In January, we told you about the 10 most complained about things in Britain. Topping the list, somewhat unsurprisingly, was second hand car dealers.

The fair trading watchdog has now delivered a damning verdict on the industry yet noticed that, after a nine-month study of the market, existing laws were sufficient to clean up the sector.

Shit.

The industry said car buyers should ensure they use a reputable garage that is a member of a trade association, which implies that, if you don’t, you deserve everything you get. That didn’t stop 650,000 people complaining about the vehicles obtained from dealers (complaints made to Consumer Direct if you’re wondering).

Apparently, under the Sale of Goods Act, a secondhand dealer should resolve a problem with either a refund, repair or replacement if the vehicle was defective when sold. This advice comes on the back of 67% of people complaining about used-motors saying that within a month of purchase, something went wrong.

Okay, so we know what secondhand dealers are supposed to do, but the report says that nearly 30% of buyers complained that they didn’t have their problem rectified and instead, forked out an average of £425 to get it fixed.

On top of faulty goods, other complaints included gripes about secondhand car dealers pretending to be private sellers, unlawful use of contractual disclaimers which say vehicles are  “sold as seen” and offer “no refunds” and, of course, that old chestnut of whacking the price of a car up after ‘clocking’ it. It’s thought that one in eight cars have a “mileage discrepancy”, according to the HPI checking service.

That said, the OFT report concluded that existing laws are sufficient for dealing with rogue traders.

AA president Edmund King said the report gave more weight to the fact that buyers should “use their heads not their hearts” when purchasing a vehicle.

[BBC]

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) have banned the shit out of a commercial for Tombola bingo.

The ad features a black man repeating everything a white man says in song while playing a ukulele. The ASA have ruled that the commercial breached the advertising code on using harmful or negative stereotypes. Watch the ad below… it is a bit ‘yes masser‘.

The ASA looked at the relationship between the two characters and felt it “was defined as the power of the white man over the black man”, because of the difference in their dress and the way the black man was portrayed as less intelligent in that he repeated everything the white man said, even “Thank you, Tito”.

Tombola Bingo, an online business which also sponsors ITV1 soap ‘Emmerdale’, said it did not intend to use the ad again. Of course, thanks to the wonder of the internet, we can watch it over and over until we get indigestion.

[BrandRepublic]

How could any of us ever have a gripe with our water suppliers? They bring us fresh water to our taps for a tiny outlay, their customer service relationships are on par with that between a mother and her child and they maintain their network of pipes to such a level that there is never any waste or needless spillage.

But there are rumblings of discontent. Water watchdog Ofwat are looking into complaints that some suppliers are dropping the pressure without informing customers, action that could be leading to needless cases of boiler-knack.

While Ofwat have conceded that many suppliers inform customers when pressure is due to drop, there is no obligation on them to do say, and complaints to Ofwat about pressure levels have risen dramatically.

The water suppliers made a collective profit of over £1.1 billion between them last year, yet they are regularly heard to complain about the 150-year-old pipe network that carries their delicious, refreshing product.

Did you know that you can claim a £25 refund from your supplier if the water pressure doesn’t come up to scratch?

Test your water pressure by seeing if you can fill a gallon bucket in 30 seconds from a ground floor tap. If the pressure falls below that level for more than an hour on two occasions in a month, you’re entitled to a £25 refund.

How’s your water then, dear Bitterwallet reader? Does it flow freely or do you find yourself regularly punching the crap out of your pipes? And how long must we wait before the raisin taps (pictured) that were promised to us will arrive? They WERE promised to us weren’t they?

Banks? Wanks more like – hur hur hur.

Yeah. Everyone hates banks don’t they. Even people who enjoy working for a bank hate banks. They’re all a shower of remorseless bastards, cackling as you drop deeper into debt after you gleefully accepted one of their acts of goodwill like a loan or an overdraft.

Not many people know this, but everyone in the banking world gets coal for Christmas from Santa every year… so you can blame the lack of our Earth’s resources on those cockshafts as well.

But who is the worst?

Well, according to figures released today, the Lloyds Banking Group attracted more complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service in the second half of 2009 than any other financial firm. In the last 6 months, the FOS received 20,190 complaints about ‘em, including 9,952 concerning Lloyds TSB which just happens to be the highest number of complaints about an individual bank.

This is almost double the number of disgruntery than those in second place – Barclays.

The two have switched positions at the top of the complaints table but both attracted considerably more complaints than in the first six months of last year.

The ombudsman found in favour of the consumer in a higher proportion of Barclays bank complaints, upholding 65% of the total claims against them with only 51% finding favour concerning Lloyds TSB. It’s still a bit shit for both though.

