Consumer Watch--Praise and Shame
With today's ease of sharing information among customers and potential customers, I decided to put up this page of praise for the good companies I've dealt with, and the bad news about companies I've had problems with.
I used to be a consumer who just took it quietly when I wound up dealing with a bad company, but I finally decided that even if I can't affect my own outcome, I can pay forward by complaining when a company mistreats its customers, with the idea that if enough people express themselves, some of the worst companies will either slowly change or go out of business. Sometimes the person at the helm isn't even aware of the problem, so it gets fixed right away. Other organizations are led by people with poor ethics or no ethics, and the corporate culture is driven by that lack of ideals. The test comes not when a sale goes well, but when a serious mistake is made or a customer is treated with contempt. Ethical companies will make strides to correct their mistakes.
Before you deal with an unknown company, do some web searches for the company name and "complaints" or "sucks."
PRAISE
PCIsys.com in the Colorado Springs area offers honest Internet connectivity in competition with Comcast and Qwest. They offer a variety of connection types, including wireless connections up to 10Mbps at fair prices. They also allow unlimited use and have the infrastructure to support it. (They are in contrast to Comcast, which is found below on the shame list.) 2008
www.newegg.com. I've found consistently good prices and customer support at www.newegg.com. 2007
www.buy.com. I've found consistently good prices and customer support at www.buy.com. 2007
Auctiondrop sold me a large-screen LCD TV that didn't arrive as advertised, and my initial contact with customer service was unsatisfactory, but I wrote to CEO George Northup, and the problem was resolved. Companies make mistakes form time to time, but the real test is how they respond. AuctionDrop deserves praise. 2008
SHAME
Best Buy (www.bestbuy.com) When I bought a laptop based on their web site advertisement claiming it had a DVD/CD-RW drive, I found it had a drive worth $100 less, a standard DVD-ROM drive. I wrote the web site people about advertising fraud and got a reply saying essentially, "Tough. We print corrections to ads." I wrote the CEO, Brad Anderson, and got back a form letter on an entirely different subject, saying essentially, "You must have screwed up with the rebate process. Best Buy can't help with problems like that." Aside from the obvious customer-prevention policy, they must be incredibly swamped with complaints. (And not very bright, if they think it's a good trade to bilk a regular customer out of $100 and turn that regular customer into a non-customer. They've since lost far more money from me in purchases I now make elsewhere. I've found Circuit City, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Staples to be honest.) Without much hope, I wrote back to Brad Anderson and the second time around got no reply. So this pattern of poor ethics and customer abuse doesn't seem to be an isolated problem with the web site, but comes from the very top. 2003
www.motherboards.com. I
ordered a Gigabyte GA-7ZX motherboard from www.motherboards.com.
When I tried to flash a new BIOS, the utility reported an error. Rather than
send the board back immediately, I waited until Gigabyte posted another BIOS.
Same problem. I diagnosed the problem with Gigabyte, who told me to send
the board back to the reseller. I did. About a month
after I sent back the board, I sent
email to www.motherboards.com tech support asking about the status. No reply. I emailed sales. No reply. I called tech support, and amazingly enough they had just that day confirmed the board was defective. They also told me that instead of promptly replacing the motherboard as other businesses do, they might have to send the motherboard back to Gigagbyte, who would be expected to take many weeks to replace the board. I then did a web search and found www.motherboards.com mentioned in reports of lawsuits, and saw comments like this. I then wrote the comany president, Greg Ricks. No reply. The board was finally sent back and arrived just shy of two months after I sent it in. Needless to say, I won't deal with www.motherboards.com again. I have since tried other Gigabyte boards and had good luck.(BTW, this URL is not the same as www.motherboard.com, which takes you to TC Computers, who have dealt very fairly with me.)
Roxio, the providers of Easy CD Creator software for Adaptec. Besides the fact that they repeatedly turn out products that need patches to run correctly, they want to charge to help users deal with the defects. I started my 90-day support period dealing with a defect that resulted in the installation process terminating with no error message. (Eventually I found on a newsgroup--but not in a help file on the web site--instructions for renaming an InstallShield folder.) When I wanted to find out why an update patch (they issue many of these) could not recognize the fact that the base product was already installed, I was told I could get help only if I paid $35. As before, a lengthy search uncovered newsgroup discussions of this known defect, but Roxio posted no help files on the web site. My personal opinion is that charges for support should be asked of people who don't read the manual, but not from people struggling with product defects. At a minimum, known defects should be addressed with help files on the web site. I switched to Nero.
