Air Sickness
Ready for vengeance, everyone?
It is I, the Great Shopping Avenger, reporting to
you from the Great Hall of Consumer Justice, a k a the Shopping Avenger's
poorly air-conditioned attic office.
The Shopping Avenger has had a terribly busy month
(Aquaman never had it so busy), and he is pleased to report that demand for his
services has grown exponentially. He is also disconcerted, because the sheer
number of e-mails in response to last month's installment means that too many
evil corporations are treating too many loyal consumers without regard for the
basic norms of customer care, such as answering the phone and not calling
customers bad names.
Before we turn to this month's shameful examples of
corporate malfeasance, a couple of housekeeping notes:
1) Two dozen readers wrote to let the Shopping
Avenger know they were pissed off by his use of the term "pissed off" in last
month's column. The term "is offensive to anyone with any sense of courtesy,
pride in themselves, décor of personality, and sense of decency," the vengeful
reader R. wrote.
The Shopping Avenger notes that he possesses a
great deal of "décor of personality." He also notes that many readers, driven
to near madness by customer-service representatives, use strong language to
describe their plights, and the Shopping Avenger is merely reflecting their
anger. Though the Shopping Avenger offers this piece of advice: When writing to
"consumer care specialists," or whatever they're being called today, do not use
the honorific "asshole" by way of greeting. And remember: The assholes are the
ones making seven-figure salaries. The people at the other end of the 800 line
are lackeys and shills and running dogs, but they aren't assholes.
2) Speaking of lackeys,
it has now been approximately 47 days since U-Haul spokeswoman Johna Burke
promised to share her company's reservation policy with the Shopping Avenger.
For those of you who missed the , the Shopping Avenger attempted to help an
aggrieved U-Haul customer who made a reservation for a truck, only to be told
close to the time of pick-up that no such reservation existed.
Though U-Haul--apparently unimpressed by the supernatural
power of the Shopping Avenger--has not deigned to provide answers, no fewer
than 34 deputy Avengers e-mailed over the past month, complaining about
U-Haul's reservation policy. "I reserved a U-Haul truck for a Saturday morning
to be picked up at 8," one correspondent, T., reports. "I hired some help for
the day to help me move. When I arrived that morning to pick it up, I was told
it was not there yet. After much complaining, a few phone calls were made, and
I was told the truck was 200 miles away."
T.'s complaint is entirely typical. Another member
of the Avenging Brigade, B., wrote in to say this: "A U-Haul employee in
Phoenix last 4 th of July weekend told me the company had 2,000
reservations in Phoenix that weekend and 600 available trucks. My truck was
three days late, and I only got it by threatening legal action."
The Shopping Avenger will
revisit the U-Haul issue each month until satisfactory explanations are
provided. That is the least the Shopping Avenger can do for you, the pissed-off
consumer.
Last month, the Shopping Avenger also put out a call for
airline and pest-control horror stories. One wag, J., wrote in to ask, "Is
there a difference between pests and airlines?" (Contest alert: Best punch line
e-mailed to the Shopping Avenger
will be rewarded by public mention in this space, plus a lifetime supply of
Turtle Wax, if the Shopping Avenger can figure out what Turtle Wax is.)
The complaints poured in. As noted previously, the
Shopping Avenger is but one superhero, and he issues abject apologies to all
those who did not receive personal responses.
Pest control will be dealt with in a future
episode. But about those airlines: The interesting thing about the airline
complainants is that they don't even want the Shopping Avenger to seek
retribution or restitution. All they want to do is vent. Maybe no one believes
that airlines even care anymore or are capable of responding to complaints.
The complaints covered
the waterfront: baggage problems, surly flight attendants, mysteriously
canceled flights, billing atrocities. But the most compelling complaints
concerned bereavement fares. There's nothing like an airline screwing with
someone who's going to bury his mother to make the blood boil.
"Recently, my mother passed away and I needed to travel
from Orlando to Fort Wayne, Indiana, the next day in order to attend her
funeral," our correspondent J.D. writes. "In June of last year, I had traveled
to Orlando from Detroit on Northwest Airlines (that should send up a few red
flags), and was given a $400 travel voucher because the plane literally did not
show up. Being that airline tickets, even a bereavement fare, purchased at the
last minute can be quite expensive, I opted to cash in my voucher."
J.D. says he made the reservation by telephone,
holding the seat with his credit card. He was told to present his credit card
with the voucher upon his arrival at the airport, where he would be charged,
obviously, only for the part of the ticket not covered by the $400 voucher.
Then, trouble. "On arriving at the airport I
proceeded to do this and was told by the agent that the tickets were already
purchased and I could not use my voucher," J.D. writes. "I contested this, but
she was unwilling to budge and unwilling to get a supervisor, telling me that,
'That's just the way it is.' "
J.D. says he let it drop, vowing to "settle this
upon my return from the funeral."
After the funeral, he contacted Northwest, he says,
and after much frustrating dialing, reached an answering machine. "I had to
leave my particulars on a voice mail because no agents were available to take
my call. This worked out poorly, since when the agent called me back, she got
my voice mail and left a message with the same number. So when I called back,
of course all I got was the same opportunity to leave my particulars on their
voice mail system."
