The Ethics of Online Reviews

I noted with great interest a story off the Wall Street Journal website about a lawsuit that’s being filed against Yelp.com for extortion. If you’re not familiar with the company, it’s basically a big online comments page, just like the ones on Amazon and other e-retailers, only not attached to any particular company or vendor. If you like a particular restaurant, dry cleaners or bookstore, you can go on the site and leave a review – and if somebody did you wrong in a customer service situation, you can go on the site and blast them for it. It seems like a great idea, doesn’t it? You can get real, raw feedback from the customers who have already made use of the product or service you’re thinking of putting money into, and get revenge on all of those rude and incompetent idiots who not only got your blood up but ruined your favorite shirt, too. Until we remember the basic problem with comments on the Internet…

If you read online comments (not that I am for one moment suggesting that anyone ought to do that) you will have probably already encountered those fun-loving beings known as “trolls” who insist on leaving posts that either insist that some completely impossible events have happened to the author, insult all of the other authors, or attempt to convince you to visit another site where you can find highly specialized pornography and/or make huge amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing. For the most part these electronic scribbling are harmless; the Internet equivalent of graffiti, but they do point up the credibility of anonymous comments left on websites: effectively nothing. It limits the utility of most online review functions (the ones on Craigslist are a good example) to the extent that you need to take them with a considerable grain of salt. But that’s not really the problem with Yelp, and it’s not what occasioned the lawsuit…

According to the news story (and several similar accounts), unless you give the company money, either for advertising or “membership” services of some other kind, you will never see any positive reviews of your business – and will find negative allegations that are completely false. The people who own Yelp are claiming the whole thing is hogwash, of course, but now they’re having the identical problem: people are coming out of the woodwork to claim that they’ve been scammed by the company, and there is no way to verify if any of THOSE claims are for real, either…

On the one hand, not only do people in this country have a Constitutional right to free expression, but there’s no effective way to regulate content on the Internet anyway. On the other hand, even in the United States you do not have the right to libel or slander other people (or their companies), and if you are a business entity you can (and probably will) be sued if you try to extort money out of people, disparage them for no reason, or just provide them with a good target and an easy way to squeeze money out of you in exchange for dropping a lawsuit. It’s an impossible business to be in, and I personally don’t believe it has a future; eventually only comments like the ones on Amazon (which you have to have a login and account information on file to post) are likely to survive. But in the interim, all of us who set foot onto the Web have a question in ethics to consider…

Do you have any responsibility to post positive comments about a business you have positive feelings for? Do you have any responsibility to post negative comments about a business with which you’ve had negative outcomes (to protect other consumers)? And if you know that a company which provides a forum for such comments may not be trustworthy, do you have any responsibility to avoid posting there? Or even warning other consumers away from their site, if you believe they are acting unfairly? For that matter, if you ARE such a company, how can you be expected to weed out trolls (who are attempting to destroy a business purely for the fun of it by using your service) from legitimate informants? Can you, ethically, post such comments if you can’t say for sure that they are legitimate? If you do so anyway, are you ethically responsible for the results of those comments?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: Return to Atlanta

Not counting layovers in the airport, this is my third trip to Atlanta, and oddly enough, all of them have been car trips – oddly, that is, when you realize that I’ve never lived within 800 miles of the place. But my wife and I were here in 2004, taking our daughter to college, and then again in 2008 when we came down for New Years’. And now we’re back, to help our daughter and her husband to be move again. Specifically, to help them move in with us, in East Lansing, Michigan – 800 miles from here…

I think we’re all a little worried about the transition; it’s just that none of us are willing to admit it. Even if you get along really well with your parents, it’s hard to avoid having mixed feelings about giving up your independence and going to live with them again. Even if you get along really well with the people who are going to be your in-laws (in another 14 months), it’s not easy to go and live under their roof. Even if you’re the best parent in the world (and my wife just might be) it’s hard to adjust to having the kids living with you again after five years as an empty-nester…

