M S.

The very first time I ordered from chewy.com about four or five years ago, they called me personally (no really, I mean a human called me--also a human--on the phone to t. A. l. K.) to confirm some information. That blew me away.

Since that initial experience, chewy.com has delivered consistently with quality products, competitive pricing, and great customer service.

Well. My first encounter with Yelp was through a company. Yelp wanted our business. We thought $350/MONTH for their services (it was never very clear what those services were until we turned down their aggressive offer and sales tactics) was pretty steep, so we respectfully declined... over and over and over again.

BEFORE YELP EXTORTION ATTEMPTS: we were seeing a good balance of reviews on our site, and really didn't see a need for the "service."

DURING YELP EXTORTION ATTEMPTS: I was harassed by salespeople on a daily basis, pressuring me to buy in. One person tried to educate me about my audience, and I had to correct some seriously skewed "data" he was spewing. That didn't go over well.

AFTER YELP EXTORTION ATTEMPTS: Amazingly, after I literally had to block calls from the salespeople, ALL of our good reviews were hidden and ALL of our bad ones brought to the front. Yelp blames it on "the bot! The bot did it! There's NO bias! We swear!" Yep. I'm pretty sure those noses don't fit in compact cars any more.

We started taking screenshots of hidden customer reviews and post them into our newsletters to thank customers for taking the time to write those reviews. We posted the good and the bad, because they're all valuable. Even more valuable when you can actually see them.

IN ADDITION, all of my own personal reviews on my own account (they knew my name, after all) disappeared from sight. Permanently. I had some really good reviews of some small businesses and they just magically disappeared after being there, many of them, for years. New reviews, old reviews, all gone. Poof.

So, in short, if I want to find out a restaurant's reputation or a company's cred, I look for google reviews. I don't trust Yelp to do anything but make me Yelp in pain.

I've been ordering from Vitacost for years. I've had one minor incident in all those years, a fish oil bottle that smelled rancid. I was expecting to have to ship the bottle back, but they not only offered apologies, but sent me a new one that arrived overnight. I was floored.

Fish oils are susceptible to rancidity if there's even the slightest breach in the seal. I live in AZ, and this was during the summer (nuff said), so it's not at all surprising.

I've never had any other issues with Vitacost, if you could even call that an issue; they've always exceeded my expectations in quality, cost, packing and delivery times.

I signed on with another streaming service and was finally able to ditch sling. Woohoo! What a difference. Since my review, nothing got better with sling, despite my hopes that it would. I thought maybe time would heal all incompetence, but it didn't.

I signed on with another service that isn't suffering from incompetence or money-grabbing tactics, and they just started up.

Buh-bye!

YouTube TV is new, and they've hit the market with a bang. I thought I'd give them a try, as I was dying to get rid of another streaming company. Once I started using it, it was a no-brainer.

Unlike most services, YouTube TV doesn't have hidden costs or unexpected add-ons. You get what you see, with an easy-to-use-and-understand interface, the ability to add shows to your library, and the option to have those shows DVR'd.

PROS:

Family Is Invited! Up to five family members with a Google account can be invited, no extra cost. They then have private access to their own viewings, lineup, recordings, etc.

Live and On-Demand, DVR, ability to watch a network show right after it's aired. Pausing live? Priceless.

Fast forwarding, rewinding, and pausing is available for on demand and live shows.

Clean, user-friendly interface.

CONS:

No Comedy Central.

So many obscure sports networks to get past; it almost feels as though there are as many of those channels as there are regular ones. I'm also 99% sure this is a common issue with all streaming services.

I've been doing business with OWC for well over a decade, both as an individual and through a service department.

They back every sale, honor every transaction, and have never failed to deliver. When there are issues, they stand by the product. And issues are rare, albeit unavoidable. It's how a company handles unforeseen issues that counts, and they handle them expertly.

It is simple, applied logic to determine that, since they've been in business since the '80s or '90s and having been doing business with individuals and companies for that long, they wouldn't still be in business if they weren't providing good service.

Crowdsourcing is not design, let's just get that straight from the beginning. If you really believe that an individual desperate enough to participate in these sites is a real designer, you'd be wrong. If you believe they have ethics and integrity, you'd be wrong. If you believe you're going to have the opportunity to enter into some collaboration with someone who's producing work for free in the hopes of an award, you'd be wrong.

However, of all the sites with this abysmal model, crowdSPRING tries at least to do it right.

So, in short, if you are too cheap to pay a real designer and too ignorant to understand what a designer actually does (or you just don't value what they do), crowdsourcing will be just the thing on which to waste your money.

When you ask for design from a company whose only goal is to make money by exploiting desperate people who are unqualified to do the work, you get what you pay for. I have spoken with contest participants who report unequivocally that they are paid only a fraction of what the client is told they're paying to the contest participant. Apart from the cut the company already takes up front, they take a much larger chunk from the contest participant's winnings behind the scenes.

If you want a designer, hire a designer. If you have no respect for designers and want something cheap and possibly illegal, use a crowdsourcing site. You will get what you pay for, I guarantee you that.

Throw a bunch of hungry people with a computer into a spec work situation where they're "creating" something for free in the hopes of being picked, and you get sub-par and often illegal ripoffs being touted as branding.

These aren't designers, and the owners don't care about design. This is money-grabbing at its worst.