Consumers Union Wants You to Share Your Story

dcgirl20006 writes "Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports launched a new site to help consumers across the country who are dealing with phone bills, cell phone contracts, cable packages and Internet scams. Consumers experiencing problems are not alone. The site is searchable and consumers can find one that most closely matches the situation in which they are in. We don't have all the answers to every problem consumers may face, but some consumers have shared solutions and suggestions."

Comments

Does this stuff ever stop?

[suitepotato]

Like customers in tech support who still look for the "any" key, people at large cannot even deal with the basic entanglements they willfully get themselves into. Now we share our stories and knowledge about them?

I wonder how our parents ever got along not having this sort of Internet phenomenon. How ever did they pay the electric bill and understand their furnace service contract without this? Well I pay my cell phone bill and cable bill online by bank card, manage and modify my services by the same web interfaces, and keep track of the bills in MS Money (gnucash seems to be doggedly dedicated to doing things its way instead of mine). How hard is it really to deal with this?

And why do online scams get linked in here? The verious complexities and vagaries of cell phone contracts aren't a scam unless you're too stupid to RTFC and want to blame that instead on the cell company, defining scam as any time you aren't handheld by the other party through everything. News flash to those noobs: "due diligence" applies to all parties in a contract, and doesn't mean the other guy has to do yours for you.

The stupidity in the world never ends. "But you have to help me! I don't know how to press what button to put this silver disc in my Windows!" is but one facet of overall inanity.

I know some will go on about "nightmares" in dealing with their service providers, but I've found 99% of the time, the customer is dead wrong, their provider in the right legally and contractually, and the customer was just too stupid to read their contract, if not too stupid to live. "But it should work the way I think and not the way they say" is not a workable model no matter how much the CU wants it to. It isn't in software, it ain't in banking, and it isn't in utility service.