Circuit City promised that if you ordered from them on December 18th, you’d get free shipping and a guarantee that your order would arrive before Christmas. It turns out that promise was worthless, at least for Brandon—or rather, it’s worth exactly $5 in company scrip from Circuit City. (We love apologies that force you to shop at the company that screwed up.) Circuit City’s CSR even says that the December 18th offer doesn’t exist, despite the fact that their logo is still up on the freeshippingday.com website as of today.

Brandon writes,

After seeing your post on the Free Shipping Day promotion, and found myself interested, but wary that I would not receive my order in time for Christmas. Ultimately, I decided to give it a shot anyway, comforted by the fact that all orders were guaranteed to be delivered my December 24. So, I waited until 12:01 AM December 18th to place an order with Circuit City, one of the partners for this promotion, and later received a confirmation e-mail stating that my order would arrive on December 24 at the latest.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. While I did receive one item from my order a few days before Christmas, the other three items did not arrive until December 28th. Normally, a delay like this wouldn’t bother me, but seeing as these items were supposed to be gifts for my friends and family, I got to endure the embarrassment of not having gifts for three people, while they got shorted on presents.

After e-mailing Circuit City, I was offered a paltry $5 gift card, which I refused on the basis of being insufficient. Instead, I asked for two $15 gift cards which I could provide to my two young nieces (who were two of the present-less people) on behalf of myself and Circuit City to help us both save face. Circuit City refused.

We’ll leave the negotiations over appropriate compensation between Brandon and Circuit City. What bothers us, and this is why we’re posting this, is that the company failed to honor its shipping guarantee—a guarantee they made in an attempt to lure shoppers to their online store. Here’s what “Daschelle” from Circuit City wrote to Brandon when he pointed out the freeshippingday guarantee:

Thank you for your reply. While we certainly understand how this must have been frustrating for you, the shipping timeframes were listed on our website and in order to receive your items by Christmas you would have needed to order on or before 12/12/08. We can not honor your request for two $15 gift cards. The $5 offer is still available if you would like to take advantage of it.

Brandon also contacted the man behind the freeshippingday.com website to ask for his help, but he said he could do nothing, adding, “There doesn’t seem to be much you can do other than return your item and get your money back. I do know that they were advertising free shipping with delivery by December 24th for orders placed up to December 19.”

Brandon, you might want to try escalating the matter past the frontline CSRs (NB: skip Schoonover’s address) since they don’t seem to be aware of their own freeshippingday guarantee. We also think if they won’t budge on the $5 offer, you should seriously consider asking for a full refund and find another place to buy your gifts if at all possible. Why give your business to a company that doesn’t stand behind its promises?

We also think behavior like this should earn them a big ban from next year’s freeshippingday.com group, but c’mon, it’s Circuit City—does anyone really think they’ll still be here next December anyway?

(Photo: qnr)

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In 2006, Raed Jaer, an Iraqi-born U.S. resident, was forced by TSA officials and JetBlue to cover his t-shirt—it read, “We Will Not Be Silent” in both Arabic and English—before he could board a flight. The airline and the two TSA officials (TSA was not named in the suit) settled out of court last week for $240,000, although JetBlue still denies they did anything wrong, and the TSA says they don’t “condone profiling in any way shape or form.”

Here’s what happened back in August 2006:

After passing through security… [TSA and JetBlue officials] came up to him and asked him to change his shirt as, “people are feeling offended.”

Jaer replied, “Why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” Inspector Harris said, “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights.”

He added, “You can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am a robber” and going to a bank.”

When the settlement was announced, JetBlue took pains to make it clear that they’re only settling to avoid a protracted legal battle, and that they don’t think they did anything wrong, according to this email to the Washington Post:

“JetBlue continues to deny, outright, every critical aspect of Mr. Jarrar’s version of events,” airline spokeswoman Alison Croyle said in an e-mailed statement. Croyle added, “JetBlue believes diversity adds great strength to our company; diversity among our crewmembers as well as our customers.”

Diversity, and silence! And obedience! Lower your heads, cattle passengers of all colors, and submit to the skittish herd!

Anyway, we’re happy for Jaer. We’re also trying to come up with a good pseudo-terroristy tshirt design so we can try this ourselves.

