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New York Sues Dell for Poor Customer Service
Phanatic1a writes "New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is suing Dell, alleging bait and switch financing tactics, false advertising, and 'numerous other deceptive business practices relating to their technical support services, promotional financing, rebate offers, and billing and collection activity.' According to Cuomo himself, 'At Dell, customer service means no service at all.'"
I kid you not, I just finished a gold support call to Dell for a server. They were prompt and courteous. They didn't know how to fix it offhand, but called me back quickly with the right information. The guy even spoke English, which was a very pleasant surprise.
Is a loan sharking operation which will charge you 29.99% APR. I quickly transferred my balances and will never use that service again.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
Had the misfortune to call Linksys recently too. An entire Saturday wasted going through the first-layer support morons, who were just reading the scripts from their screens. Some of them — reading so slowly, I could not help thinking, they are on drugs. Others — lying that the supervisor is "on a meeting"...
Finally, someone had brains enough to realize, the problem is above his level and transfered me to the second level support person, who quickly understood, what I was saying all along, and proceeded to tell me, how to cold-reset the wonder Linux-router, which promptly fixed the problem — 6 hours after the first phone call to Linksys...
Don't know, if any amount of legal prosecution can help against this sort of moronity.
The main legal beef of this prosecution, I guess, are the (alleged) financing/collection irregularities — a heavily legislated and regulated area. The populist "no service at all" rhethorics are just thrown in to help Mr. Guomo repeat Mr. Spitzer's feat later on...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Recently I had a problem with my printer and it took 27 calls over 3 days and about 16 hours of waiting on the phone and talking to Indian after Indian whom couldn't answer my problem. My problem isn't with Indians as I have many of them as friends and Indians are very smart people. My problem is with Dell outsourcing to India and giving them no power to correct even the smallest of issues. Basically if it's not on their troubleshooting sheet they have in front of them chalked up with canned questions/answers, then you are SOL.
When are companies going to understand that they may get a first time buyer with their cut-rate prices. But if that buyer ever has a problem with the hardware and receives cut-rate support, they are not going to buy from the same company again.
Just one reason I buy HP.
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Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
Dangit, I agree with you: I'm sick of people who are unclear on the concept of just what a "free market" is.
... why use it to mean anything else?
"Free market" implies that there is no single party or group that has control over a market, not just governments. A single company (e.g. Microsoft in the OS space), or a cartel (e.g., the RIAA member companies) that can dictate the vast bulk of a market's behavior thus means the market is no longer free or capable of the self-correcting behavior that are the benefits of a free market.
Gas prices are high because a single cartel, OPEC, dictates the price per barrel. This is not a free market.
California's "deregulation" was more appropriately a "re-regulation," and was only called "deregulation" for marketing purposes. It failed to help end consumers, of course, because they really don't have a choice where their power comes from; there's no way to go to the corner store and buy a few kilowatt-months to take home and keep in the fridge til ya need them. In other words, it's a market that is necessarily never free, because you always have one company controlling delivery.
It keeps being used only in the sense of "no government interference," which is just wrong. Maybe that's an accepted meaning, but since a market dominated by any entity or cartel cannot be free and does not have the benefits of a really free market, then
Well, if a large portion of NY citizens are being routinely shafted by Dell, it certainly is simpler for the AG to sue than for the court system to handle hundreds of individual cases. Also, Attorney Generals arepublic servants. It is okay for them to do something nice for their citizens. This is exactly the kind of case that regular people can benefit from. Just because it doesn't involve the mafia or large sums of money doesn't mean that this case is not worth the time.
Well... 99% of US businesses would be violating laws in my home country, Norway. On all areas, marketing, pricing, service, warranties etc. Why? Simply because the laws require honesty and has clear regulations as to what is allowed, what the companies obligations to their customers are etc. I haven't seen many TV commercials during my 10+ years here in the US that would have been allowed back home.
In USA, the customer is without rights in most cases and the corporations can do what the heck they want. Not to mention they can tell you lies without consequences. Example: The stupid commercial fro free credit reports. $30 or more per month is the cost for those "free" reports. Free, my ass.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
So, I had a broken A key on a laptop. The damned thing fell off completely. I call up Dell support expecting them to immediatly send out a new keyboard pad. After 45 minutes on hold, the rep decides to take me through Dells little software troubleshooter program they load. I interrupt him "whoa, wait. I am holding the key in my hand! It is completely detached from the keyboard!" His response, "oh...ok...so click on Hardware..." And he continues on with the software troubleshooting!! At the end he asks me if it fixed the issue. I told him "no, I'm still holding the key in my hand." Finally he says "ok, we'll send you out a new keypad"
This is not true. OPEC exists to keep oil prices high
Wrong. OPEC's goal is to keep PROFITS high. Getting the highest profits does NOT result from arbitrarily high prices. But, when producers collaborate, the price at which profit is maximized is higher than where it would be if producers competed. THAT's the goal of a cartel - eliminate downward price pressure caused by competition.
But, even the cartel has long and short term pressures on the oil price. In the short term, if the price goes too high, they move past the optimum point, the decreased volume of sales is not offset by the increased margin, and their profits actually go down. And even if they are at the optimal short-term price point for maximizing profits, in the LONG term, if the short-term price is so high that other people start investing in technology that ultimately reduces the demand for oil, then again, OPEC loses out on profits because in 5 or 10 years, everyone's car runs Ethanol or Vegetable Oil and demand for oil plummets. One of the big reasons we don't have more alternative energy now is that comparatively, gas has been cheap, so there wasn't any incentive to develop something else.
OPEC wants high profits - but to get high profits over the long term, they want to keep oil prices reasonable in the short term to discourage investment in alternative energy sources.
paintball