Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sharing is bad. the RIAA told me so.
...can complain early?
being that the site is slashdotted, i cant RTFS.
however id surmise that complaints would date to 2004 because things sometimes happen in the past. just a guess though.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
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
Who does Abdulla think he is? I don't think I'd even hit reply for anything less than $50 million...
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
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.
This kind of witch hunt is totally unbalanced! We need a Corporations Union (independent of Congress) that has a list of consumer tricks to get out of paying bills. Like bankruptcy - they're liable to claim that getting sent to Iraq is making them pay their bills too late to keep their spouse and kids heated through the Winter. Post your list of corporate concerns, like not enough return on campaign bribes, below.
--
make install -not war
Oh no! It's their servers igniting!
I expect to see a severe downgrading of the reliability of whatever brand it is they use in the next Consumer Reports, or at least the addition of a column for 'Slashdot survivability'.
Perhaps someone should post a helpful article on their site, when it finally comes back up.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
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?
Thanks for providing the link - I can't believe I've never been to to that site before!
Culture is more than commerce
There was one exception though, the alarm company. Turns out the automatic renewal was a year contract, not a monthly contract. And it had to be cancelled by December 8. I didn't get my job offer until December 15, so I did what I did with every other company--told them I was moving, was completely unable to use their service, and requested to be let out of the contract. They wouldn't budge. "A contract was a contract." So I had the absurdity of having a contract to protect my house that went from January 8, 2004 to January 8, 2005, even though I moved out of the house on January 15, 2004!
Turns out that is part of their scheme. In fact, a lot of alarm companies do the same thing--they put you on a yearly, automatically renewed contract, but bill you monthly (or quarterly) so you think you can cancel at any time. The reality is alarm monitoring services are 100% useless.
There was a new commercial that one alarm company had. The smoke detector portion of the alarm went off. Then the phone rang. It was the alarm company asking if your house was on fire. The tag line? "Does your smoke detector do this?" My response--no, but if my house was really on fire, it wouldn't be forcing me to answer the phone in a burning building.
ADT, right? Their scam has been going on for quite some time, and several of my relatives have been sucked into it. They try to closely guard the secret about their alarm service, which is that you can get the same thing with $100 worth of Radio Shack parts and a few hours of your time, and with no contract or reoccuring fees.
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
Not much to this site. Mostly a great place to bitch and make businesses look bad. One thing I do notice is there is no way to reply to a story, which is awfully convienent because leafing through what's posted I realize lots of the stories are:
* People who didn't read the fine print on contractual agreements.
* Customer's who don't understand economics of scale (i.e. one person having troubles with cell phone reception in a given area of town does not justify the cost to put in a new tower for the company).
* People who are blaming the wrong person
(i.e. a la carte cable)
Don't blame Comcast because you can't buy channels one at a time. Comcast can't buy their stations from Viacom, ect like that, that is why they don't offer it to you. If you hate this arrangement, talk to TimeWarner (Entertainmant) or NBC Universal, not Comcast.
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.