Archive for the 'Consumer Advocacy' Category

A Message to National Review

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 12, 2022
in Consumer Advocacy and Personal
. 7 Comments

Dear National Review:

1) Your Android app no longer works. I click on ‘magazine’, which brings up images of covers of past and present issues. If I click on any past issue, everything is fine. If I click on the current issue, all I see is a list (in red capital letters): SECTIONS, ARTICLES, FEATURES, etc. — but none of these are clickable and the content is not accessible.

2) I thought this might be because my subscription had expired, so I clicked on ‘Subscribe’ and paid for an extended subscription. I see that you still have my expiration date as September 2022, so apparently you took my money but did not extend the subscription.

3) I clicked on subscription help, got back an email telling me to try a few obvious things like “log out and log back in again”, responded by saying I’d already tried those things and none of them worked, and then never heard another word from you. I emailed again, asking what to do next. After several days I’ve heard absolutely nothing.

4) I went to your customer care website, typed in the above, and was told I could not submit the above message because it is “too long”.

5) I called your customer service number (which took some digging to find because it does not appear on your website) and spent twenty minutes talking to a representative who insisted that I re-try everything I’ve already tried, none of which worked. She finally connected me to a supervisor. The supervisor came on the line and said “I understand you’re having trouble logging into our app”. I said that I’m logged in just fine; the app just doesn’t work. The call suddenly ended.

6) I called back, explained I’d been in the middle of a call with a supervisor that got cut off, and was connected to a new supervisor. I started to explain the problem, and the call ended.

7) I am now on hold trying for a THIRD time to reach a supervisor.

8) Here is what I need from you: First, fix your app and/or tell me how to make it work. Second, extend my subscription consistent with the money I just sent you, or refund the money. Third, please be more responsive in the future.

9) Because this message is “too long” for you to accept on your website, I am posting it here and sending you a link to this blog post.
Everyone else can safely ignore this post.

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Is There a Way to Stop Paypal from Stealing?

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 20, 2021
in Consumer Advocacy and Personal
. 13 Comments

I’ve been a quite satisfied customer of Paypal almost since the very beginning, but I am now a mightily annoyed and frustrated customer and I wonder if anyone has any advice on how to deal with this:

1) I see a charge to my Paypal account for $35.63, with the payee listed as “Google — Automatic Payment”. Looking back, I see there was an identical charge (which I had overlooked) a month earlier.

2) I disputed the charge with Paypal. 24 hours later, I was informed that the transaction was authorized and the case is closed.

3) Google denies any knowledge of this. They claim that the last time they authorized any sort of automatic payment from me to them was in May, 2020 and the amount was $4.29. Edited to add: When I go to Paypal and look under “automated payments” and then click on Google, it shows that the last automated payment to Google was in fact this $4.29. The repeated $35.63 payments do not show up.

4) When I try calling Paypal, I tell the automated phone system that I’m calling to dispute a transaction. They ask me which transaction, I tell them, the voice says that’s already resolved, and they hang up on me.

5) When I try calling Paypal back and respond to all queries about why I’m calling with the word “agent”, the voice says that to speak to an agent, I must call back during normal business hours. But I’m *already* calling during normal business hours.

6) When I use the chat function on Paypal’s webpage, I get the same responses I get from the phone system.

Question 1:

How the hell do I get Paypal to talk to me? Failing that, how the hell do I get Google to inform Paypal that they did not authorize this charge? (Google appears to be completely unreachable by phone.)

Question 2:

It looks like the only way to stop this from happening every month is to close my Paypal account. Will it then be safe to open a new Paypal account, or will they just transfer the charges to the new account?

Help!

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How to Kill Off Amazon’s Damned “Popular Highlights”

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on August 13, 2020
in Consumer Advocacy, Outrage and Technology
. 18 Comments

As my good deed for today, I’m posting a solution to a problem that I’m sure is plaguing others. I hope Google points them here.

I’ll say this much for brick-and-mortar booksellers: Not one of them ever sold me a book, then showed up at my house two years later, pulled the book off the shelf and started highlighting passages for me. I can’t say as much for Amazon, which has been selling me books for many years and has suddenly decided to highlight passages in all of them. Effectively, they’ve vandalized every book they’ve ever sold me.

