An eBay user bought a dress for her daughter, but what showed up was far from what had been advertised on the site. eBay now says it will refund the purchase, but not until after being called out by the local news. [More]
customer disservice
Gay Lowe’s Customer Accuses Employees Of Making Slurs, Threats Of Violence
By 6.26.12
A man in California says that what should have been the simple exchange of a leaf blower at his local Lowe’s store instead blew up into an incident that involved a Lowe’s staffer allegedly using anti-gay slurs and threatening the customer and his partner with physical violence. [More]
Verizon Wants Me To Pay $300 ETF Because Of Its $450 Error
By 5.14.12
When Consumerist reader Timothy bought his wife a new smartphone for her birthday last December, he thought he was just doing something nice for his special someone. Little did he know he was hopping aboard the grotesque merry-go-round that is Verizon Wireless customer service. [More]
Woman Spends Night In Jail For Picking Up Prescription Refill
By 5.7.12
Police in Dallas added insult to injury when they arrested a woman in a leg brace for a shattered knee on charges of forging her painkiller prescription, even though her doctor says no one ever checked with him to see if the ‘scrip was legitimate. [More]
Wells Fargo Thinks USPS Is Fastest Way To Tell Me About Bounced Check
By 1.24.12
When you think of the fastest, most-efficient way for a business to contact a customer about a problem, you obviously think of an antiquated, bloated, nearly insolvent government-operated organization that is synonymous with sloth. Oh wait — you don’t? Well, Wells Fargo apparently does. [More]
ToysRus.com Loses My Order, Tells Me I Can Go Pick It Up In Store For An Additional $60
By 12.19.11
As we reported last week, a recent survey showed that the website for Toys R Us came in dead last among top online retailers for its average delivery time. Unfortunately, this news came too late for Consumerist reader Victor who had already been waiting 11 days for his order from the site. [More]
Hundreds Of Hours On The Phone With AT&T Still Haven't Solved My Problem
By 9.30.11
Gerald would like something very simple: he would like to connect to an FTP server. He knows that it’s not completely blacklisted: he can get to it using an AT&T business-class connection. He’s even narrowed down precisely what the problem is. He just can’t find anyone at the company capable of helping him, and he’s found the online help groups to be an utter waste of time. [More]
Sprint Won't Give Me Credit For Service Outage Because I Could Theoretically Use My Phone Somewhere Else
By 9.7.11
More and more people are using their wireless phones as their home phones, which means that when wireless service goes out near your home, you are telephonically cut off from the rest of the world. But Sprint says that’s not worthy of an adjustment to your bill because Sprint service still exists somewhere out there. [More]
Sony Has Been Trying To Fix My Laptop For 7 Months And Already Charged Me $1,000
By 7.29.11
John doesn’t exactly have much love in heart for the people at Sony right now. He spent thousands of dollars on a laptop that broke after only three months. Then, he says, someone at the Sony store did further damage — and passed the repair bill on to him, but the absolute last straw is that his laptop still hasn’t been fixed in almost eight months. [More]
Google Deletes Last 7 Years Of User's Digital Life, Shrugs
By 7.22.11
Something happened to Dylan’s Google account, and it’s been disabled. He doesn’t know what happened to the account, and no one at Google with the power to help him is interested in acknowledging the problem or letting him back in to the cloud-based services where all of his correspondence and much of the digital trail from the last few years of his life is stored. Google doesn’t own Twitter, though (yet), and he has taken to Twitter to try to draw attention to his problem and urge anyone who will listen not to trust Google with their digital lives. [More]
AT&T Keeps Giving Out My Number To Angry Customers
By 6.22.11
After Consumerist reader T switched mobile phone service to AT&T in 2009, aggressive folks have been calling, trying to reach someone named Jerry. For months, the annoying calls were chalked up to this Jerry person likely owing a lot of debt collectors. But then in February, one Jerry-caller, complaining that his local cell phone tower was down, told T. that AT&T had given him this number as a tech support contact only 20 minutes earlier. [More]
Shopping Guru: Retailers Clueless About Serving Online Customers
By 5.1.10
Behavioral researcher Paco Underhill has spent his career studying consumer behavior, and has documented it in best-sellers like “Why We Buy.” His real business, though, is advising corporate clients through his Envirosell consulting firm. And he has some very bad news for them. Retailers, he said in a recent interview, are clueless about such basic niceties as offering price-matching in their online and physical stores, and providing a seamless experience between the two shopping venues. [More]
Home Depot Accuses You Of Attempting Return Fraud
By 6.12.07
Here at the Consumerist we realize that return fraud is a very serious problem for retailers. Nevertheless, this story puzzles us. Dana bought a thermostat from Home Depot, but it turned out to be incompatible with her heating and cooling system. When she brought it back, the customer service person accused her of bringing in an empty bag and receipt, shoplifting a thermostat and then trying to return the stolen unit. It’s a common scam…. but…
