You may have heard some people complain that when they used online chat on some big business’s website, they were chatting with a computer bot instead of a real person. You might think this isn’t a problem for you because you don’t use chat features on websites. Think again. The dream of big businesses is to run their customer interfaces with computers rather than employees. Most of the time I actually prefer to do things myself on a website, such as banking transactions, travel packages for my phone, and even some troubleshooting. However, there are times when we need to speak to a person to solve a problem. After you’ve waded through phone menus, listened to music for several minutes, and finally get a person on the line, you may not really be getting human responses. Increasingly, call center employees just read computer responses off a screen. As these computer algorithms get more sophisticated, call center employees make fewer decisions on their own. Even your local ba...

Recently I was pleasantly surprised to receive a gift certificate redeemable at Amazon. However, my happiness was short-lived. The first clue to potential trouble was that the amount of the gift certificate was £620. It’s not too uncommon for me to get U.S. dollars, but I don’t often receive British pounds. A scan of the gift certificate’s fine print revealed the following: “Amazon.co.uk gift certificates ... cannot be redeemed at Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.jp.” It’s hard to see a good reason for Amazon to make restrictions like this. Unless Amazon.co.uk delivers to Canada for a reasonable price, this gift certificate won’t do me much good.

AT&T has introduced a bandwidth cap on DSL usage that has sparked some outrage in the U.S. for how it will affect Netflix customers among others. However, the over-use charges are only one-tenth of what is generally charged in Canada. AT&T charges $10 for each additional 50 GB of bandwidth used above a base allocation of 150 GB. This works out to 20 cents per GB. Canadian over-use charges are typically $2 per GB and base allocations tend to be lower than 150 GB depending on the level of service purchased. It seems evident that Canada could use more competition in the internet access market.

Many people are unhappy with the size of their cell phone bills but imagine the shock a Quebec woman got when she was charged $47,000! Her story had a happy ending, but many others whose stories don’t make the news aren’t so lucky. From an informal poll of a few friends it seems that getting hit with an unexpectedly high cell phone bill is quite common. Maybe they’re not as high as $47,000, but they are higher than anticipated. This happens often enough that it seems to be part of the business plan of cell phone providers. A useful feature to protect cell phone users would be a monthly cap. If I expect my usual cell phone bill to be $100, I might volunteer for a feature where my service gets shut off if my monthly bill hits say $500. The idea is that this would be an immediate cut-off so that my bill could never exceed $500. This would only happen if I were being hit with some expensive charge that I didn’t understand in advance. Some people wouldn’t want such a feature, bu...

Bell has an offer for its customers: a $100 credit toward a new Bell TV subscription or a new cell phone. This sounds like a generous promotion until you read the body of the letter and fine print on the back. As a long-time monopoly, Bell was regulated by the CRTC and one of the things Bell was directed to do was to set aside some of the money it collected from its customers for “future use”. CRTC has now decided that this money should be returned to customers. Bell’s letter states that the rebate amount “could be up to $67 per home phone line”. However, “as an alternative” Bell is offering the $100 coupon. While it may not be obvious, the phrase “as an alternative” means that if you take the $100 offer you give up your right to the $67 rebate. The last line of the fine print on the back of the page is much more direct: “By taking advantage of this offer, you will not be eligible for any other offers specific to this program, or the rebate cheque mandated by the CRTC.” Le...

I had an interesting experience recently where I got better service from an airline by threatening to abandon my travel plans. I didn’t intend for this to be a bargaining technique, but it seemed to work out that way. I was scheduled to fly 3 legs to a U.S. destination on a Sunday on United Airlines. We were an hour late leaving which made me miss my first connection. There weren’t any actual airline employees nearby to help me get a new connection and I ended up calling United Airlines customer service. U.S. air carriers use various techniques to keep their flights quite full, and I was told that they couldn’t get me to my destination until Tuesday (two days later)! The agent tried to convince me to just take a flight to a city nearer my destination and hope to get on another flight to my destination by getting on a standby list. However, I insisted that if I couldn’t be scheduled with guaranteed seats the whole way, I wanted to turn around and go back home. I’ve had exper...

The Supreme Court found middle ground when it ruled on a case that could put some money in your pocket. Canadian telephone companies filled a $650 million fund with money collected from urban land line customers from 2002 to 2006. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ordered phone companies to spend $350 million of this money on broadband internet for remote areas and give the rest back to customers. The phone companies appealed to the Supreme Court to spend the whole $650 million on broadband, and consumer groups wanted the whole amount given back to customers. In the end the Supreme Court decided that the CRTC’s middle of the road plan was reasonable. So, you can expect to get some money back if you’ve had a land line for a while. But, don’t expect too much. Although the refund amount isn’t set yet, various estimates are between $5 and $20.

