Buyer Beware of Businesses

[mishalak]

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.

Comments

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

Even the official government agencies can be crap, for the same reasons. The local board here in Mississippi had a referral service that we later found out was where they referred people to lawyers based on those lawyers paying for that service. When they sent us to an incompetent (and incompetent is too kind a word) and we complained about the way he treated us and the retainer he refused to refund and the unscrupulous tricks he tried, we were told that the lawyer had done nothing wrong. Of course we were told that -- they had to cover their asses. But I forced the issue into arbitration, just to piss everyone off really, because I did not believe a lawyer in this legally-corrupt system would ever rule against a fellow lawyer. Except the rules specified that an independent lawyer had to be assigned as arbiter and he ruled in our favor -- much to my surprise. Most people would never have taken it as far as we did though.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I didn't know all that until about three years ago. Nor that the Better Business Bureau is a Major Lobbyist in government circles -- lobbying, of course, for laws that are good for Businesses, even though these are often bad for customers & other ordinary people. The BBB was a significant force behind the individual bankruptcy-limitation law passed recently, and in opposing limits on the interest & penalties Credit-Card Companies are allowed to charge.