Yes, I know about the checkbox in the settings for “Show Popular Highlights”. (This is in the Android Kindle App.) Yes, I have that box unchecked. I am not an idiot. Unchecking the box has no effect. Checking it and then unchecking it again has no effect. The highlights remain highlighted.

Here are some other things that don’t work: Clear the app cache. Reboot the phone. Express rage.

So I called Amazon customer service and had the good luck to hook up with Brandi G., who was fantastic. She instantly understood the problem, instantly understood everything I had tried to do to fix it, and, unlike what I’ve come to expect from customer service reps pretty much everywhere, she did not insist that I try all the same things again. Instead, she suggested that I uninstall the app completely and reinstall it, and she stayed with me on the phone to see how things would turn out. Presto! Problem solved. Yay Brandi.

Then an hour later, the popular highights came back.

So I uninstalled and re-installed about six more times (because that’s the kind of guy I am) and finally called Amazon again. This time I had the bad luck to hook up with Devan J., who kept me on the phone for 35 minutes, mostly in silence while he researched the problem. (When I suggested that we hang up and he could call me back when he had an answer, he insisted that I stay on the line, to no apparent purpose.) One of the first things I asked him was: What if I install an older version of the app? No, said Devan, unfortunately that’s impossible.

Like an idiot, I spent about 24 hours believing him. Then I decided to go ahead and do it. Here is the solution:

1) Fully uninstall the app. This means going to the phone settings, then Apps, then Amazon Kindle. First choose “Force Stop” and then “Uninstall”.

2) Go to apkpure.com, search for the Kindle app, and you’ll be presented with a great variety of choices, all representing different vintages of the same app. I chose one from June 2020, two months ago, well before my problems started. Click to download, click to install, and voila. Problem solved.

I hope this works for you too.

Coming soon, I hope: Tricks I’ve discovered for setting up a new Windows 10 machine, which has been something like a fulltime job for me for the past two weeks. Why can’t things just work out of the box?

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Dear Google: Please Stop Trying to Kill Me

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 27, 2019
in Consumer Advocacy, Outrage, Progress, Rants, Technology and WTF?
. 17 Comments

wm2

When I’m in the car, I use my phone as a music player. Sometimes a song comes on that I’m not in the mood to hear. Once upon a time — in fact, once upon a very recent time — I could say “Okay Google. Next song.” Then the current song would stop and a new song would start. It was all part of Google’s awesome — and free — service. The service was imperfect in some minor ways, but mostly it was awesome and free and I was thankful to have it.

Here’s what happens now when I say “Okay Google. Next song.” The perky Google Assistant voice comes on and says something like “Oh, you want a different song? Okay. Let me sing you one.” Then the perky assistant sings some stupid little jingle for me, and then it returns me to the song I was trying to bypass. My only options at that point are to either a) listen to the rest of the unwanted song, b) try again and have the same thing happen again, which approximately triples my frustration level with each iteration, or c) fumble with my phone, call up the music player, search for the little “next song” button, push it, and try to put the phone back down before I drive into a lamppost. The pattern I’ve developed is to do b) approximately three times, then do c). I hope I’m still alive by the time you read this blog post.

Okay, so the service is still free, and still mostly awesome, right? But I am furious and I think I have a right to be. Let’s review the bidding here. Google has deliberately done the following:

  • Disabled the good and useful “next song” feature, for no apparent reason.
  • Trained its Assistant to mock its users when they try to invoke that longtime feature.
  • Done so in a way that is sure to drive those users into a state of combined frenzy and distraction while they are driving.

Let’s be clear: Mocking users and driving them into a state of frenzy seems to me to be the only conceivable reason for the whole “Here, I’ll sing a song for you, ha ha” bit. I am willing to bet you at substantial odds that no user requested this mockery. It’s apparently put there by Google (or perhaps by a rogue programmer on his last day of work, and overlooked by a lethargic quality control team) for the sole purpose of pissing people off and giving the folks at Google a good chuckle, without regard for possible deadly consequences. It seems to me to be roughly the moral equivalent of throwing watermelons off overpasses.

And just to make that analogy fair: If someone, through sheer technical brilliance and the goodness of his heart, ever designs the world’s most awesome overpass, builds it at his own expense, offers it to the world for free, maintains it for years, and then one day starts throwing watermelons off it — the main thing I’m going to remember is the watermelons.