During the last six months of 2009 the FOS received a total of 82,136 new complaints across the board, meaning an increase of 18% on the 69,841 cases received in the first half of 2009. The main offenders were the aforementioned, as well as Royal Bank of Scotland (with a total of 7,098 complaints), Abbey (4,918 complaints) and HSBC (3,881).

An average of 53% of complaints were upheld across all the financial groups. Not exactly ‘top box service’, eh?

David Thomas, interim chief ombudsman, said it was encouraging to see that some businesses were committed to handling complaints better, but added: “The data we have released today clearly shows that some businesses still need to do more to ensure that they deal with their customers’ complaints effectively and fairly – so that consumers do not then need to escalate their dissatisfaction to the ombudsman.”

In a statement, Lloyds Banking Group said it took all complaints seriously and was committed to ensuring that they were dealt with fairly, quickly and consistently.

“With over 30 million customers, the group has the largest customer base in the UK. The vast majority are happy with the service we provide and this is reflected in the low number of complaints we receive in relation to the high number of accounts we hold.

“We encourage our customers to share their views with us and we use that feedback to help us to provide a high quality of service. We are focused on developing a long-term and strong relationship with our customers, and the complaints and feedback process is an essential part of that relationship.”

Have you had a bad time with Lloyds? Or any bank for that matter. Slag ‘em off in the comments. Or indeed, slag anything off that takes your fancy, including this article. We’re needy for attention… even the negative kind.

[Guardian]

There’s a new social media network out there for the kids. It’s called a serious breach of data protection laws. Not a sexy name, but here’s how it works – just submit your email address to a company, and wait for some ten-thumbed prick to cut and paste your address into the CC box of an email, along with hundreds of others. Boom! Dozens of strangers have your personal details and the company in question drives a tank through the Data Protection Act.

It worked for customers of Orange, and now Spotify have done much the same thing. Avid Bitterwallet reader Jack has been in touch about a joint promotion Spotify are running in conjunction with TalkTalk – entrants submit a favourite Spotify track and their email address, and winners receive a premium subscription to Spotify. Not that you have to win to receive a prize – yesterday, Jack was lucky enough to get a mailing list of over 240 email addresses, all CC’d into an email sent by Spotify. Obviously he was less than delighted to note his own address amongst those distributed to all recipients.

This isn’t just an inconvenience, or an irritation – it’s a breach of the law. And of course, Spotify took the matter very serious, and certainly didn’t just knock out a trite email to anybody who complained in the vain hope they didn’t take the matter further:

Hi There,

Spotify would like to apologise for the previous email you received today regarding the current TalkTalk competition. Spotify inadvertently copied all users who requested information on the promotion into the same field, which exposed your email address to others.

Privacy is of the utmost importance to Spotify and we’ll be reviewing our processes to ensure this type of error will not happen again.

Yours sincerely,

The Spotify team

Plenty of those who received the email are now co-ordinating plans to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about the breach. Some just want a free Spotify subscription for their trouble. Of course mistakes happen, but when they’re mistakes that break the law, there needs to be some gesture by the guilty party beyond a piss-poor excuse. Over to you, Spotify.

Hey you! Remember not so long ago, we told you about avid Bitterwallet reader Haresh and his battle with ExclusiveEyes.co.uk to get a refund for his specs? Yes? Good work. The whole story involved a lot of super duper guarantees offered by the website that were seemingly worthless when put to the test, and it all began when Haresh noticed his glasses appeared to have been produced from recycled parts:

Actually, the story began when the glasses took nearly a month to be sent, when they were guaranteed to be dispatched within three day. Then Haresh noticed the shoddy state of his glasses and contacted the company – in spite of their own no quibble money-back guarantee, ExclusiveEyes refused point blank to promise a full refund. Indeed, the guarantee was contradicted by the company’s own terms and conditions, which only offered a 50 per cent refund against the cost of the frames, not the order.

So what’s new? Haresh takes up the story:

I just thought I would let you know that I have successfully managed to get a refund.

I got a call from some executive, who said it was regrettable that I had to resort to contacting outside parties, and that they would provide me with a full refund. Whilst he didn’t apologise for the shoddy goods, he did state that they normally don’t have any issues with people, as they have with me.

This is an issue that Haresh attempted to resolve directly on several occasions before coming to us. The right result in the end, but it’s a shame a company has to be flogged in public before making good on their own guarantees.

Dear Mister Elliot,

Can I call you Mike? No? Now Mike, your role is Head of Credit and Collections at 3, so you may think this letter doesn’t matter to you. It does. Keep reading.

