December 18th, 2011

‘Tis the Season…for Christmas Chanukah Candles?

Seen at the local CVS: Christmas Chanukah candles. Apparently, the deluxe kind.

What next, a nice Chanukah ham? Oh. I see.

You gotta love corporate America. It’s amazing, sometimes, that this whole capitalism thing works.

But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe this is really part of something much bigger, like the War on Chanukah. Or, the War on Hanukah, depending on your transliteration style. This assault is not something new, of course, as it goes back at least to the culture war days of George W. Bush and his Chanukah party card that included a Christmas tree. So yeah, I blame George Bush for the assault on our nation that I saw in CVS this weekend. You didn’t really think Bill O’Reilly invented the war against holidays, did you?

C’mon, that was worth blogging, wasn’t it? Maybe there’s some legal warranty kinda issue hiding in this story someplace to justify its existence on my blog…

October 7th, 2011

U-Haul and its Lousy Customer Service (Updated x3)

Maybe once or twice a year I use this blog to gripe about some consumer issue. Consumer issues aren’t 100% in my wheelhouse, but they are a close cousin to personal injury law. Last year it was snowboarder Tony Hawk, and before that it was Ink Jet Superstore. It’s my blog and I get to do that kind of thing.

Today I’m going to kick the fenders of U-Haul for its incompetent customer service. As regular readers know, I’ve been ultra-busy lately in my non-lawyering life being the Grand Poobah of a half marathon trail race that I founded (reviews of the race here). And to put that race on, I had to rent a van to haul around all manner of stuff for the almost 500 runners and 100+ volunteers who showed up. I made the mistake of picking U-Haul instead of a local company.

So what happened last Friday morning when I went to pick up the van, needed immediately to go fetch and haul many hundreds of medals, awards, goody bags, water bottles, signs, shirts and other stuff? The nice U-Haul guy says that he can’t rent to me yet; I have to call a special customer service number first.

Grrrrr. I’m in a rush. So I call, because I have no choice. And you know where this is going, right? Who has success calling customer service for anything, unless it’s Apple you are calling?

I finally get through after 15 minutes — I hear the phone go out of auto mode and it rings! — and then disconnects.

Grrrr. So the nice U-Haul guy – who is not to blame as he is following the computer orders or he loses the franchise — calls another number for me. And 15 minutes later I hear it disconnect. I’m ready to explode.

After about 45 minutes of grinding my teeth, pacing the floor and steam blowing out my ears, I get an actual, living, breathing, human on the phone, who tells me that there is an outstanding parking ticket for last year for $80 for the van Mrs. Poobah picked up. I tell said person that we never received this phantom ticket, but that that we did get a notice in the mail sometime after. That notice came from Vengroff, Williams & Associates, a Florida law firm. I immediately wrote to them for a copy of this phantom ticket so I could see if it was legit or not. I even put it on my office letterhead, in my capacity of representing Mrs. Poobah. But nothing ever came.

And there the issue lay dead. Until this year when I was finally told by some stony-voiced lady, an hour into my efforts to pick up this stupid van, that if I didn’t pay this $80 — which seemed to be ransom I had to pay to get the van we had reserved — then I would not get the van. So I said I would pay it if they sent me the phantom ticket. And I gave U-Haul the credit card info. I was not pleasant about it, though an hour earlier I no doubt would have been. Their agent promised to send me the ticket.

But they once again failed to send me a copy of the phantom ticket.

So there you have it: Another company that thinks customer service simply doesn’t matter. I say it does. I toyed with the idea of calling U-Haul to find the right person to straighten this out, but if I couldn’t get through the first time with any level of efficiency, why would I succeed now? Why spend an hour on the phone when I can write about this is just 20 minutes? And the irony is that their Twitter name is @UHaul_Cares. Maybe the company cares more about pretending to have customer service than actually having it.

Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield has been gnashing his teeth about a crappy KitchenAid refrigerator and his attempts to get one that works that hasn’t been dropped. Then Greenfield took to Twitter to blast them up, down and sideways. If he has to waste days at home waiting for phantom rapairmen or deliverymen, well that gives him time to talk about KitchenAid’s failings. And now his refrigerator has its own hysterical Twitter feed (and now its own website) and the fridge has even been interviewed. (Update: Greenfield has now updated with a post exemplifying the utter failure of customer service: KitchenAid “There’s Nothing Else We Can Do.”)

Once upon a time, if you had a gripe against Big Corp., you could spend your days standing in front of their HQ with a picket sign for the world to see. But that world has changed.

Maybe one day corporations will get a better grip on this whole customer service thingie and the power of the individuals to self-publish to the world.

Update (2:50 pm): I emailed U-Haul customer service after this Twitter exchange:

@UHaul_Cares : @Turkewitz Mr. Turkewitz, we’d like to discuss with you further. Please email contact info to [email protected] or contact 8007893638

@Turkewitz: @UHaul_Cares You don’t really think I’m going to call a UHaul 800 customer service number again? Didn’t you read? bit.ly/pHfgwQ

But despite emailing them, no word back. So I got curious and Googled around a bit and found other horror stories about the company…I bet there is more out there, when I get the time maybe I’ll link to them too…

I Hate U-Haul Truck Rental (And so does everybody else)

Don’t Use U-Haul

Update #2 (10/9/11) – U-Haul finally sent me the ticket, a year after it was issued and eight months after I learned of it and demanded a copy. The citation was issued the day after we returned the van and on a street where we never took the van. And, more importantly, despite my calls to customer service being cut off twice after about 15 minutes each, without ever speaking to a human, I was told their 800 numbers were “in working order.” If the numbers are in working order then that means the customer service agents are not.

Update #3 (10/10/11) — U-Haul has reversed the $80 charge and apologized to me. One other thing worth noting, since the money is obviously the smaller of the issues: I don’t yet have an answer as to why their customer service reps kept cutting me off. They claim that they are investigating. If I get a definitive answer I will do another update. My best guess — and it’s just that, a guess based on a general perception of corporate stinginess when it comes to customer service, unless the company is named Apple — is that they are understaffed and overworked and that some folks were “clearing” the lines. It is possible that a rep or two could get blamed, when a larger issue might be a company trying to add a penny or two to the bottom line to make Wall Street happy, and done at the expense of customer service. I’d love to be proven wrong.

AMERCO is the holding company for U–Haul International. Stock: UHAL on NASDAQ.

December 29th, 2010

A Tony Hawk Christmas (Shred Game, Updated)

If Christmas Day isn’t the slowest day of the year for a law blog, then it’s darn close. But not this year. Rather than see a spike downward, I saw a spike upward and comments started to pour in.

Because on Christmas, it seems, a lot of kids open presents. And many of those kids were unfortunate enough to receive a Wii game created by skateboarder Tony Hawk, which I reviewed a month ago: See, Tony Hawk’s Shred for Wii by Activision (Review: How Many Ways Can you Say Awful?)

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read that review and return.

Welcome back. It seems I wasn’t alone in finding problems calibrating the skateboard controller to the Wii. In fact, since that posting a month ago, a couple thousand people have stumbled in here to view it, with over a thousand using some combination of the word Hawk and calibrate, using search terms like these:

Tony hawk shred calibration
tony hawk shred calibration wii
tony hawk shred board won’t calibrate
how to calibrate tony hawk shred
can’t calibrate tony hawk shred
what do i do if the tony hawk shred calibration doesnt work?
cannot get tony hawk shred board to do initial calibration with wii

There are hundreds of these search combinations as people wasted hours on Christmas Day trying to get this computer game to work, and then had to scour the Internet for information as they tried to find some way to put a smile on a kid’s face because the gift sucked the big wazoo. A nice way to spend Christmas with the family, right? This was my favorite comment on my first posting on the subject, from “Laura”:

electrical engineer PhD husband who can fix ANYTHING could not resolve the calibration problem

But the agony of children across the land on Christmas does have its humor, if you like black humor that is. There were lots of comments and ideas on how to get the thing working, such as:

Try “gently used” batteries
Turn the lights off in the room
Hold the controller right next to the game system
Rotate the console so the “dongle” is in a different position relative to the board
Elevate the board to a height not recommended by the game’s maker
Move all furniture away from the game
Remove all metal in the area

Several seemed ready to hang Hawk from the nearest light post, though I may be reading between the lines. Messing with a kid’s Christmas, oddly enough, tends to bring out unhappy parents. A couple suggested class action lawsuits against Hawk for putting this lemon on the market.

