Buyer Beware of Businesses

From the "I thought Everyone Knew This" File

If you see the Better Business Bureau symbol on a business, you should beware and look for the scam. What? But aren't they a forthright agency dedicated to good business and providing a way for consumers to know if they can trust a business? Well, not so much. For starters they are funded by their members, the businesses they police, and give ratings based upon if a business is a member or not. And they get members by cold calling businesses and asking for information and a membership donation.

The usual procedure with the BBB is to take a complaint and then to ask the business, if they are a member, to respond. As long as the business does respond to the complaint the business will keep its satisfactory rating. It doesn't matter how the business responds as long as it does respond. There are numerous documented cases where scam artists provided false information to the BBB they joined and the BBB didn't bother to check the information. And the con artist got to keep their BBB membership longer than his business stayed in business.

So who can you trust? There are numerous websites for disgruntled consumers out there, many of them one step above scams themselves or at best a place for the unhappy to vent their frustrations. Much better is if your State Attorney General has somewhere you can check or lodge complains against businesses. As a government agency they are much more likely to be impartial in complaints against businesses.

I Read Redwall

And now I'm journaling about it because if you don't have anything nice to say, there is always "the internets" where no one cares if you're right or wrong, because everyone is just here to vent or find a boyfriend. Which is to say that is review isn't by Mishalak, it is by Snarky D. Sprite, enemy of literature. Right onto something like a review.

Redwall is the literary equivalent of a precious moments figurine. It is a little sad, but the cutely human animals mostly only die if they're very bad ones indeed. And, of course, to show how bady, bad Cluny the Scourge and the other bad guy types are they threaten a lot of them with death and even kill three of the the good guys on screen. The book is less classist (I'm sure I cannot have coined that word) than The Wind in the Willows, but it lacks something. Perhaps it lacks me reading it a golden light when I was about 12 or it is a little too self aware. I'd have to read it again (not something I want to do any time soon unless I need to put myself to sleep), but I think there might be a bit more animal quality to the characters of The Wind in the Willows. In Redwall the animals all seem to be furry christians with special abilities like being proficient climbers or very fast runners.

What did I love about this book? Well... it was fun to see the repeated bad ends that the horde of evil ones come to either at each other's hands or the fearsome snake. And the fact that after one last VERY meaningful death scene the thing is over.

This is not the worst furry fan novel I've ever read. If only it were. But there is no sex, only a bit of violence, and so it could be a suitable present in large type for someone's Grandmother. One who covers everything in doilies, not the one who was an adventurous soul who grew up just in time to avoid leaving a young and pretty corpse and mother some children. And as harshly as I've treated this work here it really is quite hard, because it isn't outright disastrously terrible or so bad it is funny. It is just sort of... inoffensively cute. I'd rather have some faeries who bite people's hands, thank you very much.

Two Words: Precious Yawn