Hi All,
Welcome to a Friday morning. Won't you have a cup of coffee with your daily dose of the Farmingdale library reference blog? Please enjoy a bagel with this blog also...
So I had to have an item delivered from a fairly well-known store yesterday. Alas, the item was not delivered when it was supposed to even though said retailer promised delivery between 3pm and 7pm last night. I was waiting until at least 10pm before I just gave up and went to sleep. (I did call the retailer's customer service department to find out where the item was and if was going to be delivered...they said yes on both accounts. Go figure.)
My point is not to bore you with my trevails...my point is to generate an interesting introduction to a blog post. So, what would you do if you needed to lodge a complaint against a store or business or other organization?
Simple,
click here to visit the Better Business Bureau main website. Enter your zip code to go to the local chapter of the BBB. You can also
click here to visit the New York chapter of the BBB.Click on the Consumer link and you'll have all sorts of options of checking out whether or not a business is a member of the BBB, if the business has had any customer complaints lodged against it over the last 3 years, ownership information and more.
Possibly the most important part of the site is
this link where consumers can lodge complains against businesses, organizations and other groups. There are other important and relevant parts to the BBB site which are definitely worth looking at. A small effort on consumers' part can make a big difference in preventing a problem with a contractor, company or organization. Think of all the time and agita that could be avoided with a bit of homework! That's good, value added stuff!
Another good site to research businesses and organizations is the
Office of Consumer Affairs of Nasau County.
In a way that is somewhat similar to the BBB, the
Nassau County Office of Consumer Affairs has two sections: one for consume resources, another for Business resources. I'm going to give a brief overview of the Consumer Resources section.
First, the Nassau County OCA (Office of Consumer Affairs - I sometimes like to abbreviate things, it saves time and effort...) is a county website. As such the info on OCA is unbiased, pretty darn timely and very, very helpful.
For example, just on the main page for Consumers you can find very accessible links to
Consumer Information,
Home Improvement Contractors to Avoid (how about that! what a great link!),
Consumer Forms,
consumer complaints,
information on identity theft (that could - and probably will be a blog post at some time in the future),
users can check gas and oil prices in New York on the site also, get
FOIL requests (Freedom of Information requests) and much more.
Its funny because when I originally thought about writing a blog entry about my experience last night with the retailer I wanted to include some links to other consumer websites....but, as this entry has gone over my normal length, I'll keep you in suspense and include the sites in a future blog. I hope you check back for the part II entry to this post because I really, really think you'll enjoy it. There will be some very valuable nuggets in it!
Regards and have a great weekend.
Stu
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Hi All,