Here’s the deal. If Three is to continue providing customer support via email through the Three website, then at the very least Customer Services should acknowledge any emails they receive and deal with any issues. That’s what customer support is.

Specifically, if Three is going to offer email as a legitimate way of contact for issues such as contract cancellation – as stated in Three’s terms and conditions – then once more, Customer Services need to read the emails and act on them, not ignore them and deny all knowledge of their existence. If an operator asks a customer to re-send the email, then somebody really should reply. Really.

(By the way, in all our collective time of working on Bitterwallet, none of us have ever seen a more impenetrable set of terms and conditions offered by any business – a two page PDF document featuring over two dozen pages from a booklet. Staggering.)

Mike, these issues are not strictly your concern, but given how the failure of Customer Services must provide plenty of business for you, I thought I’d let you know. What is relevant to you, Mike, is this:

If Three is going to attempt to contact a customer during daytime hours, then failure of the customer to respond to a phone message your operator left with an 8 year-old child is not really an excuse to push an account to a collection agency.

And when a customer responds to the letter you signed, by sending a letter recorded delivery, one that contains all the correspondence they sent to Three by email in the past two months, have the decency to have a note put on their account. If you’re going to threaten people with adverse credit ratings, act when they attempt to put things right.

There are probably many reasons why Three has such a poor share of the mobile market. Treating customers like dogshit, even if they don’t want to give your their custom anymore, really can’t be helping matters. You’re putting your name on these letters, Mike. Do something about it.

Cheers,

Paul

PS – for the love of Christ, change the scripts you dish out to your call centre staff. Asking the customer “is there anything else I can help you with?” when the operator called them to threaten them for non-payment – I’ve gotta be honest, Mike, it’s taking the piss.

Following yesterday’s expose of a couple of members of the DVLA clamping team flouting the law and parking on some double yellows wihile they scoffed their chips, here’s another example from an avid Bitterwallet reader of authority gone crazy on the nectar of power.

Our contributor, Steve Blag, tells us

[The DVLA story] reminded me of this little tosser, who I was following on my not un-macho Vespa one morning when, after committing no fewer than 10 endorsable offenses (overtaking on a crossing, overtaking the wrong side of a traffic island, speeding etc etc), stopped as illustrated in the photo.

“No!” I can hear the PCC screeching – “it was an emergency”!

“Fuck off!”, I say! There are no emergency lights, the brake light is on, his foot is down, and he’s stopped in a fucking cycle-only area after behaving like a prized toolbox for some time. Pogo on that, you twats. etc etc etc.

Eeeeeeeeh, it makes my blood boil. I never stop in those…..

Obviously, as photographing a police officer is some kind of offence now, we’re probably all going to jail for showing you this picture, even though someone appears to have dumped a blue sack of rubbish by a bin further up the road. Surely that’s a more heinous crime?

If you spot an authority figure acting like a bit of a hypocritical tit end, you be sure to get some evidence and forward it to us here at bitterwallet@gmail.com – the more we get, the less likely we are to run pictures of pricing mistakes in supermarkets.

Now and again, the issue of fat people on aeroplanes rears its bulky head and we all make a few jokes about salad-dodgers. Whether it’s Ryanair’s (aborted) plans to levy a fat tax against chunky fliers or AirFrance-KLM’s decision to make airbound Billy Bunters pay for, and sit in, two seats instead of one, it’s all good for some light debate and a bit of a chortle.

But the debate just went nuclear – yes, you guessed it, a celebrity got involved. Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, Dogma and Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back has been booted off a Southwest Airlines flight in the USA after the plane’s captain deemed him ‘a safety risk’ something which the not-all-that-fat-actually Smith denies being.

What Smith is though, is an active Twitter user, with 1.6 million followers on the internationally-recognised communication service. And once he’d informed his legions of fans about the incident, all online hell broke loose, culminating in a swift and full apology from SWA.

This didn’t please Smith either, calling SWA out for only apologising to him because he’s a celebrity and has a voice that is listened to. He tweeted…

“Fuck making it right for me just ’cause I have a platform. I sat next to a big girl who was chastised for not buying an extra ticket because “all passengers deserve their space.” Fucking flight wasn’t even full! Fuck your size-ist policy. Rude…”

We get the feeling that the flying fatties debate is only going to escalate from hereon in. A bit like roly poly director Smith’s waist measurements…

Avid Bitterwallet reader Haresh is one of many folks who has four eyes instead of two. No, not really, that’d be freakish. He does wear spectacles, however, so he ordered a couple of pairs of simple prescription glasses from ExclusiveEyes.co.uk:

The site promises a great deal, including a “no quibble money-back guarantee… a 100 per cent quality guarantee – this means that if there is anything wrong with your glasses, you get your money back without a quibble”. They also offer a guaranteed dispatch of all simple prescriptions within three working days. They’re certainly attractive guarantees for an online retailer to offer, and to this end the website crows about them on several pages of the site.

