For years, we’ve been poking fun at Verizon’s apparent inability to use a calculator on its customers’ bills. Now we’re finding out that the wireless wonder also has no idea how to figure out an average rating for the products on its own website.

For example, there’s this Navigation Vehicle Mount for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. At first glance, one would think this must be a good product because it has an impressive 5-star average rating after 80 reviews.

But if you actually look at those 80 ratings, only one of the 80 is actually a 5-star rating, with all the other ratings appearing to be 3-star or worse.

Consumerist reader Chris asked a Verizon chat CSR if the company had any explanation. Not surprisingly, the sales rep lacked an answer and told Chris to contact Verizon via the 1-800 customer service number.

When Chris asked the CSR if she thought a reasonable person would look at that 5-star rating and be misled into thinking it was accurate, she replied, “I honestly do not look at the consumer ratings on items when I purchase them…. I feel people are quick to complain but slow to praise.”

While we wouldn’t expect a chat CSR to understand how Verizon Wireless’ website miscalculates ratings, we would hope that the rep would have a more creative solution other than to hand off a customer to a phone CSR and then brush off the entire notion that someone should care about customer ratings.

It’s likely that this is a glitch rather than any deliberate effort to deceive, but any CSR should at least pretend that they are going to pass your concerns on to someone who can look into the matter.

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