“JetBlue, TSA Workers Settle in T-Shirt Case” [Washington Post]

RELATED
“JetBlue Makes Passenger Change ‘Offensive’ Arabic Tshirt”

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SlyDial lets you jump straight to voicemail to leave a message. You can pay a fee for the service, or agree to listen to an ad first before leaving a message. Glenn gave the service a trial run and it seemed to work as promised—he listened to an ad and then left a message. Today, however, the company “slydialed” him and left a second ad in his voicemail box. That’s certainly sly, but sounds to us like an abuse of the service as they’ve described it. You might want to avoid using them until we find out more about why they’re spamming previous customers, or check back on Glenn’s blog to see what develops.

(Photo: allspice1)

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Kushal wants to know how Time Warner verifies the call logs for its installer technicians, because when they say they call, his phone doesn’t ring.

My TimeWarner cable installer did not show up at the appointed time, and when I called them, they said the installer had logged a call to me and said I did not respond. My cell phone has perfect reception and shows no call in my log. When I talked to someone else, they said the exact same thing happened to them. In both cases, the installer logged the call at the very end of the window. I’m not normally a conspiracy theorist, but is this maybe some clever ploy to keep up their ontime installation statistics somehow? The ensuing wasted day where TimeWarner kept promising to call back, failed to do so, and then refused to make any concessions for their screwup didn’t help anything either.

We’re working on a theory that in another universe, people are getting calls from Time Warner every day. Those people probably complain about having too much cable installed.

(Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography)

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Nate at Idea Shower (responsible for the awesome Read It Later Firefox extension) has created a nifty online tool to help you narrow down your ski and snowboard destinations. Visit LiftSift.com, adjust a few sliders to set your price range, vertical rise, and location, and compare away. The data behind the service is public so that users can add new locations or make updates when lift prices change.

LiftSift

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that product you wanted? It was only one dollar. Back in the past. When you didn’t buy it. Are you ashamed? Do you harbor rage against it? Does it keep you up at night? Don’t let it get in your heads, Consumerists, or you’re letting the Wal-Mart win! Fight back, Consumers! Fight back against their mind games, and their awkward notion of sales, in one fell swoop; shop elsewhere. Thanks, Bryan!

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Monster Cable has agreed to drop a heavily mocked (by us, anyway) trademark lawsuit against Monster Mini Golf after a private phone call between the founders of the two companies. Great, now you won’t be able to tell if you’re playing mini golf or being gouged by a cable manufacturer. [News10.net] (Thanks to Trever!)

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Ever been scorned by Comcast? A brave Comcast Call Rep has given us an in-depth analysis, as well as some ways to navigate around the Cable giant’s sales pitch.

Jane Doe writes:

Hello,
I am a Comcast Rep. I do not work in a call center, I work from home. Comcast has been contracting out to Cloud 10 Corp and they’ve been providing training to At-Home Agents. Why am I writing?
I would love to fix your problems. I would love to call up and find out where the tech is that has bailed on the last 3 appts. I would love to be able to downgrade your account and help you save money. Unfortunately all we are allowed to do is take payments, do basic troubleshooting, and schedule tech calls. I can also upgrade or change services as long as you are not downgrading.

When you ask for a supervisor, they tell us to take your name and number and account info and send it into an email address. (homeps@nucomm.com) How are we connected? We are all logged into a work IM system and a team chat room. We talk to each other in IMs and a chat room. The supervisors tell us to send in the email when we try to get them to take the call. I don’t know if anyone was called back for the emails I’ve sent in.

We cannot call out. We have no direct line into us and we don’t exactly have operator numbers. I guess we could give you our phone extension number but you wont be able to call back in and get us. We deal with Michigan, Maryland, Indiana, DC/Potomac, Atlanta GA and some areas in Florida. We DO NOT have direct dial numbers to the local stores. We have some funky speed dial that they disable if we call in too much. This just happened with transfers to Baltimore’s locals. They whined that they were getting too many calls that the reps should have handled, so they took away our option to call them. Now it has to go through a supervisor.

We aren’t supposed to call dispatch to figure out where your technician is, a supervisor is supposed to do that. Comcast uses independent contractors for the tech calls, and it’s hit or miss on if you get a good one or a crappy one that lies and says you weren’t home and they never called or knocked on the door.

The training we got was pretty spotty. The subject matter was provided by Comcast’s parent company. It didn’t really cover what we handle on a daily basis. Training is 2 weeks long with 2 weeks of “nesting”. That is when we take live calls and get help in the chat room by a supervisor.

Our phone system and the work systems have continuous issues. Calls come in and we can’t hear a customer, or they call and cannot hear us. We spend too much time rebooting the systems.

