Companies Pass Exorbitant BBB Membership Fees Along to Customers

Think You're Being Smart by Shopping an A+ Rated, BBB-Approved Comopany? Think Again!

BBB Membership Dues (the Only Criteria for Acceptance or Rating) Drive Up Prices Among Members of Extortion Club

By: Fat Lester (FREE Consumer Advocate)

You’re proud of the fact that you need a herd of other sheep surrounding you in order to make decisions? You’re proud that you’re a big enough sucker that you gave $400-$500 to a gang of wanna-be mobsters who aren’t cool enough to have guns and wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did just so they wouldn’t make fun of you?

Wow Jason! That’s pretty pathetic!

Is the feeling of acceptance you get hanging out with a bunch of parasitic dweebs who didn’t move out of their mom’s basement until they were in their 40′s and even still managed to avoid getting a real job worth the $500 you take away from your little girl’s education fund each year so that you can remain a member of the lamest club on earth?

What would you do if someone were to tell you that your buddies will in all likelihood be indicted before the end of 2014 on charges of fraud, racketeering

and extortion? Would you fear for your own safety or would you become psyched by the opportunity to be one of the “inner circle” of ‘mid-40′s-but-still-not-self-sufficient dweebs’ by default if the current group of super-sized maggots were to be sentenced to a federal prison term?

I got news for you Jasey… Your mom’s the only person who thinks you’re cool. Paying $500/year to be a member of a fake-club wherein the club’s upper-echelon agrees not to make fun of you of call you names if you pay them doesn’t make you cool. It’s still not the same thing as a fraternity (which aren’t cool either — just a less uncool group of conformist twits). The difference between someone like you and someone like me is that you’ll shell out big bucks for approval, whereas I go out an earn mine through my work and my character.

Then again, I don’t expect you to know anything about that… Character and the doofuses who make up the BBB are mutually exclusive. I’d rather be among the former (someone with character and principles) than a wanna-be tough-guy gangster only fat from drinking too much beer on mom’s sofa any day of the week.

Good luck in federal court… I hope you all get at least six months. What I’m really looking forward to though is the class-action civil suit that’s going to issue divine comeuppance to your oversized kindergarten class full of adult twerps.

You might as well let mom know what’s coming, as your snarky little badge means nothing to anyone aside from you, mommy and the other twerps who have convinced each other that you actually did something besides pay someone smarter than you (smart enough to get you to pay $500 for a $0.30 badge) three days salary so you could pretend to be important with the other manboys in the little clubhouse.

Ebay and Paypal's Nonsensical Policies

Attention online shoppers: For Heaven's sake, please STOP using Ebay and PayPal! These companies are so poorly run it is virtually impossible for an online merchant to successfully utilize their "services" (and that's being generous).

Ebay and PayPal are dead-end destinations for vendors specializing in e-commerce sales, and in the opinion of this author, both have the capacity to kill new start-up firms by draining their human resources, which must be invested entirely into waiting on hold for a customer disservice representative to hang up on them once one finally manages to get them on the phone.

To start with, PayPal has got a set of some of the stupidest rules conceivable. For example, you cannot use the same email address for more than one PayPal account. You cannot add new email addresses to an account, even though there is a link on PayPal's site claiming to do just that. Unfortunately, PayPal creates a mystery password that if you want to actually log in using the new email address, you must first successfully guess what it is. Sure, they provide a field where you can enter a new password of your own choosing, but it does not work when one tries to log in using the new email address and password.

You cannot use the same credit card with more than one PayPal account, the same goes for checking accounts. Once a credit card is associated with an account, it can never be successfully removed from that account and added to another. If you wish to set up a second PayPal account for a different purpose, you must first activate a brand-new credit card to associate with the account. This is pathetic and beyond asinine on the behalf of PayPal.

Now onto Ebay. Ebay requires that all sellers have a credit card and checking account associated with their Ebay accounts. However, Ebay provides no mechanism for actually providing them with that information. That is correct, Ebay is apparently not accepting any new sellers, as there is apparently no place on the site to enter credit card/checking account information, and the company will not allow new sellers to actually sell without providing this information Ebay won't allow you to provide.

Naturally, customer service at both of these organizations is more like a disservice.

Both companies were founded by Meg Whitman, which explains why both are so convoluted and unnecessarily complicated.