Can you imagine? Some gently used athlete puts out a game where you have to possibly find gently used batteries, turn out the lights, put the game on a pedestal and adjust its dongle. Trust me, the set up instructions that came with the game don’t read that way. Maybe said athlete has spent a little too much time on his own pedestal. Perhaps Hawk has a defective dongle. Perhaps he thinks he can do no wrong. Yet wrong is exactly what he did.

I went to the Tony Hawk Shred website (coded “nofollow“) to see if there was an apology there for the thousands of screwed over customers who had wasted untold hours with sad-faced children looking on. I like to amuse myself that way sometimes, pretending that those who owe apologies are sane enough to actually issue one. You may not be surprised to learn that there were none to be seen.

The site even has a blog that I checked. It’s last entry is dated November 29, 2010. It says to “Stay tuned for weekly updates.” They seem to have missed a few weeks during the biggest sales time of the year.

Hawk, perhaps, knew that he laid an egg, though he didn’t yank the game from the market. (Or he’s completely clueless, take your pick.) Maybe he’s now looking for just the right crisis manager to put out an artfully worded statement. Now that the money is in the door.

November 28th, 2010

Tony Hawk’s Shred for Wii by Activision (Review: How Many Ways Can you Say Awful?)

Personal injury law is a consumer issue, usually dealing with individuals battling corporations. But I’ll stray off that theme a bit today, to review a consumer product I did battle with over the weekend. It’s my blog and I get to do that kind of thing, especially if the product ticks me off because it doesn’t work.

Tony Hawk, for those that don’t know, is a skateboarder. One of the best. And he’s making a killing, it seems, by licensing his name to products as Tony Hawk, Inc.

One of those products is a video game designed for the Wii called Tony Hawk Shred, marketed by a company called Activision. Activision had marketed Guitar Hero, a mega-hit video game with a guitar used as the controller, so maybe the company thinks consumers will buy any game they distribute.

If you are the type to think that way, let me clear it up today with this review: Tony Hawk Shred is not yet ready for prime time. After a few hours of hook-up attempts and product returns, on behalf of a certain child that sleeps down the hall from me, I never did get this thing to work.

This is the idea for the game: A disc goes into the Wii computer, and you use a mock skateboard/snowboard filled with hi-tech doo-dads that’s placed on the floor for the gamer to stand on. The board is motion-sensitive and is supposed to act as a controller, the same way a handheld joystick might. Then, if it actually works properly, it responds to the user as it gets turned, jumped, grabbed and otherwise tricked upon to mimic skateboarding or snowboarding. As I said, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. You can see the commercial for it on YouTube.

Why would I review such a product on this blog? Because my 8-year-old boy — who loves to skateboard and snowboard — got one from his Nana as a present, and that means Dad hooks it up if it’s beyond the kid’s capability. So I tell said kid to try to do it himself, because he should learn how these things work, and because my video game experience is rooted in Pong, PacMan and Asteroids a few decades back. I confess that I also dabbled a bit in Solitaire and Minesweeper in the early ’90s when I had my first computer, but let’s face it, I peaked with Pong. No one will confuse me with a joystick cowboy. So the smart money bets on the kid to hook it up if he can.

Tony Hawk, center, showing off the controller board with fans who clearly were not in my basement this past weekend

But he couldn’t. So down to the basement I went. And the problem he seemed to be having is that the controller/board has to first be “calibrated” to the Wii. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I do know that the Wii computer has to talk to the board/controller computer and that this dance between the two is a necessary step to start the game.

So after the kid tried and failed, I took a crack at it. And 45 minutes later, I hadn’t done any better. The instructions were simple, and after following, re-following, re-starting, re-booting, changing USB ports, changing batteries, and standing on my head to spit nickels, I finally buckled and called Activision’s technical support.