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College Students: Do Not Give Your Credit Card to the Wall Street Journal

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 1, 2016
in Consumer Advocacy
. 6 Comments

With the new school year underway, and mindful of the fact that many economics students read this blog, let me repeat this periodic warning: Your econ profs are likely to offer you an “opportunity” to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal under the newly renamed Wall Street Journal University program. (I like to think, but of course do not know, that the renaming had something to do with the repeated warnings on this blog and elsewhere regarding the old Journal-in-Education program.)

I realize it’s implausible that a well-established institution like the Wall Street Journal would be running a credit card scam. Nevertheless, they are. When I subscribed through the old “Journal-in-Education” program, they tacked an extra $900 in phony charges onto my credit card bill. I called them repeatedly, they repeatedly acknowledged the “error” and promised to fix it, and, repeatedly, nothing happened. After a year, I got a refund for $450. After another year — and countless hours on the phone — I got an additional refund, still short of the entire amount. Most audaciously of all, they told me I could have the remainder of my refund if I agreed to attend a marketing event. They still have my money.

I am a long-time subscriber to the Journal and have never had these problems with subscriptions bought in the ordinary way. The Journal-in-Education, or Wall Street Journal University, or WSJ-Prof, or whatever else they’re calling it, program seems to be a separate entity that plays by its own tawdry rules. Don’t get mixed up with them.

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Poison Apple

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on September 30, 2015
in Consumer Advocacy, Outrage, Rants and Technology
. 39 Comments

poisonappleThere are about a million reasons why I hate my iPhone, but this one pretty much sums it all up.

On my phone, I’ve got quite a few files that were not downloaded from any of my other devices. These include pictures I’ve taken with the phone itself, pdfs I’ve downloaded through the phone’s browser, etc.

Of course, I’d like to have backups of all these files. And of course Apple makes this as difficult as possible by pushing me to use its abysmal iTunes software for creating the backup.

Now here is what iTunes does: I have photo files with names like IMG_0840.jpg — which, if not terribly descriptive, is at least immediately recognizable as a photo. I have pdfs with names like Dirac.QuantumMechanics.pdf, which is a nice, easily recognizable name. I download everything to my computer via iTunes, and here is a partial directory listing of what I get:

Continue reading ‘Poison Apple’

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REALLY Worthless Cash

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on November 4, 2013
in Consumer Advocacy
. 7 Comments

Just a quick followup to review of Square Cash — further experience has confirmed that using Square Cash is a really really good way to not know whether or not you’ve managed to make or receive a payment. They transfer money from me to you. A couple days later, without warning, they transfer it back from you to me. They ignore most inquiries and respond uninformatively to others. Don’t use these guys.

On another note, I realize blogging’s been slow of late. I’m hoping to find time for some long posts in the near future.

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Worthless Cash

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 31, 2013
in Consumer Advocacy and Technology
. 15 Comments

The future, apparently, has not quite yet arrived.

Square Cash promises to be the easy way to transfer money over the Internet. To send you $50, I just send you an email with subject line “$50” and a cc: to cash@square.com — whereupon Square Cash, upon receiving the cc:, moves $50 from my bank account to yours. (First time users get an email from Square asking for their debit card numbers so the transfer can be accomplished.) Sounds like the easiest thing in the world. And it’s free.

Unfortunately, it’s worth about what you pay for it. My experience using Square Cash multiple times over the past several days indicates that, more often than not, Square transfers $50 one direction — and then a few hours later transfers it back in the opposite direction, so that on balance, no money changes hands. When this happens, you get an email from Square saying the reverse transaction was triggered by a “problem”. No further explanation.

Emails to Square are met with standard Customer Service gobbledygook that ignores key questions such as “Why is this happening?” and “What can I do to make it stop happening?” and “Going forward, can I count on it to stop happening?”. (It’s just happened yet again, so apparently the answer to the last question is “No”.)

One feels a little churlish complaining about the quality of a free service. On the other hand, I’d like to spare others the frustrating experience of dealing with Square, never knowing when a transaction is going to be permanent, and getting no useful answers from the powers that be. (All communication is by email; Square is apparently too advanced a company to use phones.)

My advice: These guys are amateurs. Stick with Paypal.

