Friday, September 13, 2013

How stupid are Philadelphians? Apparently on average we're pretty fucking stupid

I've had an issue lately with a company operating out of Chicago.  Long story short, they've engaged in bait and switch advertising and related fraud.  Although we're getting our money back (after a fight), I still wanted to report them to their local Better Business Bureau.

The BBB, a topic for another time, has given the company an A+ despite 1,400 similar complaints in the past three years which according to the BBB's own site are almost never resolved to the customer's satisfaction.

This led me to wonder about the BBB itself (no complaints ever = A+, yet 1,400 unresolved charges of fraud also = A+?!),  which some small business owners are describing as a virtual protection racket.  This gets us to the title of the post...
 

Exhibit B
Google reviews of BBB Chicago, which popped up doing a phone number search, give them a very low rating (about 1.8 stars out of 5) with 19 total reviews.  All 19 of those are reviews of BBB Chicago, which is obviously what is supposed to happen.

BBB Philadelphia (Eastern PA) has 11 Google reviews, at a higher 2.4 stars, which piqued my interest so I read them.  All 11 reviews - 11 out of freakin' 11 - are of businesses, meaning messages intended for the BBB to readNot a single one - not one of 11 - is a review of the BBB itself.  Because duh.

There's a negative review of a dentist and a few positive and negative things about a few contractors and some obvious requests for the BBB to begin investigating something, although I'm not sure how they would if you leave no contact info and no specifics of your issue.

I flagged all 11 as off-topic so they might come down soon, so if by the time you read this there are 0 reviews and no rating figure at all that's what happened.

This is all the same Google, so the 19 people in Chicagoland who filled the form out correctly and the 11 people here who all didn't saw the exact same internet form and came to completely opposite notions as to how to use it and what it meant, and with an iron-clad consistency that defies statistical likelihood of anything other than local dumbfuckitude.

Congratulations, Philadelphia, you've made me ever so proud once again.

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