By a show of hands: How many think I could get a human on the line in less than 20 minutes? Right. Does anyone actually like these electronic answering service systems, other than the companies trying to save money by not hiring enough staff?

But I eventually got the human, finally, and she told me to move everything in the room at least four feet away from the board, so the board’s sensors wouldn’t be effected. And to move any heavy metal objects away. But after re-arranging my basement so the magic board sat there in the center by itself like some museum diamond, and even standing in another room to make sure not a hair moved in the vicinity of the computers while they tried their calibration flirtation, we still didn’t have a calibrated skateboard/snowboard. And we know it didn’t work because there was Tony Hawk on the TV telling us so. Over and over and over again.

So Activision’s technical support rep gave me a special number to call for advanced technical support. Ah ha! The magic ticket, I figured.

Only after hanging up, however, did I realize that she had given me the same number I had just dialed. Back into the electronic answering system I went, as the steam blew out from my ears.

Before going on, let me give you a tip if you have the misfortune of calling Activision technical support and being trapped inside its virtually humanless hotline. If you want an actual, living, breathing person to help you, do not speak any of the following logical commands at the voice prompt: “Help.” “Customer Service.” “Human being.” “Representative.” Nor should you repeatedly pound on the “O” as this won’t get you an operator, though it might get you disconnected so that you have the pleasure of starting all over yet again.

No, the magic words are “Live Agent,” to distinguish it I suppose, from the dead agent robots that the evil mastermind designed to exhaust your patience and have you hang up, so that Activision and Hawk need not pay more salaried humans. Most people, I suspect, will hang up in frustration after being unable to find a human on the hotline, which I guess is the idea.

Back to the story: My new Live Agent — a perfectly pleasant gentleman who I imagine is forced to put up with this crap all day long for those that can get through — suggests our particular game might be a warranty issue, which I understood to be a polite way of saying I have a lemon. So I call the store to swap it out and start all over, except of course that they have none in stock. Nor does the store in the next town over, but I do find one in the Bronx, and finally fight my way through the crowds for the swap. The salesman who did the swap told me he’d heard of problems with the Wii version of the game.

Now you know where this is going, right? The second piece of crap was just as bad as the first. The controller, that being the board, refused to calibrate. We never did get the game working.

The kid with his Tony Hawk shirt, before he got the crappy game as a present

The kid with his skateboard and Tony Hawk shirt, before he got the crappy game as a present

By this point, my kid had developed a new mantra. It goes like this: “I hate Tony Hawk.” I doubt he’ll wear the Hawk shirt again that you see him sporting in the photo to the right. I thought about telling him that Hawk probably didn’t design either the hardware or software; that he’s just an athlete that licensed his name. It wouldn’t be a bad lesson for a kid.

But then I thought, why should I defend Hawk? He wanted the money so he created Tony Hawk, Inc. and licensed his name. And besides, he claims to be involved in making the games. If he wants to preserve his name he must make sure the stuff with his name on it actually works. You don’t get to take the good stuff (money from licensing) without risking the bad (lost fans and shredded reputation if the product stinks).

When I brought the game back for a refund the salesman told me that the model released last year (Tony Hawk’s Ride) was also riddled with complaints about the Wii version. This was supposed to be the new and improved model. You’d think they would have worked the bugs out of the system with this one. But the guy told me that people will buy anything with Hawk’s name on it, so maybe management (and Hawk himself) don’t really care?

When I buy a computer, I expect it to work. Which is why I’ve used Macs since around 1995. And when I need to call tech support, Apple taught me to expect a person on the line that will actually help. Tony Hawk’s Shred for Wii fails miserably with respect to both the game itself and the support it offers.

But wait, there’s more! You know that prompt you sometimes get asking if you’d like to take the customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call? The one you always answer “no” to? This time I said yes. And as promised, the call came in two minutes after I hung up with tech support. And this was the kicker: After one question the customer survey line simply went dead. The company couldn’t even do that right. Or, perhaps, they really don’t want to know.

But at least I know this blog works.