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Never Give Your Credit Card to the Wall Street Journal

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 27, 2013
in Consumer Advocacy, Outrage and Personal
. 41 Comments

Having just discovered a staggering $910 (!!!!) in unexplained and unauthorized charges to my MasterCard by the Wall Street Journal (no, these were not legit renewal fees), I have just spent what seems like the better part of four days telling my story on the phone to one customer service rep after another, each of whom has found a new way to lie to me. (“We’ll call you back by the end of the day” was the most frequent lie, followed by “we’re putting through a half-refund now and someone with higher authority will call you shortly to arrange the rest” — which turned out to be two lies in one). Finally, I decided to send an email with the whole sad story, asking for a refund and mentioning that I sure hope there won’t be any resulting confusion that interrupts my delivery service. I got an email back saying “Per your request, we’re cancelling your delivery service”. Today I had no newspaper — and still no refund.

Think of the top three worst customer service stories you’ve ever heard. Chances are excellent that versions of all three have cropped up along the way in this sordid saga, the details of which I will suppress because I’m sure they’re less interesting to you than they are to me.

But I will mention this: Aside from the lying, and the lying and the lying, there’s also the fact that absolutely nobody appears to keep any record of these conversations, so that each time I call, I’m starting from scratch, explaining the whole story to a customer service rep who won’t put me through to a supervisor until I rehash the whole thing, then waiting on hold ten minutes for said supervisor, who needs the entire story told from scratch again before connecting me to the department that’s really equipped to deal with this, where I wait on hold for another ten minutes before telling my story yet again and, 50% of the time, getting disconnected. When I call back, it’s back to Square One.

Oh, yes….and they’ve also studiously ignored my repeated requests/demands that they expunge my credit card number from their records, and refused to acknowledge my repeated notifications that they do not have my authorization to charge my credit card for anything ever again.

Continue reading ‘Never Give Your Credit Card to the Wall Street Journal’

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Consumer Tip

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on March 6, 2012
in Consumer Advocacy and Humor
. 36 Comments

sudafedHaving trouble getting Sudafed? Does your local pharmacy close at night? No problem: all you need is a set of simple step-by-step instructions for synthesizing Sudafed from crystal meth, which is readily available 24 hours a day in most American cities:

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Note to Continental Airlines

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on October 27, 2011
in Consumer Advocacy, Personal, Rants and Snark
. 14 Comments

Your inability to construct a functional website does not fill me with confidence about your ability to fly me across the Atlantic Ocean.

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In a Fit of Pique

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on June 21, 2011
in Consumer Advocacy, Outrage, Personal and Rants
. 28 Comments

For God’s sake, don’t let your children subscribe to Sirius/XM.

Since May 4, when Sirius rearranged all its channel numbers, my radio has been badly confused. If I punch in station 23, it goes to the station that’s currently 23 for a while, then jumps to the station that used to be 23, etc. And certain stations, which according to the Sirius website are part of my standard package, are completely inaccessible.

Given my past experience with XM customer service, I knew this was not going to be an easy fix, so I’ve been putting off making the call. Today I had some spare time. Sure enough, I’ve spent over TWO HOURS on the phone with these people being alternately put on hold, lied to, put on hold, lied to some more, and put on hold again.

They claim the missing channels are missing because they’re “premium” channels not included in my package. Except that their website clearly identifies these channels as standard channels that *are* part of my package. They tell me that they’re instituting a fix at their end which requires me to leave my radio on for fifteen minutes before it takes effect; this gives them a convenient excuse to hang up and not be there fifteen minutes down the line when nothing has changed. When I complain about how long I’ve been on hold (the automated system always says the wait time is “about eight minutes” before stranding you for half an hour), they give me a direct number to call to bypass the queue. I call that number and am told that no, this number is only for radios installed on airlines or boats. I complain that I’ve just waited twenty minutes to get this message. They give me a *different* number to call, promising me that there is currently no wait at that number. Thirty five minutes later, I’m still waiting.

Ah, but what about just using the form on their web site? Well, you see, that form will not allow me to submit a query unless I give it the serial number of my radio — a serial number that it insists is wrong, even though I have *copied and pasted* it from the “My Account” section of their own damned website. Therefore my query cannot be submitted.

Continue reading ‘In a Fit of Pique’

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