Calvin A.

Home Depot is a great store in many ways. Often they have some very good people, not always. Some stores such as Vallejo, CA are terrible. Others like Redmond, OR are some of the best in the entire western USA. It's all about the people who run those stores, some are better than others.

My wife was in my local Target store with my two girls in the women's rest room, and there was a man in there, Scared them all a lot. Manager said it was OK if men used the ladies room. I think we've all gone mad.

It used to be pretty darn awesome, Paypal was great to me for many years. You'd run into nothing but the worst customer service in the known universe over at Ebay, and Paypal would step in and solve that issue like FAST. Now you call up and they've gone from a reasonably good answering system to another one of those nightmares from hell. And then you get put on hold and they play the same message over and over, telling you how much they value you as a customer, and after 30 minutes of hearing it over and over I wanted to pull my hair out. And so did the other people around me who could hear the speaker phone. They all said the same thing, "Wow Paypal has gotten bad!" If you get through to someone outside the USA you have about a 50/50 chance of it working out. The over-seas operators can be very good or very bad, their levels of training vary greatly. Almost always the USA people have great training and will help you. Recently I had a problem and got my money back. I have never once failed to get my money back. But one time I sold an item on Ebay for $5500 and the customer was happy, there were no problems, but Paypal decided to just freeze my account. No reason was given. Phone calls went on and on, and finally after many dozens of phone calls I got through to an "upper tier" person who would help me. What a nightmare. Don't ever give them access to you bank account, that's a very serious mistake. They can and will take money out of your account if they want to, and they have not always been forthcoming about why. I was part of a class action law suit a long time ago against PayPal for stealing $88 dollars out of a bank account without my permission, and we won. And yet they continue to do it. They make it harder and harder to complain about a bad purchase. You have to wait long periods to get your money back. They exceed their own time frames. They'll tell you on the phone it's 5 days and it will turn out to be 10. Very often the operators have told me one thing only to find out that changes. They'll say 5 days, and that's what it shows on the site, but then suddenly on day 4 you look and now it says 10 days more with no explanation. This has happened to me many times. In all cases no one at PayPal can say anything except, well we're sorry but it was always 10 days, or whatever. I'll say then why did it say 5 days and your operator say 5 days? They have no explanation. PayPal used to have a "Executive Escalations" team. If it still exists they often can help you. I'm not sure it exists anymore because I was told Ebay did away with that, so I wonder if PayPal did, too. Now my review is a one star but the problem is there really is no other game in town. Mostly on Ebay you have to use PayPal. If you have big problems with them complain to the Fed at http://www.consumerfinance.gov/, and then figure out in your state who licenses PayPal in your State and complain to them, then complain to your State Attorney General's office of consumer protection. The only way to get them to ever improve is if enough people complain.

They shipped right away and their tracking actually worked, sort of. But they shipped me two solar items IN A PLASTIC shipping bag. Needless to say they were broken. Then they want me to send them pictures of the items. Well, I know I should have a camera but I don't. My friends don't either. We're an odd bunch here, no one has a smart phone, I don't even use a cell phone myself. So I tell them three times I don't have a camera. Their responses in really poor English (but you can understand it, sort of) say "Send pictures". Well, I'll send a credit card reversal, see how they like that. Shipping in such a poor manner and then making me prove the items were broken is poor customer service. Amazon, for instance, requires it's sellers to ship properly, as does Ebay.

Yeah they continue to insist on "photo evidence". Thank God for the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974 and other laws in the USA that protect me against unscrupulous criminals from Hong Kong.

UPDATE: Still waiting for the CC Bill to arrive. Bang Good has no intentions of making good on their obviously bad shipment. I mean mailing glass items in a plastic shipping bag, what did they think would happen?

I wrote them three times explaining that their so called "tracking" doesn't track anything. A month ago it shows the shipment arriving in San Francisco, and then... nothing. They always respond in broken English saying please check the tracking. Two months total and the items never arrived. Reported it as not arriving, no response. Reversing credit card charges now. What a pain!

Got my money back! Yeah!

The Walmart website, the secondary vendors, are well known for selling fake Chinese junk. Everything from fake Duricell batteries to fake memory cards, you name it, they fake it. And if you buy a fake item and complain to Walmart, they told me "sorry but we don't control the vendors". Worse they have no "Report counterfeit items" button or any real way to report the items. https://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/consumer-fraud/walmart-marketplace-for-fakes-*******.html

We love costco!

I buy all my t-shirts here, they last a long time. And I buy my boots here, they're great. They have good stuff.

I love Amazon both as a buyer and a seller. Only problem they have is sometimes they'll use a shipper called OnTrac which, where I live, is nothing but criminal low life scum. UPDATE: I called and complained repeatedly to Amazon and to OnTrac, and things only got worse. Shipments not arriving and yet shown as delivered, shipments left at the wrong location, shipments delivered after 11pm at night, etc. So finally I filed a complaint with the BBB at their corporate location. And now it's fixed, at least so far.

Steve Jobs said they would always support the Apple II.
I had every piece of software ever made for the Apple IIGS.
Then they dumped it like some old laundry. I'll never touch an Apple product again.

Many Sears are franchises, some are good, some are run by people that are one step above criminals. You'd better ask around a bit before buying anything important from a Sears.

As a seller or a buyer, you will sometimes end up with problems. And then you can try and use Ebay's automated system, but frankly it usually fails miserably. Calling and talking to customer service is a very long operation, and is hit or miss, and you can spend many hours doing this. On one item I bought I ended up calling a total of six times, and several times I was told one thing by one person, and a completely opposite thing by the next. Good information was rare. The people in the Philippines are much better than they used to be, but it's still common to get a really bad one. You have to be very persistent and find a good person which is getting harder and harder. -
- Also, many items on Ebay are fakes. There are websites that help you figure out if what you are buying is a fake. And Ebay sells dangerous, illegal things. Earlier this week I had them take down an auction for an abortion drug, Mifepristone. Many illegal prescription drugs are for sale, although it varies greatly over time, as they do take some of them down. -
-I just got them to take down about 100 auctions for an antibiotic that's by prescription only, but another one that's even stronger and more dangerous, even after three phone calls, they've not taken down over 50 auctions for it. The FDA confirmed it was illegal.-
-Recently there were F-14 Tomcat military aircraft parts, and other apparently stolen military hardware. After reporting it, it's all still there. Calling the Dept. of Defense it was very hard to get someone to help but they finally looked at it and agreed "It's illegal". You can see the NSN numbers on a lot of these items, and they're not supposed to be sold to the public.- Attempting to report these things to US customs, the FDA, the FTC, FBI cyber crimes, and DHS, has met with utter failure after numerous tries since 2002. Attempting to get legislation through Congress has met with failure.
-Magic the Gathering cards, a one billion dollar a year worldwide industry, many of the cards coming in from China are all fake. I've bought many of them, sent them to PSA and Beckett, all fake. Ebay still allows those sellers to sell. Also, reported dozens of auctions with fake fossils from China, Ebay took them all down, a week later they were all back up again by the same sellers. Rinse, repeat, called them several times, they took them down, they came right back. To this day they're all still there for sale, fake fossils from China. -I'm not an unhappy Ebay user, I'm a seller with a good rating.