets stuck in a tunnel or if one of the Sob Story People gets on the train with them.

Jeff Daniels acknowledges he walked out of his father's liquor store in Dudley Square holding an open bottle of beer on Aug. 12. But, he said, he was only going outside to dispose of the bottle - opened inside the store, he says, by a customer from whom he immediately grabbed the bottle and ordered out of the store.

Unfortunately for Daniels, two police officers on bikes happened to be riding by at that moment and they stopped to arrest him on a charge of drinking in public - and issue a citation to Daniels's father, Richard, longtime owner of Giant Liquors at 2371 Washington St.

Bob Slate has re-opened in Harvard Square. They're even on Twitter.

Good banking is good citizenship, but bad banking is technology's fault.

Apology from the bank.

CKP took this photo this morning on Boylston Street, where iPhoniacs began lining up last night to be the first to get a new phone. No doubt it would be pointless to attempt a Venn diagram showing the overlap between this group and the group of Verizon workers and Occupy Boston supporters outside the Verizon Store on Washington Street downtown yesterday evening:

Roving UHub photographer Gretchen snapped the new Whole Foods sign in Hyde Square this morning, adds:

I chatted with the workmen this morning and discovered I wasn't the only person who had stopped to take pictures.

APB put out for tagger in Dudley Square.

Seen running from the scene with a can of spray paint was a stout 60-something Caucasian male wearing glasses, appeared to be running toward Hyde Park.

More Dudley Square photos: http://s369.photobucket.com/albums/oo139/JohnAKeith/Goin%20down%20Dudley/

One of the country's last 5 & 10's yesterday filed a class action lawsuit against a Florida marketing firm it says keeps sending ads it doesn't want to its fax machine.

In its lawsuit, filed in US District Court, the owners of the West Concord 5 & 10 want RFB Distributors - and a series of other marketers still to be identified - to stop tying up its fax line.

Receiving Defendants' junk faxes caused the recipients to lose paper and toner consumed in the printing of Defendants' faxes. Moreover, Defendants' faxes used Plaintiff's fax machine. Defendants' faxes cost Plaintiff time, as Plaintiff and their employees wasted their time receiving, reviewing and routing Defendants' unauthorized faxes. That time otherwise would have been spent on Plaintiff's business activities. Defendants' faxes unlawfully interrupted Plaintiff's and the other class members' privacy interests in being left alone.

In addition to a ban on the faxes, the suit seeks $500 for each junk fax the store and its as yet unidentified fellow fax recipients have gotten.

The Wall Street Journal gets the scoop: Cheap food served slow no longer cutting it.

Boston Beer Corp. yesterday sued a former West Coast sales executive and the rival California brewer he went to work with to try to keep him from spilling any of its trade secrets.

In 1998, the California Supreme Court ruled other states could not enforce their non-compete clauses on its residents, because such clauses are illegal there. However, Boston Beer sued Judd Hausner and Anchor Brewing of San Francisco in US District Court in Boston, a state that allows non-compete clauses in employee contracts.

Back in the day, many towns had two kinds of refuse - trash, which went to a landfill or incinerator, and garbage, the food remains that went to a local pig farmer to feed his animals. Bootstrap Compost, based in Jamaica Plain, gives customers a dedicated garbage can, which it picks up and turns into compost.

CentralSquare.com has posted reports from several committees looking at the future of the Cambridge business district, with ideas ranging from creation of a full-service visitor information center, new plantings and better lighting. Some merchants want to create a "business improvement district," like the one in Downtown Crossing that would include hiring "ambassadors" to greet visitors - and broom panhandlers from the area (one landowner proposed removing all the benches in the square as a way to discourage the loitering classes).

One committee dealt with Central Square's "messaging" and came up with an elevator pitch:

Central Square is the pulse of Cambridge; an eclectic urban neighborhood where cultures mix, mingle and create. Day or night, Central Square is a vibrant destination for dance, theater, music, and global cuisine.

Jamaica Plain Patch interviews the new owner of Video Underground in Hyde Square, determined to make a go of it in an era of online downloads and DVD-dispensing boxes in supermarkets.

Could the BRA's sudden kissie-kissie with evil Hole overlord Vornado have anything to do with Vornado's part ownership of the group that wants to build a casino at Suffolk Downs - the one the mayor is betting on? Jason Schwartz assumes 2+2=4.