Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Given it’s the start of the consumer spending season, I thought I should review Ron Burley’s short book Unscrewed: The Consumer’s Guide to Getting What You Paid For, which I read about year ago.

Billing itself as a “powerful and informative guide” to helping you deal with companies, it offers advice and strategy on “who to talk to, what to say, and when to walk away.”

While it does do this, I think at times the strategies are either unrealistic or way over the top. I personally have managed well with companies by simple being polite and making sure I’m talking to the person that actually has the power to make the decisions. If you do that and have a valid case, I think you’ll get what you want 90% of the time.

For example, when buying my car, I never spoke to a salesmen (except during test drives). Instead, I’d called and asked for a “Sales Manager” and said, “I want to buy a 2007 Honda Accord EX-L, Silver, Inline 4, Black Interior. I don’t need dealer financing. I’m calling the 5 dealers in town and whoever gives me the lowest price wins. I’ll come in with a check and pick up the car tomorrow.”

This actually worked really well, I didn’t need to learn about Dealer Incentives, Loyalty Bonuses, or play the “how much can you pay a month” four-square game. Instead, I got back 4 bids and then picked up my car from the dealer with the best price.

A great source of contact information is the Consumerist blog. While it has a disappointing signal to noise ratio, it does have contact info for the executive customer service line at a lot of companies. So when I couldn’t get Sprint to process my ~$80 refund, I used the relevant contact info, send a polite note explaining the situation, and immediately got my refund.

Again, the combination of being polite and knowing who to talk to solved the problem.

So, back to Burley’s book. Burley starts out explaining why customer service is bad today. First of all, there are lot more companies and customers out there, so personalized attention is hard to get. Second is that pressures on the bottom-line reduce funding in non-revenue departments like customer service. Lastly, since these businesses are rarely local, customers are basically seen as anonymous account numbers.

Next Burley presents a series of techniques to get attention from the right people. Some of them seem unethical, like pretending to be an accounting firm in order to get a CEO’s fax number and then spamming him with letters explaining your problem. Some are more reasonable, but pretty intense, like threatening to picket a business that you feel wronged you.

Generally, all the techniques involve making yourself annoying enough that you get what you want. In the end, if the amount of money owed to you is large enough it may make sense to use the more extreme techniques.

There’s one technique that I wish the book had gone into: don’t get into the situation in the first place by reading reviews, asking friends, and getting recommendations. If you do this, you’ll rarely need to use these techniques.

In summary, Unscrewed is a quick and probably worthwhile read. I would get this book from the library though, it’s not worth reading twice.