And, of course, even if you’ve loved your stepdaughter like your own child pretty much from day one (which is when we first met), being a middle-aged doctoral student with your own health, memory, stress and anxiety issues (and a schedule that frequently explodes for no apparent reason) means that anything you attempt takes on whole additional dimensions of complexity. It’s the only sane choice; it’s the only reasonable choice; it’s the only practical choice. But even for people who love each other as much as all of us do, it’s not an easy choice – we’re all going to have to work at this…

So it’s probably fitting that the whole thing is starting off with a mad scramble to get the residual belongings (the ones that didn’t get onto the moving van) packed up, everything we’re not taking thrown out, all of the services disconnected, and the cars loaded out. We’ve got to be out of the apartment in two days, on the road in three, and home to East Lansing before Monday, because I’ve got a class to teach. And that doesn’t even consider the going-away party…

It’s hardly the first time I’ve joined a party of the younger generation as somebody’s parent; I had that same experience with some of these same people seven months ago, the last time we were in Georgia. I think I finally understand the riff I’m getting here, this time: I’m 20 or so years older than the average person in this group, but not only am I cool enough to be worth hanging around with, I’m cool enough to actually go out and join the party without needing to be in charge of it. Don’t get me wrong; it would be a wonderful thing to be able to just whip out my billfold and tell everyone that the food and drink are on me. The generous side of my soul would love to do just that, in fact. But that would mean taking over this party; not only making it my event, but also changing my role into the “Great White Parent,” at a remove from all of the others…

It’s a line I will have to be careful not to cross over the next few years, and it’s a fine one. But this party is not about me; life in general is frequently not about me. And sometimes even the best of intentions can change things in ways you don’t want – and never intended. Some years ago I told the woman who would become my wife, “I am not a very good man – but you could make me one.” She said I gave her too much credit, but I disagreed then, and I do now; I am still not sure where this journey is taking me, or what I will be like at the end of it – but I know I will be a better person for taking the trip. And an infinitely better man for having taken it with her…

Of course, tomorrow I WILL be in charge of getting four people, three pets, two cars, and one metric assload of stuff 800 miles before we sleep. But for now, I think I’ll just lean back at one corner of the table and enjoy the party. Because there really is no way of knowing if I’ll ever make a fourth visit to Atlanta…

And the last easy day was yesterday…

What Are the Odds?

We’ve all seen the billboards, television ads, banners and whatnot, claiming that if you send it your old or unwanted gold trinkets, there’s a hefty payday waiting for you. Some of the television commercials are particularly high-pressure, with happy spokespeople talking about all of the wonderful things they managed to do with their huge gold windfall. What makes it all sound credible to the viewer is the near-record prices that gold has been selling for lately. After all, if gold is selling for over $1,000 an ounce, and you have several ounces of jewelry sitting around, that means you should be able to get several thousand dollars for it, right? What are the odds that something being advertised on TV by the late Ed McMahon could possibly be less than legitimate?

Well, according to an article that posted this week on The Boston Globe website, some of the “cash-for-gold” companies aren’t offering all that much per gram. In fact, 11% to 29% is the average range, but the Globe actually tried buying some gold earrings, just to see what they could get for them. The earrings sold for $62 (on sale) and had about $14.65 worth of gold in them (the rest of the price being “workmanship” and markup). The mail-in dealer they sent a pair to send back a check for $3.25...

Now, this is not to suggest that there is actual fraud going on here. The fact is, the mark-up of anywhere from 400% to 4,000% for “workmanship” and overhead is actually very common in jewelry; there’s also a matter of definitions, in that gold prices are given per ounce of 24-karat gold (the purest form), while a lot of gold jewelry is 14-karat or 10-karat, which are stronger and more durable. Even so, most of the prices quoted in the Globe story are listing gold prices at somewhere around $9.75 a gram, or a little over 27% of market price. And that doesn’t count the (apparently very common) cases where your “guaranteed” gold-return envelope mysteriously “vanished” in the mail, and the cash-for-gold company never got it in the first place…