We DO want to help. Our poor training and poor support don’t help you much and I apologize for it. I’ve been here a year and I am tired of being chewed out by pissed off customers. Recently we were told that we can no longer do any type of payment arrangements. The customers won’t believe us, but the system won’t let us do it. Only collections has the ability to set something up…or so we were told. There is so much contradicting information out there. I understand why this company has such a poor reputation.

You know that saying “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing?” Well, the fingers on the right hand don’t have any idea of what the other fingers are doing. It’s frustrating to not be able to help much. I enjoy helping customers and actually solving the problem. I wish Comcast wasn’t such a mess within and that we had better access to the local offices so we could make sure you get to the right dept.

And this is something for the consumers to consider. Having cable tv isn’t a “right”. If you call me up and tell me to turn your cable back on for non-payment and then mention that you can’t pay me until 2 weeks later because you have to buy groceries….maybe you should reconsider having that 150.00 a month cable package. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT USE THEIR CRAPPY PHONE SYSTEM. If the power, Internet, or cable go out so does your phone. Just stick with a basic land line phone. It takes major problems before they go out. I get too many calls from seniors living alone with the crappy CDV (Comcast Digital Voice) and it worries me that they will not be able to use the phone when they need it.

Please be aware of when the promotion ends and what the cost will be. ASK FOR IT when you sign up. I am tired of being yelled at because someone didn’t bother to inform themselves of the future rates. The reps should tell you to begin with, and I always look up the rates and remind customers of the new costs when I see a promotion is coming to an end. Don’t trust the reps to tell you, protect yourself and ask!

From,
Your at-home agent that would like to actually help you

P.S. Don’t let them talk you into a 2 yr contract. The price is only locked in for 12 months and can go up after that. And they usually do.
another P.S. Please don’t get an attitude with me if I ask for the last 4 digits of your social security number for verification/security. You provided it to us, or you gave us the drivers license number. I verify. If you have a problem with that, hang up and call back later to get a crappy rep that doesn’t care who they let into your account. And for the spouses, you are not always automatically authorized. It depends on the area. So if I tell you to have the account holder call us and give you express authorization or ask to speak to them, stop acting like I am going out of my way to ruin your day. It pisses me off and makes me not really want to spend time figuring your issue out. You catch more flies with honey, so remember that okay?

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It’s a simple question, and a little shocking that we have to ask it. I mean, it’s not like Staples specializes in technology or anything. Our tipster was shocked himself when he discovered this curious fact. His full story, inside.

I was shocked to learn yesterday that Staples gift cards can’t be used online or over the phone - only in-store!

I did a bit of searching on the Internet, and it’s obvious that this is an old problem. People have been pointing this out to Staples for years, and they’ve remained blissfully unaware. Or unwilling to do anything about it.

When I called the number on the back of the gift card (888-609-6963) they acknowledged it was true, gave me a virtual shrug, and suggested I call the Customer Relations department. When I called the Customer Relations department this morning (800-338-0252), the gentleman I spoke to made it sound like this was something of a rare request. He agreed it was true, but suggested that not many people call with that complaint.

I said it was just so strange that Staples, a company that sells technology, hadn’t figured out how to do something that Gap and Home Depot had no problem doing.

So, I’m hoping you can help publicize this issue, and get more consumers to call Staples asking for this (in my opinion, obvious) feature for their gift cards. I would be very surprised if this was really a rare complaint.

Picture:[Jason Gulledge]

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California Liquid Fertilizer has been spiking its fertilizer with ammonium sulfate for the last several years, affecting the organic status of many farms, including organic behemoth Earthbound Farms.

It’s a pretty epic story. The revelation that the fertilizer merchant (feel free to suggest better terms in the comments) was using non-kosher ingredients came from a former employee, who alleged that the company has been using ammonium sulfate since 1999. Inspectors confirmed the taint in 2005, even intercepting train cars of ammonium sulfate, but the California government didn’t take action for several months, as the E. Coli in spinach outbreak consumed attention. In 2007, another organic fertilizer pulled its fertilizer, and another similar announcement is apparently coming soon.

Synthetic fertilizers were substituted because they cost less than 5% of the price of organic fertilizers. Yes, substituting a cheap ingredient for the more expensive, labeled ingredient usually goes over well.

Organic Farms Unknowingly Used A Synthetic Fertilizer [Sacramento Bee]
(Photo: What Rhymes with Nicole)

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