Update 12/28/10: A Tony Hawk Christmas (Shred Game, Updated)

January 14th, 2009

InkJetSuperstore Not So Super

I’m irritated. The web site claims that orders “are usually shipped the same day.” But it took them five days to ship mine. Since this is ink for my printer, that matters.

Over the last 20 years I have done everything as an attorney from answering the phones and filing papers, to taking verdicts and arguing appeals. I’ve also taken care of my office equipment, which inclues the utterly mundane act of ordering ink.

InkJet Superstore has ink. So I ordered it. But when I got an email five days after placing the order that it had just shipped, I was steamed.

I tried to call, but the customer service number was no longer working.
I tried to email, but there was no email address on the site.
I tried “live chat” and got a human, claiming to be named “Jane.” Ah ha! So let’s see what happened to my ink:

info: Please wait for a site operator to respond.
info: You are now chatting with ‘Jane’

Jane: Hi! How can I help you?
you: I ordered my stuff 5 days ago. Why did it take 5 days to ship?
Jane: I do apologise for that delay. Could you tell me your order number so I cna look it up?
you: 683089
Jane: And what is your name please?
you: Eric Turkewitz
Jane: We experienced a severe delay during the weeks from Dec. 29 to January 10th, this is why your order shipped fiveive days later. I apologise for this inconvenience.
you: Your website says:
you: Orders placed before 3pm PST are usually shipped the same day. (Monday – Friday).
you: I tried to call, by the way, and the customer service number on the website has been disconnected.
Jane: Yes, but as I said, we went thourgh a very big, unforseen, delay. Which is why we couldn’t ship a lot of orders within due time.
Jane: Our phone system is down at the moment, we’re trying to solve it.
you: What was the delay?
Jane: We had our anual inventory recount opnthe last week of December, which resulted in a huge delay of orders from that week and the week after it
you: If this was an annual recount, why was it “unforeseen?”
Jane: Because we don’t prevent how many orders we will have delayed
you: ??? (That didn’t seem to make sense)
Jane: The delayed was expected, but we didn’t know it was going to be such a delay. Is there anything else you need us to do for you???
you: If you knew there was a big delay, why didn’t you at least send the stuff to me by next day delivery instead of ground service?
Jane: I’m sorry for the inconveniece, but we weren’t able to do that at the time.
you: That’s not a very good answer to an unhappy customer
Jane: I apologise for this problem I really understand your situation.
you: Saying you have delays due to an annual recount and apologizing for me not sending me the stuff pronto, doesn’t really answer any question that I had
you: Your site says 100% satisfaction guaranteed. As you might guess, I am not satisfied
Jane: What you can do, if you wish, is return the items for a full refund, when you receive them.
you: Where were these goods shipped from?
Jane: Form Bell, CA, 90201
you: Great, so it will take another 5 days to reach New York?
Jane: Yes.
you: Will you be letting your boss know that s/he has lost the business of a customer, not just because of the initial delay, but because the company then caused further delay by shipping it via ground?
Jane: I will. We always report this issued to our boss. I’m sorry for this inconvenience.
you: By the way, you said you couldn’t ship the stuff to me via air after the delay. Why not?
Jane: We can’t change the shipping method a package once the order is shipped.
you: But it only shipped today. You knew many days ago you were having long delays. So why wasn’t it switched before it was sent?
you: I mean, really, is that any way to treat customers? To make them bear the brunt of your delays?
Jane: This was an unusual situation, I’m so sorry about this.
you: You’ve already apologized. I’m not looking for another one. I want to know why steps weren’t taken to immediately rectify the foul-up. Because if the company can’t rectify foul-ups in such a simple manner, there seems to be little reason to trust the company in the future.
you: Hello?
info: Your chat transcript will be sent to [xxxx [at]Turkewitzlaw[dot]com] at the end of your chat.

So there you have it. Delays by the company, and the hope that lots of “I’m sorries” will somehow make the goods appear at my office quicker. I never did get a decent answer as to why an annual recount was unforeseen or why the company didn’t ship delayed items by air to make sure the customers got their goods with as little delay as possible.

OK, you’ve each been warned about this company.