What keeps this from being a scam is that none of the companies that engage in these practices make any claims about how much, exactly, you can make selling them your gold – or even what they pay per gram of gold in the first place. They also aren’t clear about how much they are charging you for shipping and handling, or for converting belongings of yours that look vaguely golden into gold ingots; metals extraction and recovery procedures aren’t actually that cheap, and neither are pre-paid insured shipping envelopes. It might seem like 77% is a large cut for the company to be taking, but $10 for shipping and handling and $1.40 for metals extraction aren’t actually large amounts of money in absolute terms. The real problem here isn’t so much deceptive advertising practices as it is people who can’t seem to grasp the idea of “something for nothing” being impossible, at least in a business context…

The simple fact is that companies do not exist to do wonderful things for the consumer; they exist to make money by providing value for their customers. McDonald’s does not exist to provide you with convenient and inexpensive nutrition; they exist to make money by buying basic ingredients (meat, potatoes) and adding value (processing, cooking) which you then pay extra for. Otherwise, you could just buy your own meat and potatoes and spent the time grinding, chopping, baking and frying until you got what you wanted. In the case of the gold-buying companies, you could take your $14.65 worth of gold, spend the money having it appraised, smelted, and made into ingots or wafers, and then sell it – spending all of the time, transportation, security, and overhead costs that would incur – and you’d probably be pressed to make more than the $6 the gold buyers in the linked story offered. Add in the shipping costs and insurance costs (along with the occasional pay-out to people who claim to have shipped you gold-like substances but really haven’t), and you’d probably have a hard time doing better than the 22% the “cash-for-gold” company in the story was offering…

None of this excuses the fact that these organizations are preying on people with a poor grasp of reality, of course. But if all companies were prohibited from making money on the greedy, the short-sighted, and the hopelessly credulous, the economy would collapse…

And you still couldn’t make thousands of dollars selling $14.65 worth of gold…

It’s Contagious?

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year picking on various airlines for what I continue to feel are misguided strategies surrounding revenue, and I probably shouldn’t have. The fact is, consumer behavior is complicated, and even the scholars who spend their entire careers studying it can’t always account for why people choose to spend money on things that cost more, do less, and confer no particular social or status advantages on the purchaser. Certainly, Sir Richard Branson knows a lot more about running service-industry companies than I do (one of us is a self-made billionaire; one of us is a doctoral student making less money than an exterminator’s helper; you do the math), and if he feels that charging $80 for an aisle seat on Virgin Atlantic flights is good for business (even when people in the linked story are describing a whole section full of empty aisle seats), then I probably shouldn’t tell him otherwise. But you still have to wonder who at Blockbuster thought bringing back late fees was a good idea…

According to the story in the Chicago Business News website, Blockbuster has returned to charging extra for movies kept beyond the first five days. The company had suspended this policy in order to be more competitive with Netflix, which does not have late fees, but apparently they feel they can make enough on the extra revenue from the late fees to make up for the customers they will annoy enough to lose to Netflix. Even more mind-blowing, at least to me, was the note in the story about an “auto-sell” feature: if you keep a Blockbuster movie more than ten days, you are automatically considered to have bought it – which could be really embarrassing, I suppose, if you accidentally forget to return the wrong movie in time…

Now, I suppose the auto-sell feature makes sense; otherwise, you could easily end up charging people $100 for a used DVD that you’d sell them for $10, a deal which makes your customers unhappy and makes you an easy target for class-action lawsuits in any state that doesn’t have California’s iron-clad contract laws. I still have to wonder about the idea of late fees, though. The company insists that the new charges aren’t a late fee, but rather an extension of the rental charge, like the one you would incur if you kept a rental car for an extra day. I have trouble believing that their customers are going to see it that way, however; down on the pointy end of consumer purchasing behavior this looks just like an old-fashioned “I-was-too-lazy-to-return-the-movie” charge, and it’s likely to play right into the competition’s metaphorical hands…

So the questions that remain are, will Blockbuster actually be able to make more money on this new fee structure (as opposed to losing market share by annoying the all-important lazy and stupid customer demographics), and did they get this idea by watching the airlines charging for baggage checking fees, pillow and blanket fees, seat-selection fees, and (my on-going favorite) fees to pay your fees in advance? If your reaction to any of these issues was “Wait; Blockbuster is still in business?” you’ve probably just answered my questions – and raised a few more that the stockholders should be asking whoever the CEO of Blockbuster happens to be at the moment…

Wretched Excess?

