Comment by tptacek
14 years ago
So tone deaf. A PR coup for FeeFighters. A total PR debacle for BBB. FeeFighters could in fact give a fuck about their actual accreditation, so they had nothing to lose. BBB meanwhile looks petty, out of touch, and defensive.
You didn't need to be a chess grandmaster to see how this will play out. You barely even need to see one move ahead. What moron at BBB OK'd this? How incompetent is the rest of their organization?
If the air seems to be more humid today, that's because PR guys everywhere are salivating for how much play they could get with "We investigated the BBB, found shenanigans, and got it explicitly committed to paper that they wanted to crush us for having found shenanigans and talked publicly about them."
"How incompetent is the rest of their organization?"
Really incompetent in the last complaint I filed with them. Just basically threw it out without communicating why. When I called to ask why, no call back. Looks like these guys are on the way down - they used to respond competently and quickly to consumer inputs.
Looking at timing and tactics - its possible they are recently taking a page from Yelp - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau#Criticis... - sad.
I have serious doubts they even read complaints or responses. Last complaint I made was about my landlord delaying our notice of termination of tenancy (my wife works in legal and had a lawyer make sure it was to the letter of ontario law) and they refused claiming, we had to pay $100 fee - which is illegal under ontario law.
We first wrote the BBB, who resolved the matter when the head office of my landlord responded to us that "we had misunderstood the situation". Regardless of their wording, they require a $100 fee to terminate tenancy.
We decided that letting our tenancy lapse and have the extra 30 days to move. We moved out on the 18th, planned to clean on the next friday like the 26th. We found our landlord had entered our property without permission and allowed contractors in (who trashed the carpet by pouring a gallon of solvent out) and told us they intended to charge us for the damages.
We contacted the BBB again, whilst taking the matter past the local office to the companies legal department. The BBB never even registered our second complaint, stating the matter was already resolved. We got the issue resolved by dealing with their legal department and threatening to haul them in front of small claims court and the landlord and tenancy board (and we had not only an admission of illegal entry on their part, but also photographic evidence over a week of illegal entries), and then one of their lawyers apparently drove down to the local office to yell at the staff.
My impression of the BBB is not good. Here in ontario the threat of the BBB is a lot weaker than threatening the consumer protection act.
Businesses pay the fees that sustain the BBB. Consumers do not.
Consumers are not the customer of the BBB. Businesses are. All else proceeds from that.
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You didn't need to be a chess grandmaster to see how this will play out.
Yeah, it will all blow over in a week or two because Fee Fighters is relatively small. A few more people will find out how sleazy the BBB is, but not enough to actually impact the BBB.
I think Thomas and I are thinking less "Probability that this will kill the BBB" and more "How many tens of thousands of dollars of PR firm time would produce demonstrably less press hits than this event will."
It's that and the "let's punch ourselves in the face" aspect of taking a story that you want to minimize, and deciding months later when it has completely blown over to send it aloft in a gigantic fusillade of skyrockets and roman candles. "PLEASE, ENTIRE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, PLEASE REVIVE THIS ABSOLUTELY TOXIC STORY. And if you could, could you maybe mix in a David vs. Goliath element to it this time?"
Having been in the room with PR people during (supposed) crises in the past: every single one of them would tell you not to do what BBB just did here.
I think the BBB has already sustained the fatal wound, it will just take a time-frame of decades for it to play out. Their service means nothing to most of the generation that grew up on the internet. Those people tend to utilize several key data points (trusted blogger, Amazon Review, a forum, Yelp, Urbanspoon) to make decisions about businesses and products.
Where those that are rapidly becoming elderly, grew up in a generation that had to rely on these data aggregation and trust business entities. As those people become less and less of a consumer force via attrition, entities like the BBB in their current form will cease to exist. I think they sense it and are selling that last thing that they had (their credibility) in the death throws. All efforts to adapt their model has thus-far failed.
FeeFighters should announce that they're getting into the Business Credibility game and start moving in on the BBB's territory.
They're holding the ring over the fires of Mount Doom. THROW THE RING IN, SHEEL!
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You're right, utterly ridiculous.
On the other hand, when your business is corrupt to the point that it was investigated for pay-to-play practices by a third party, well, completely expected.
I don't think anyone at the BBB is thinking about the outcome; rather they're protecting their (stupid) business model.
the funny thing is that initially, we (feefighters) didn't plan this to be an investigation. we just kept hearing stories from our customers about how credit card processors would rip them off, they would complain to the bbb, and nothing would happen. finally, we decided to take a stand.