My wife and I have a Jordan’s Furniture charge account issued by HSBC NV, a somewhat shady subsidiary of HSBC with a history of predatory lending and suspicious practices. They issue “private label” charge accounts for Jordan’s and many other retailers.
We have a balance on the account under one of their frequent “buy now, pay later with no interest” promotions, which they offer to virtually anyone who is eligible for a charge account. As long as we make the minimum monthly payments on time and pay off the entire balance before the end of the promotion, we will pay no interest. However, if we are late for just one payment, the promotion is canceled automatically and we have to pay a high interest rate retroactively back to the day we made the purchase.
We are signed up for paperless billing on the account. Instead of sending us a paper statement every month, they post our statement on their Web site and send us email notifying us that it’s available.
Several months ago, that email never arrived. (more…)
I recently sent Citizens Bank, the issuer of our primary credit card, a letter disputing a charge on the card. Being eminently familiar with the rules surrounding such disputes, I included in my letter all of the required information. A week or so later, I got back this letter: (more…)
As I recently wrote, I had trouble on my iMac when one user was suddenly unable to send mail using Mail.app. After attempting to fix the problem myself, I opened a support case with Apple under our AppleCare contract on Friday, December 24.
John D. Goodman
Executive Vice President, Apparel and Home
Sears Holdings Corporation
3333 Beverly Road
Hoffman Estates, IL 60179
Dear Mr. Goodman,
“Guaranteed. Period.®” is a lie.
In case you’re not familiar with it, here is the entire guarantee offered at www.landsend.com:
The Lands’ End guarantee has always been an unconditional one. It reads: “If you’re not satisfied with any item, simply return it to us at any time for an exchange or refund of its purchase price.” We mean every word of it. Whatever. Whenever. Always. But to make sure this is perfectly clear, we’ve decided to simplify it further. Guaranteed. Period.®
A number of years ago, I purchased a Lands’ End “squall parka”. Over time, the parka deteriorated in several ways reflecting defects in materials and workmanship: a horizontal seam on the back of the parka split, the zipper stopped working properly, and the seam beneath the hanging loop split open.
I tolerated these problems for several years. Finally, a few weeks ago, I found an old wool coat at the bottom of my cedar chest that I felt I could live with for a while in place of the parka, so I boxed it up and sent it back to you with a short letter which read as follows:
To whom it may concern:
Please replace the enclosed Lands’ End coat with the nearest match in your current inventory….
I am asking for a replacement because the seam on the back of the coat has split and cannot be properly repaired without taking apart the whole coat….
I wouldn’t be asking for a replacement if the coat had merely worn out, but I consider a split seam to be a manufacturing defect….
P.S. Forgot to mention – The zipper is broken at the bottom too.
Before doing this, I glanced at your Web site and saw that you still offer a “squall parka” there which is nearly identical to mine. It seemed obvious to me, as I believe it would to any customer reading your “Guaranteed. Period.®” promise, that you would exchange my parka for one of those. What you did, instead, was to send me a gift card for $59.50, $40 less than I originally paid.
In the last six months I have received no less than 16 promotional mailings from Comcast, many of them only a few days apart.
I have tried repeatedly to get them to stop sending me these mailings, to no avail. I filed a complaint about it with the Better Business Bureau; not only did Comcast fail to respond to the complaint, the BBB has failed to respond to multiple inquiries from me about its status (way to go, BBB!).
I live in an area with a heavy student population, so I could understand several mailings per year at the times when students tend to move in and move out. But 16 mailings in six months just doesn’t fit that profile.
Comcast isn’t a monopoly in very many places anymore. Even if they’re the only cable company in an area (and that’s not always true, e.g., I also have access to RCN service), there’s always satellite TV, FiOS, ADSL for Internet, etc. The odds are that anybody who hasn’t taken Comcast up on their offer after receiving a few promotions in the mail isn’t going to because they already have another service they’re satisfied with.
In short, the continuous stream of promotional mailings from Comcast simply makes no sense, and anybody who’s already a Comcast customer is paying for it in the form of higher fees.
I posted on November 2 about FedEx attempting three times in a row to deliver a shipment to our house which turned out to be intended for (and addressed to) one of our neighbors, and then when their error was discovered refusing to redeliver the shipment to the correct address. Here’s the end of the story…
The actual recipient of the shipment spent hours arguing with FedEx on the phone. The people with whom she spoke acknowledged the absurdity of the situation but repeatedly insisted that there was nothing they could do about it.
Finally, someone at FedEx agreed to deliver the shipment to her house “unofficially.” He brought it to her house late at night, out of uniform, in his own car. She told me she was so scared by the situation that she notified several friends and family members of what was going on, just in case something happened to her when the FedEx guy showed up.
According to my neighbor, the two boxes holding the shipment were in perfect condition when they were sent. When they were delivered, however, one of them was “completely destroyed” and had new tape all over it, obviously added by FedEx, holding it together. since the shipment contained a bunch of random stuff that my neighbor’s mother had shipped to her from home, neither she nor her mother was certain of exactly what was in it, so they can’t be sure nothing was lost when the box was destroyed by FedEx.
I am planning on sending a link to this blog entry to FedEx’s Executive Services office and asking them whether this incident reflects the level of service FedEx aims for. I will post any response I receive.
You’ve probably heard the expression “five nine reliability,” which is shorthand for saying that a product, Web site, service, application, or whatever is fully functional 99.999% of the time, the equivalent of less than six minutes of downtime per year.
Most Web sites don’t need to achieve that level of reliability. However, when you’re in the business of critical infrastructure, e.g., the natural gas that people use to cook their food and heat their houses in the winter, you had better be aiming for a pretty serious uptime target.
National Grid apparently thinks otherwise. When I contacted them to find out why there have been several incidents recently when I was unable to view or pay my bill online, here’s how they responded:
Our system goes down every night between 10:30 PM and 6:30 AM for processing. During this time you cannot view bills or take care of other processes for your account like payments or paperless billing. Please try going online during the daytime to view the bill.
In other words, their Web site has planned downtime, let alone unplanned downtime, for a third of every day, so their maximum possible uptime, assuming no other outages ever occur (which, alas, is not the case), is 66.666%. That’s an awful uptime ratio. Really, really awful.
National Grid ought to fire whoever thought it was reasonable for their Web site to be down for eight hours out of every day, not to mention whoever thought it was necessary for their Web site to be down for eight hours out of every day.
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