If you read, watch or listen to the news these days, you will eventually get to hear a lot of stories about wretched excess, whether it’s $40 bottles of mineral water, $1,600 bottles of scotch, or $1.2 million cars – although I still like the story about the gold-plated sinks and toilets the best. There was a news story this week that may have taken this concept to a new limit, though: cashmere toilet paper…

A story posted on The Consumerist website led me to this press release site, where you can read more about this revolutionary new concept, assuming you still want to. Now, before you go off having some extreme reaction, please note that the press release specifies “extract of cashmere” rather than actual fabric; apparently it’s some sort of chemical extract (similar to aloe vera or jojoba) that is supposed to make the product more comfortable to use. It’s really only “cashmere” by courtesy; there’s just enough cashmere materials included to allow for marketing it under that name. The product is more expensive than bargain-brand equivalents, but not actually that much more expensive than the premium brands in the product category; unless there is something special about its performance, it’s really nothing more than a marketing stunt…

Which does not change the fact, however, that it’s a super-luxury brand of toilet tissue – at best, an absurd concept, and at worst an example of excess, although perhaps not quite as wretched as you might have initially thought. One can only wonder if purchasing such a product would confer status on the consumer (“Look, Helen! The Johnsons are using cashmere toilet paper! How are we ever going to top THAT?”) or provide an advantage in social situations (“I bought the cashmere toilet tissue because I knew YOU were coming over, baby!”). Would it be possible to market super-premium versions of other household products not normally offered in a luxury configuration? Could you offer mink toothbrushes? Solid gold soap dishes? Diamond toilet brushes? Platinum-plated, jewel-encrusted loofas? Should you just give up and start buying luxury-grade knitwear, for towels and washcloths, if not actual toilet tissue?

I kid, of course, but while this sort of product is undoubtedly good for business for whatever sort of store sells cashmere toilet paper (assuming that anyone actually buys such a thing), it does raise some serious issues about the wider civilization in which this commerce is occurring – such as: have we all gone completely out of our tiny little minds? In a world where you could feed a child in a third-world country for a month on what the crystal-encrusted bottle of spring water would cost, how do you rationalize spending that much extra on a product that you’re literally going to flush the moment you’re done with it? Even allowing for its obvious contribution to the supply of low-hanging comedy fruit for Internet humorists, can we as a society really continue doing things like this?

Of course, social commentary about wretched excess has been around for millennia, and there’s no reason to believe that it has ever actually been responsible for bringing down an entire civilization. But, on the other hand, if this is the exception that proves the rule, remember, you heard it hear first, folks...

More Bad News

Hopefully, most of you have been spared from having to deal with the phenomenon of “helicopter parents,” but if you spend any time working in Academia you won’t be able to avoid them for long; I even had some run-ins with them at the Extension at UCLA. The term refers to those individuals who insist on hovering over their offspring at all times, regardless of the situation – hence the name. It drives elementary, middle and high school teachers to distraction and occasionally results in kids with no concept of how to solve their own problems, but it really gets interesting once the children in question turn 18. As a college instructor, I’m legally prohibited from discussing anyone’s grades with anyone; if you’re a legal adult I can’t tell your parents anything, any more than I could a total stranger. But helicopter parents aren’t about to take no for an answer, even with legal backing; there have been cases of them calling their (adult) child’s employer and demanding to know why their offspring wasn’t given a plum assignment or a “deserved” promotion…

All of which is already causing massive problems for an American workforce which wasn’t doing that well against the rest of the world as it was, but the worst may be yet to come. A story from the AP by way of the SF Chronicle warns of a growing trend of colleges calling parents whenever a student under the age of 21 is caught with alcohol, or even just intoxicated. I’m not sure this practice is even legal in some jurisdictions; arrests are generally public information, but not always, and if the student isn’t actually arrested I’m not sure you can release their school disciplinary record. But even assuming this is legal, it’s still one of the most colossally bad ideas I’ve heard since giving Federal funds to “Faith-based” organizations without an audit procedure. It’s the first step onto an extremely slippery slope which NOBODY in their right mind wants to be on…