This is a guest post by my wife who is going back to school and trying to save money on her textbooks. Hoping to avoid long line ups at the campus bookstore and hoping to save some money, I did some comparison shopping on both amazon.ca and chapters.ca. I was happy to find a savings of 12.5% compared to the campus store. The textbook prices at both online book sellers were identical before applying Chapter's iRewards savings and since I don't have an iRewards card anymore and since the savings were only half of the cost of a new card, I decided to order my 5 books from Amazon. All five of the books individually qualified for "Super Saver Shipping" (over $39 of merchandise) so my money wasn’t going to be eaten up by Canada Post. Three of the books were in stock and the other 2 would be shipped in 1-2 weeks. I still had time before classes started so there was time to complete the order. The first option Amazon presented me with was to choose a shipping speed:...

This is a Sunday feature looking back at selected articles from the early days of this blog before readership had ramped up. Enjoy. I bought a scanner from a well-known chain store and was surprised to find a note inside the box explaining what was wrong with the scanner written by the last sucker who bought it. The note came with actual pictures of scans gone wrong. I’m grateful to this anonymous person who took the time to help out the next sucker to buy this scanner (me in this case). The two pages explaining the problem were not exactly hidden. They were the first thing that I took out of the box. Obviously the store employees never even looked inside. They just put it back on the shelf to sell it to someone else. Nice. I don’t see much point in naming the product or the store. But, I do like the consumer strategy of including a note any time you are forced to take a defective product back to a store. For your altruistic side, you get to help out other people. For ...

Two years ago a law passed requiring airlines to advertise the full price of airfares. Unfortunately, it contained a provision to delay implementation, and this delay has continued to today. There seems to be little political will to enforce such a rule despite the fact that it is popular with Canadians. I decided to try a little test. Air Canada has a listing of special offers, the first of which is a $295 flight from Montreal to Bogota. However, here is a full listing of all the charges that came up for this route after I chose the lowest costs I could find: $314.99 outgoing flight $314.99 return flight -$15.00 receive no Aeroplan miles for outgoing flight -$15.00 receive no Aeroplan miles return flight $30.02 surcharge $252.00 fuel surcharge $31.00 airport improvement fee $17.00 air traveler security charge $11.18 JS $1.55 GST $36.88 Columbia domestic airport tax $979.61 Total So, $295 turned into $979.61, a 232% jump! If they just increased the $252 fuel surch...

A pleasant-sounding woman from Bell Canada called me up the other day to save me some money. She told me that I could switch from my current $20 per month long distance plan to a $15 per month plan that gives more free minutes per month. This seems like a no-brainer, right? For a second I was confused because I’m not on a $20 per month long distance plan. The Bell Canada lady checked again, and said that two different systems showed my records differently. Imagine that. No worries, though. She still seemed to believe that I’d be better off in the new $15 per month plan because I use Yak, and Bell charges me a dollar for each Yak call plus I pay the Yak charges. This confused me again. Surely, I would have noticed if Bell were charging me an extra dollar for each Yak call. She had lots more reasons why the new $15 plan is better than the roughly $7 I paid last month (a heavy long distance month for us). I had stayed on the call this long because I was interested in how Bell woul...

In the past Bell has made me numerous offers for internet service that doesn’t work at my house . Their latest offer of a long distance plan is equally enticing. Apparently, the Canada Block of Time Long Distance Plan is only $17.95 per month. Just before this price is the word “from” written sideways in small letters. There is also a tiny “1” indicating the footnote on the back of the letter that informs me in ultra-small font that taxes and a $5.95 per month network charge are extra. The letter says that this “long distance plan matches your unique calling habits and saves you money.” It’s hard to see how this could be true given that in a typical month my family uses about $4 in long distance. This reminds me of the time when a life insurance salesman promised to save me money, but then proceeded to offer me plans that all cost more than double what I was already paying. I guess the target market is people who look at two numbers and can’t figure out which is bigger.

I’ve explained before that Bell technicians were unable to make their internet service work on my telephone line. In a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, Bell continues trying to win me back as a customer. The latest letter from Bell offers me internet service for only $17.95/month (in giant font). I suppose that would be a bargain if the service could be made to work, but I find the weasel wording around the giant numbers amusing. In front of the giant 17 is the word “from” written sideways in tiny font. This isn’t too surprising. The cheapest service costs $17.95.month, but higher levels of service cost more. There is also a tiny superscript “2” indicating that there is a footnote with additional information somewhere. However, I don’t see any notes on the page. A quick flip of the page shows about 130 words in 3 lines of text with characters less than a sixteenth of an inch tall all jammed into the bottom of an otherwise blank page. Nice. Fortuna...

