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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."
...why do some of the complaints date to 2004?
Also, the few I read seemed to me like more of cases where people failed to read the fine print and then got upset when the other party enforced their contract rights.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Alright! All too often, the consumers voice is lost in the shuffle.
I attempted to submit questions about a company that bit me on Slashdot, just to see if I was the only one. After numerous rejected stories I ended up writing an article, and submitting it to OSNews.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10532
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
when i was looking to buy an MP3 player, i started researching my first choice, player A. to my dismay, i found tons of negative feedback about A. i then looked at B. tons of feedback about B. then C ... etc. every player i looked at had a lot of negative feedback. the point is, there are always some number of disgruntled customers. such online reporting cannot be used as an accurate guage of quality. if five people cry foul, you cannot say if it's 5 out of 10, or 5 out of a million.
They didn't figure out a way to leverage what epinions is doing and just promote that. I know that epinions is business oriented, but it is almost exactly the same concept.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
So then the phone says "change battery" and I went to tell them that I needed a new battery since the phone was under warranty. They said that "change battery" just meant charge battery. So I said, "so you mean its just broken, and it means charge the battery instead of change the battery?" and they said, "yeah." So I said, "Well then THAT MEANS THE PHONE IS FARKING BROKEN" in front of their entire store full of customers, and everyone started cracking up. They kicked me out of the store, and I was planning on coming back that night and torching it but I pussed out.
Has anybody actually read CR recently? Better still, who has compared the CR from the 1970's with the 2000's? The evaluations and the NEGATIVE reports have been supplanted by mostly happy-talk and non-substantive reviews of major manufacturers products.
The on-line CR has even less to recommend itself. Now they are putting the public out-front to eat the defamation actions where the old CR would have done the research and published the dirt.
I blame the CR board member Burnele Powell, a law professor and law school dean. Who better to blame than the lawyers?
My co-worker just spend about a half-hour going through his Bell cellular phone bill. It seems that every month since he started (about 6+ months ago I think) they've screwed up on his bill, and never in his favor. The main screwups seem to be with "companion phones" which are not supposed to be billed when they call each other, often they'll not charge when B calls A, but will for A calling B. This month he found $18 in errors... go figure.
How many people don't check their bills, and get screwed to the cellular company's profit...
I think in aggregate CR doesn't pull punches, that said their evaluation criteria may not match yours and in their framework of evaluations perhaps overall products have improved since the 70s. As a simple hypothetical to illustrate this latter point, the TV of 1971 and the TV of 2005 are very different beasts (even in the older "analog" tube variety). I would say that probably uniformly the worst 2005 TV is probably more passable than some of the best 1971 TVs...
Consumer Electronics Rebates should be one of the topics. I have had more trouble over 30 and 50 dollar rebates then I ever have had with my cell phone provider.
Most reductions in quality are probably due to fact that the courts are becoming less a protector of individual freedom, and more a tool to insure corporate profit. Since CR is not out to make a profit selling shitty profits, they cannot afford to fight long battles in court. OTOH, corporations are masters are abusing the courts and wasting the time of judges. The corporation know how to extend lawsuits, thereby purposefully increasing fines to huge amounts, and then complain about excessive damages, resulting in awards far less than court costs, and minimal compensation to the injured consumer.
There is really no way for the public to get an accurate picture of a product in a world where the corporation is free to use the courts as thier personal PR department.
And, to address you real concern, CR has always published certain complaints from consumers. Like anything on the net, one has to take it with a grain of salt. Of course, corporations want the average person to beleive everything he or she reads so they can sell thier penis elargement pills.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Now we get to the subject: publishing comments from the public. The original CR was a bi-monthly publication and the room for public comments in the magazine format was greatly limited. From my own observation the entire "critical" letter section did not exceed 12 column inches a year. You can rest assured that they edited the comments very well, indeed. Certainly no more than 24 letters were published in a year, and usually many fewer.
Now CR has decided to provide unlimited bitch and moan space, but no editor. There goes the neighborhood...
Turning to the corporate world: in the original incarnation, CR didn't accept the corporate "freebies" to test, didn't accept advertising and, they bought their test subjects from retail outlets so that they obtained a representative sample of the product (a car to a TV to washer-dryers). After purchasing random consumer end product, CR evaluated them based upon a reasonable objective criterion. The magazine gave a whole page to 2 pages on the testing methodology and the rationale for the testing method. Then they gave a rundown of the winners and losers along with a table showing the names, prices, and performance results for every product tested. Today, we don't see the test results, or the write-up, that the original CR provided.
I do believe that CR has been "chilled" in its speech by some corporate pressures and the "veggie libel" laws. It seems to me that the public bitch and moan page just cheap "content" generator provided in a way for CR to skirt the liability issues by making use of the Telecommunications Act of 1996's "bulletin board liability" shield.
I bought CR for the independent lab results, the professional writing and the high quality editing. Now we don't have the comprehensive testing or the writing - and editing just flew out the window.
Nowhere does the grandparent say that he should personally exploit the stupid people of the world, he is just exasperated that they persist in blaming the "world" for their stupidity. I can totally share that exasperation. At work there is a phone card machine, in large letters right above the bill acceptor, in both Spanish and English "This machine cannot dispense change - EXACT CHANGE ONLY". (Not knowing Spanish I am just assuming that it is correctly translated) Weekly someone says that they "got screwwed" by the machine because they only wanted a $5 card and the machine took the rest of their money.We open the machine up and get them their "change".One guy even did this twice.
The monitoring is not useful for that purpose in many cities. My father and I discussed this a few months ago. (He is a Captain on the Sheriff's office where I grew up.)
Many departments don't respond to alarm calls as emergency calls anymore as the vast majority of them are false alarms. That means that they'll fit you in along side the noise complaints etc. and not actually come running lights/siren just because the alarm went off.
His advice? Buy the alarm.. get nice loud speakers inside *and* outside of the house and ditch the monitoring service. If someone is determined enough to continue into your home after a loud speaker alerts everyone in the neighborhood to their presence, they are determined enough to kill you before the cops get even close.
And not to start a flame war - but thats also why I believe in having a gun available for home defense.
Josh.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
If you get a chance to visit the Consumer's Union open house (each year in early October at their headquarters in Yonkers, NY reachable from NYC by transit easily)- make an effort to turn up. It's really great to meet everyone there and chat with them. These people love what they do and care a great deal about their methods and approach and are happy to talk about things. I find it very uplifting to go on such a pilgramage when I can. (It is a biased sample, since presumable the most enthusiastic and interested people are the ones who are willing to turn up and host an open house in their labs, but still it's great!)
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.