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?
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.
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.
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make install -not war
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?
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.
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.