Website of the Week - Consumerist.com | Voice of America - English
Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.
Thisweek, a site that is an outgrowth of the consumer culture, which is so much apart of the American economy, where we buy a lot of goods and services, andwhere we sometimes think we're not getting the value we deserve for ourpurchases. " is a daily blog thatis dedicated to empowering, informing and entertaining the everyday consumer ashe navigates the murky and bloody waters of the marketplace," says BenPopken, editor of Consumerist.com, where buyers of products and services bringtheir complaints and post them online. Thereare a wide variety of topics that consumers want to talk about online, butPopken described the typical issue this way: "Thebasic formula for a lot of the complaints is: I bought something from thecompany, the good or service wasn't up to the standard that I expected, andwhen I contacted them, they didn't care. And that happens over and overagain." Andif that's the typical complaint, the classic example was the user who tried tocancel his account with AOL, at one time America's largest Internet serviceprovider. The company was notorious for making it difficult for subscribers tocancel, so one persistent customer recorded a frustrating 20-minuteconversation with AOL. Consumerist.com posted it online, prompting the companyto change its policies. "Soafter we posted that," Popken said, "it very quickly went viral, andit ended up fast-tracking AOL's ? basically disintegrating thesubscription-based service they had been known for and making them a lot moreresponsive to peoples' requests to cancel their account." Consumerist.comalso includes a variety of consumer news, including notable bargains every dayand, more often in this economy, news of retail chain businesses reducing operationsor shutting down entirely. Checkout a different side of American consumer culture at Consumerist.com, or getthe link to this and more than .