Intuit's Turbo Tax 2003 requires product activation now, so I won't be buying and instead am switching from Turbo Tax to Tax Cut. Product activation hassles are also why I'm looking at Linux as an alternative to Windows.
DirectTV continues to sponsor spam that arrives in my mailbox. I guess they don't understand that by now, a goodly number of people are aware that their only power against spammers is economic. Each time I get another spam sponsored by DirecTV, I mentally add another several years to the earliest date I would ever consider becoming a subscriber.
Omaha Steaks spam keeps arriving, and in this case has turned me from a customer into an ex-customer.
AARP informed an overweight aquaintence of mine that her request for health insurance was declined on the basis of being overweight. There was no request for more medical data before arriving at the decision, so I'm sorry to see the organization's image tarnished by this kind of discrimination. On the other hand, NASE (National Association for the Self-Employed), and now we're into the PRAISE area, not the shame of the AARP area, handled things the way an ethical company would. When looking at the insurance application, NASE looked at additional factors like great bone density, very low blood pressure, cholesterol well under control, etc, and granted insurance. AARP has become for me a symbol of one of the many things wrong with health insurance in the US.
rip-off complaints consumer praise roxio sucks www.motherboards.com sucks best buy sucks
So, say you buy a Dell machine with a Windows XP license. Thirteen months later it's dropped in a swimming pool, never to recover. You buy a replacement machine without the Windows license, because you figure you can use the one you already paid for. Not so, says Microsoft's license. The software with the Dell was only for that machine. I can't imagine a clearer example that proves Microsoft not only has monopoly power, but that they also abuse this power. Power corrupts. What a concept. Needless to say, I'm very unlikely to buy another Dell or other OEM system with a Windows license unless it's discounted so heavily that when I throw away the Windows paperwork and install Linux I won't feel I wasted any money.
Comcast, another mostly monopolistic company that has turned into an evil empire, has developed a reputation for advertising unlimited Internet connectivity (they sell by maximum speed and imply that is the only cap on your use) and then they periodically call their heaviest users and tell them they are using too much bandwidth. So there is a limit, but the limit is secret. Not only that, but if you're a heavier user in another month, they will cut you off with no further notice. I confirmed this is their actual policy by writing to the CEO, talking with a corporate representative, and talking with a representative at the network security group. They are not even smart enough to throttle usage for heavy customers rather than abruptly cuting them off, and a business office representative says business lines are subject to the same secret usage cap. If Comcast sold cars, they would prominently advertise that their models could go zero to sixty in five seconds but tell you only after you're victimized that you can drive 60mph only 24 hours per month. Rather than deal with such a dishonest company and their double-secret probation philosophy, I've moved. And Comcast will never get my cable TV business or my telehone business either.
Be wary of Broadvoice, the VoIP provider. They have a web page that purports to tell you "the bottom line" about what it costs. I signed up for two lines. When I eventually cancelled one of the lines because their service was not dependable enough to use without a backup landline, I got socked with a $39.95 cancellation fee. Yes, I could find mention of this outrageous fee hidden away in their FAQ pages, but it should be disclosed more plainly. I wrote to the Broadvoice CEO, David Epstein, about this behavior and my complaint was ignored, so this unethical corporate behavior comes right from the top.
I'm a high-volume eBay buyer and seller, so I've come to know that most eBayers are honest and ethical. A small minority will disappoint, by winning an auction and failing to pay, or thinking the auction was for something else entirely, but a small number of bad sellers go even below that standard and reveal pretty much non-existent ethics. Posting negative feedback on eBay would ordinarily seem the best recourse, but the eBay feedback system is horribly broken (it's scheduled to be fixed in a way that will leave it broken), as eBay allows people to leave retaliatory negative feedback without bothering to verify the facts. So all that's left to do is share bad sellers' names in a private network of buyers and sellers, and mention them on the web in case potential buyers are looking for more data points. Here is one1st-percentile seller.
- Horkusone charged me $50 ground shipping (undisclosed up front) for an as-is 19" LCD monitor when ethical sellers were charging between $20 and $25. The postage label showed under $27. But several emails to Horkusone went totally ignored. Be wary of eBayers like Horkusone who show contempt for the people they deal with.
GovernmentMoneySearch.com is lately one of the most abusive and egregious spammers I'm aware of.
rip-off complaints consumer praise roxio sucks www.motherboards.com sucks best buy sucks comcast sucks microsoft sucks AuctionDrop sucks Horjusone suckss
Site contents copyright © 2008 by John E. Stith. All rights reserved.
This page last updated on 01/07/08.