This is when the customer says, "Arrrghh."
After much go-around,
J.D. called American Express, told them his plight, and Amex canceled the
entire charge.
I e-mailed Northwest spokeswoman Marta Laughlin, who
responded first by questioning J.D.'s motivation: "The writer's remarks about
the 'plane never showing up' and 'raising red flags' cause me to question his
story. It just sounds like there's something more personal here."
One could argue that a passenger might have
"personal" feelings about an airline after said airline messed with his head
while he was traveling to his mother's funeral.
Laughlin followed up, though, by saying that "the
death of anyone close is a very emotional and trying experience, and
individuals frequently behave differently as a result of their pain." She's
still blaming the customer but, she continues, the "Northwest employee at the
airport should have taken extra steps to help the writer in his time of need. I
wish that was the case, and I apologize on behalf of Northwest Airlines."
Grudging, double-edged,
but an apology all the same.
We will return to the issue of airlines in a future
episode, but the Shopping Avenger would like to relate another tale that caught
his attention this past month. The company in question is Sprint PCS, and the
story most definitively does not end with an apology.
In short strokes, the story goes like this: A
customer, William Summerhill, an associate professor of history at UCLA,
ordered two phones from Sprint PCS. He was billed for six--weirdly, at three
different prices (still another charge, for one cent, was also billed to his
credit card by Sprint PCS). He fought the bill; Sprint PCS fought back, by
phone and fax, wasting a good amount of time.
Finally, his credit card
company agreed that he was the victim of false billing and canceled out the
charges for four of the six phones. Professor Summerhill continued to be
billed, but one thing he did not receive in the mail was a rebate on one of the
two remaining phones, part of a special promotion he signed up for. Though he
paid for the two phones, he withheld paying his monthly fee until Sprint PCS
straightened out his case and gave him his rebate. In response, Sprint PCS
canceled his service and referred his case to a collection agency, which is
threatening his credit rating.
When I first contacted Sprint PCS (which is a tale in
itself--the 800-line operator, citing policy, refused to disclose the telephone
number of Sprint PCS headquarters, apparently fearing that customers might try
to talk to the executives whose salaries they pay), a spokesman, Tom Murphy,
told me the case was terribly complex. Actually, it isn't: Sprint PCS billed a
customer for six phones, refused to stop billing him, and threatened him when
he wouldn't pay for service pending a resolution of the problem.
Summerhill, who is now a happy customer of
AT&T, says he will pay the monthly fees when he receives an apology and the
rebate money. The rebate money is owed to him, and so is the apology. He
estimates that he has spent 40 to 50 hours trying to straighten out the billing
problem, which is clearly Sprint PCS's problem.
But no apology is
forthcoming. The Shopping Avenger received an e-mail from Alison Hill, an
"executive analyst" at Sprint PCS, who writes that she works "directly for Mr.
Andrew Sukawaty, the President and CEO of Sprint PCS." Hill concedes that
Sprint PCS was at fault for erroneously charging Summerhill for phones he did
not want--she claims he was charged for two phones he didn't want, even though
his records show he was billed for four--but she says the "customer is also at
fault" for not paying his bill for telephone calls made on the phones he did
use.
I spoke with Hill directly and told her it seemed
reasonable to me that Summerhill would withhold payment until his billing
dispute was settled and the rebate issue resolved. She said he was wrong. I
mentioned to her the quaint notion that "the customer is always right," and she
said, "in my opinion, the customer is wrong."
Obviously, the Shopping Avenger juju has not yet
worked on Sprint PCS, but Summerhill reports that it has worked on the
collection agency. "I told the agency that I was reporting this matter to the
FCC, to the California consumer protection people, and to the Shopping Avenger
at
Slate
. She didn't say anything about the FCC or the consumer
protection people, but she did ask me to please not give the name of the
collection agency to
Slate
."
Professor Summerhill has
promised to tell everyone at UCLA and in his Army Reserve unit to boycott
Sprint PCS. "I'm pro-business, I love America, I love capitalism, but these
people are crazy," he said. "They could make this go away, but they won't."
Sprint PCS could take a cue from Southwest Airlines, one of
a handful of companies in America with sterling reputations for customer
service. A little while back, the Shopping Avenger received a plaintive e-mail
from B., who reported that he was the only passenger on his flight not to
receive free drink coupons. Apparently, the flight was late, and as a friendly
gesture Southwest let the passengers get drunk on its dime. But not B. Somehow,
he was skipped over.
The Shopping Avenger let Ed Stewart, Southwest's
spokesman, know of B.'s sad story, and within hours, the Shopping Avenger
received this reply: "As I'm sure you've heard, we here at Southwest Airlines
pride ourselves on our Customer Service and would NEVER want it to be said that
we deprived anyone--particularly a Customer!--the opportunity to have a drink
on us."
Stewart says that B. will be mailed an apology,
plus Southwest peanuts, plus a coupon book for free drinks--including mixed
drinks!
"I hope that this will satisfy your sense of
justice," he wrote.
It does indeed.
Got a consumer
score you want settled? Send e-mail to [email protected].