Haresh has several issues with Exclusive Eyes. First and foremost, despite a guarantee of a three day dispatch for a simple prescription, the glasses took nearly a month to arrive. When initially challenged, Exclusive Eyes told Haresh his order was shipped on a given date; when the package arrived shipped, the postmark was dated five days later. This was all Royal Mail’s fault, he was told. Then in a later email, the company forgot this excuse and instead referred their customer to the small print:

“We dispatched your glasses well within the limit that you agreed to by clicking the terms and conditions.”

The terms and conditions on the website state:

“Even though we aim to dispatch orders within 2 working days, this may not be possible for complex prescriptions. Our ophthalmologists will decide whether a prescription is complex or not. Their decision will be final and binding. The maximum time required for delivering a complex prescription is 28 days.”

No mention of any sort of guarantee whatsoever and instead an attempt to back out of it – aiming to meet a target is hardly the same as guaranteeing they will. Besides which, Haresh claims his order was for two pairs of single lens glasses with a simple prescription.

Next, when the order finally arrived, it appeared that the arm of one pair had been recycled from a previously-owned pair of glasses – there were several nicks and obvious wear and tear down its length:

Nowhere on the website does it state recycled components may be used, and despite putting the allegation to Exclusive Eyes several times, customer services have not refuted it. And when Haresh did complain about his order, the company would only promise the possibility of a 50 per cent refund, not the 100 per cent guaranteed. Delve into the terms and conditions once more, and the No Quibble Guarantee isn’t mentioned one. The only refund policy detailed is a 50 per cent refund against the cost of the frames, not the order. Haresh won’t return the goods until the company offers to make good on its 100 per cent refund guarantee and so far the company is refusing to do so. The terms and conditions also state that the company will not refund postal charges, but distance selling regulations mean that this is not absolute; if off-the-shelf prescriptions were used, then they are legally obligated to refund all costs.

In other words, even without considering Haresh’s situation, both guarantees offered by Exclusive Eyes are seemingly worthless; their terms and conditions mean they won’t promise to fullfill even simple orders in the time given (there’s a day’s discrepancy between the guarantee and the terms which may allow room for wriggling, although there is no detail on what constitutes a ’simple’ prescription) and there’s not a whiff of the 100 percent money-back guarantee anywhere. We’ve contacted ExclusiveEyes.co.uk for a response and will let you know what the heck they say, if anything.

H&M – that clothes chain you’ve probably seen on the High Street – has made a whole bunch of people angry. Is it a row erupting over sweatshops? Has it sparked white-knuckled fury over rubbish working conditions for the staff? Maybe it’s shitty customer service?

Well, it’s none of these things actually. The spat has come about over bags full of slashed clothes.

You see, what’s happened is that someone called Cynthia Magnus, who is a student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, found that H&M routinely slash and bin unsold garments. In particular, workers at the NYC store chop up clothes with box cutters and throw away bag after bag of clothing.

This, of course, is particularly badly timed as New York currently sits in one of the coldest winters it has had in yonks and of course, hasn’t escaped the worldwide recession and the subsequent unemployment and homelessness problems.

Magnus told the New York Times about what she found: ‘Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fibre fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.’

Naturally, H&M wasn’t going to stick fingers in the collective ears and hope this all went away (not when there’s twats like us preying on the mistake of every company we stumble across).

In a statement, the company said: ‘We donate garments that do not meet our quality requirements to organisations such as Gifts In Kind, UNHCR, Caritas, the Red Cross and Helping Hands. However, we do not donate clothes that do not meet our safety requirements, chemical restrictions or are damaged…. We are currently looking into if we can further improve our routines.’

One thing remains unclear however. Does all this mean that H&M don’t mind selling stuff that don’t meet ’safety requirements’ and ‘chemical restrictions’, but they do mind giving it away to charity? Hmmm. That’ll need clearing up I’m sure. Failing that, if you’re good with a sewing machine, it’s obvious you should get down the arse end of the High Street clothes shops… they’re chucking stuff away which you might be able to do something cool with. If you can be arsed.

[New York Times]

Pears’ soap is the world’s oldest brand. Okay, maybe Jesus would have something to say about that… but in terms of things you can buy in shops, it’s pretty much the oldest thing around.