I haven’t had much luck with Bell’s customer service until recently. I’ve had some crazy battles with Bell including being made to pay the same bill twice many years ago and a more recent running battle to get their internet service to work. A problem with my telephone sent me back to Bell’s customer service. It all started Friday when I started getting calls where the caller would hang up after one ring. My first thought that some kid was just having fun proved wrong when a friend sent an email asking what was wrong with my phone. It turned out that callers got one ring followed by static. My strategy at this point was to “hope the problem goes away.” By Sunday, it was clear that I would have to try another solution. Ever since Bell “gave” every customer the wiring inside their homes, we have to pay for any repairs. I had visions of having a Bell technician in to mess with the wiring for $100 and not fix the problem. This is what happened the last time a Bell technician came t...

My family uses Rogers Cable for TV and internet, but we still use Bell for our telephone. Both companies work hard to get us to bundle all three services together. I’ve discussed the offers from Bell here and here , and now it’s Rogers’ turn. The mailing we received from Rogers isn’t just a generic mailing; it is addressed to us and contains specific details of which services we already pay for. Apparently, we can bundle Rogers telephone service in with everything else for $149/month, “all monthly service fees included.” This is only $5.27/month more than we pay right now which makes it seem like a great deal. There must be a catch, right? After reading further it turns out that there is more than one catch. I’m guessing that the $149 figure doesn’t include sales taxes. This makes the added cost of phone service close to $20/month. The list of services we currently have seems to be missing a service that costs close to $20, and so we’re up to about $40/month extra for the...

A while ago I described my experience with Bell’s internet service . Since I switched providers, Bell has made numerous pointless efforts to get me back as a customer. The latest offer has a picture of a beaver inviting me to “get a lot of internet for a very little price.” The offer says that I will pay $9.95 per month. Wait a minute, there’s some fine print. That’s just for 6 months. Then the price then goes up to $22.95 per month. And I have to sign up for two years. Hold on, there’s more. I’ll be charged an extra $2 per month for modem rental and there are extra charges for using more than 2 Gigabytes per month. Something else is wrong. This offer is for a much lower speed of service than I had before I made the switch. So there you have it. If I switch back to the same service I used to have with Bell, I’ll pay some amount that has nothing to do with all the numbers in this offer. Clear as mud. Maybe it will all be worth it to get “the most powerful internet,” wh...

I used to be a customer of Bell’s Sympatico internet service. For some reason, Bell is trying much harder to get me back as a customer than they ever worked to keep me as a customer. My most recent mailing from Bell trumpets a very low monthly price of $22.95. Of course, the fine print says that this is for a level of service far below what I used to have with Bell. The real cost to me would be about double this figure. However, I’m actually not very price sensitive when it comes to internet service. I just want it to work. I haven’t really noticed my Rogers’ internet service because it works and is fast; just the way I like it. I know that other people have had trouble with Rogers, but I’m one of the lucky ones so far. I know a little about the technology Bell uses, and the quality and speed of service depends greatly on the length and quality of the phone line connection into the home. So, some people will have no trouble, and others will have no end of trouble. Unfortunately...

I don’t usually write about consumer items, but I just had an interesting experience. I bought a scanner from a well-known chain store. When I opened the box, it contained a note from the last sucker who bought this scanner with an explanation of what is wrong with it. The note came with actual pictures of scans gone wrong. I’m grateful to this anonymous person who took the time to help out the next sucker to buy this scanner (me in this case). The two pages of explanation were not exactly hidden. They were the first thing that I took out of the box. Obviously the store employees never even looked inside. They just put it back on the shelf to sell it to someone else. Nice. I don’t see much point in naming the product or the store. But, I do like the consumer strategy of including a note any time you are forced to take a defective product back to a store. For your altruistic side, you are helping out other people. For fun, you could even include an email address with your note ...

Lee Valley Tools Ltd. has initiated a class action suit against Canada Post over shipping charges. Before 7 years ago, Canada Post charged for shipping packages by weight. Then they introduced a new system where they charged for either weight or volume depending on which gave the higher charge. The idea was to charge more for big bulky packages that take up a lot of space, but aren’t very heavy. This all sounds reasonable enough, except that Lee Valley alleges that the machine Canada Post uses to measure volume can overstate the volume by as much as 20%. Another allegation against Canada Post in all this is that they keep any overpayments. Commercial customers have to weigh their packages and calculate the charges themselves. If Canada Post finds that the customer paid too little, they demand more money, but if the customer pays too much, Canada Post keeps the difference. Nice. If Canada Post loses this suit, it could be very costly for them. Of course, if Canada Post loses and ...