Now, I know a lot of you are thinking “That’s not so bad. Maybe it will cut down on the amount of underage drinking – and the resulting underage alcohol-related traffic fatalities.” And you may be right; some of the college administrators quoted in the linked story insist that this helps their students to learn better judgment, grow up faster, stop making silly mistakes, and so on. But the potential for abuse of such a system is almost unlimited; if school administrators are allowed to broadcast disciplinary record information there’s no logical reason to keep them from reporting on how much time their students spend studying, what other activities their students are involved in, who their students are keeping company with, and thousands of other details. College administrators will resist doing so, of course; most of them are over-worked now, and being required to function as babysitters and nannies will not sit well – but, as previously noted, that won’t stop the helicopter parents from demanding such services, if they get such an idea into their heads in the first place…

Even worse, though, is the effect this is likely to have on the students themselves. Some of them will probably just stop trying to solve their own problems, since they know that the moment word gets home their mommy and daddy will be on the telephone with the answer anyway. Even worse, however, will be the kids who went away to college to try to get out from under their parents’ thumb in the first place; they’re likely to take more extravagant risks and insane chances than college undergraduates already do, just to get off of the grid and away from the camera. There’s no telling what they’ll actually do once they’re incognito, but I can almost assure you that it’s going to be worse than just underage drinking – and that the same helicopter parents who are already demanding that their offspring be protected from every conceivable risk (including bad grades AND unemployment) will start demanding that the schools protect them from themselves as well…

Which is how this whole cycle started in the first place…

Killer PR Challenge

In case you missed it on your local news, there has been quite a flap for the last few days over what Sea World should do regarding its killer whales and their public image. While the company has made a very good living showcasing these majestic marine predators over the past few decades, there’s no getting away from the fact that an Orca, no matter how intelligent, fun-loving and vaguely anthropomorphic it might be, is also a six-ton (or larger) apex predator that eats smaller mammals in addition to fish. In fact, there have been some reported cases of Orcas harassing dolphins and porpoises for no apparent reason, and they are quite willing to eat adorable little marine mammals like seals, sea lions and sea otters. However, this isn’t usually much of a problem in marine parks – where the Orcas are seen frolicking with humans and eating small fish out of buckets – until one of them kills somebody, the way one did in Florida this week…

You can check out the story from the Associated Press by way of the Washington Post Online if you want to, but the basic upshot is that at the end of the lunchtime show last Wednesday, a large male killer whale named Tilikum attacked and fatally mauled one of his trainers in front of a large and horrified audience, including a fair number of families with small children. This has sent a lot of people into panic states, and the company into spin control, but no one is trying to deny that the event happened or that it would have been horrific to watch. The real question now is how can Sea World deal with the inevitable firestorm of negative comments, both from people who are against the idea of aquaria and marine parks in the first place, and also from people who are against the idea of anything unpleasant ever happening where children can see it. Or, for that matter, those against placing employees into dangerous working conditions where, for example, they might get mauled or killed by giant apex predators…

Now, I don’t want to suggest that the company has done anything wrong in this case. The trainers who work with the killer whales are all adults who have been briefed on the risks, signed all manner of legal forms, and given extensive training on how to work safely around animals that can kill you anytime they feel like it, and all of them chose to take the job. By the same token, anytime you watch a human “trainer” go into an enclosure with a wild animal (and Orcas can’t really be domesticated, after all), be it a circus lion tamer or a marine park employee, there’s a non-zero chance that he or she will be killed and/or eaten by the animal. In the case of a lion tamer’s act, that sense of danger is what makes it exciting, and in the case of a killer whale show, it’s the fact that these animals could squash the human participants like a grape – but don’t! – that makes the exhibit so fascinating and wonderful. Unfortunately, that also means that sometimes the animals will go ahead and behave like animals – in which case, you usually need to hire a new trainer…

So, if it was your company, and your trademarked tourist attraction had just killed someone in front of hundreds of horrified tourists, what would you tell the media? For that matter, what would you do with the Orca? Before you retire tonight, you might consider saying a brief word of thanks to whoever (or whatever) you believe in that you don’t have to figure out this particular PR nightmare. And, perhaps, that your job does not entail a non-zero chance of being eaten – unless it does, of course…