Recently, Pears’ changed the formula of their flagship soap. You’d think no-one would be arsed about something like that wouldn’t you? I mean, it’s just soap. The amount of ingredients were trebled which changed the look, smell and feel of it ‘beyond recognition’. Some users stopped self harming for long enough to type that this new bastard version had been made to ’smell and feel disgusting’.

Who said this?

Yep. It’s those ubiquitous users of Faecbook. Just like the Let’s Get Rage Against The Machine To Number One crew, another Facebook group campaigned for the return of the old soap.

The group, called ‘Bring Back The Original Pears Soap‘, which has a whopping 29 members at the time of writing, is generally saying ‘Urgh! It’s horrible! My skin is drier than a fanny full of cat-litter!‘

Apparently, complaints have been made to owners Hindustan Unilever Ltd which has seen Pears bosses agreeing to bring the old soap back in March.

If you’re at all interested, the old soap contained just eight ingredients – including rosemary and thyme extracts and also Pears Fragrance Essence – but these were ditched and replaced with Sorbitol, Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, Linalool, BHT, Cl 12490 and a whole bunch of other stuff you could also cut and paste from the Wikipedia page I’m currently getting bored by.

Basically, the main grip seems to be that the old bar smelled nice and the new one smells either of Tea Tree Oil or frankincense (the latter, convincing me that some of the complainers might be as old as the product itself).

Neil Rutty, the Divisional Managing Director for Cert Brands – the UK firm charged with marketing Pears – admitted that the company will do a u-turn on this and something closer to the old one will be lathering up your paws in no time at all.

He said: “You will be pleased to hear that although some changes were made in October 2009, Unilever India have listened to their customers and are revising the product again and it will be much closer to the original by March this year.”

He added: “It would appear that Unilever have not got the new formulation quite right at the moment, but from the samples I have seen we will be pretty much back to normal by March and consumers will only have the benefits of a greener product with improved moisturising qualities to enjoy.

Aren’t you glad I told you all this stuff about soap?

[Mail]

When an online retailer with offline stores sells both new and pre-used stock, you might expect the occasional dropped bollock and see a pre-owned or ex-store game sold in place of cellophane-wrapped shiny goodness. But six-for-six? Are you sure, GAME? Yessum.

Avid Bitterwallet reader Chris purchased six titles from GAME after spotting the bargains on Hot UK Deals. You’ll notice the liberal use of the word new (large image here):

So that was the order – two copies of each title – and this is what Chris received (click here to see the full-size image):

As Chris explains:

“Other than the removal of a couple pre-owned stickers to open two cases, this is how they arrived. To be fair, they’re not in terrible condition, but far from what I’m sure most people would expect. And yes, that is a rubber band holding one disc inside a manual.”

In the wake of swingeing (love that word) Post Office cuts, it has been claimed that one in five of us are hanging around in branch queues for even longer than we were a year ago.

Consumer Focus recently marched into a bunch of post offices armed with their clipboards, pencils and stopwatches and did some fierce timing and scribbling before concluding that punters now face an average wait of six minutes and seven seconds, 27 seconds longer than last year.

Worryingly, their findings revealed that 21 per cent of customers wait more than ten minutes and 38 per cent more than five minutes before getting to buy their stamps or send an unwanted Robson & Jerome CDs to some chump who has paid 11p for it on eBay.

The problems are exacerbated by the findings that justy 56% of counter positions were open in the post offices visited by the Consumer Focus hit squad, again, fewer than last year. It remains to be seen whether Lord Mandelson’s plans to turn the post offices into banks will open up these abandoned counter positions.

How does a trip to the post office make you feel? Do you see it as a interesting way of observing all forms of human life or does it fill you with dread and cause you to take a half-day off work just to ensure that you’ll definitely get served in time.

And those people who queue outside before it opens of a morning – where are they going next? What’s the frigging hurry?

You know that feeling you get when you complain to a major company and their response is a smidgeon less than satisfactory…?

Avid Bitterwallet reader Richard Mason contacted us all breathless and cross after he recently engaging Nokia in some dialogue. Richard takes up the story himself and that…

It’s not as if I had asked Nokia about their theory on existentialism, I was simply asking them if it was at all possible, somewhere down the line, if they could move the scrollbar on my Nokia 5800 to the left hand side. That’s all.”

The reply, which took them three days to get round to sending, looked like it had been put through Babelfish ten times and I was still no nearer to finding out whether they could accommodate my request. Gordon Brown gets flak for sending a letter written with a felt-tip pen, but this lot take the biscuit.

Here, for your own personal dissection, is the reply in question (click on it for embiggeness). We suspect they didn’t spend a huge amount of time studying and sympathising with Richard’s plight…