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AN INVESTIGATIVE NEWS SERIES ON THE STANDARDS AND PRACTICES OF THE BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU START WITH TRUTH |
| V 1.5 Nov 2010 | ||
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| TWO YEARS LATER, THE
BBB STORY HITS MAINSTREAM MEDIA |
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| bbbRoundup got its start almost two
years ago. Over the summer of 2008, I’d heard
several horror tales of Los Angeles BBB practices from multiple clients
and friends. They were frightening in their
similarity. Then, I witnessed firsthand, preferential treatment
to another client of mine, who was a BBB member. Things
didn’t compute. And then the economic collapse of August 2008
occurred. I found myself almost client-free and with way too much
time on my hands. In situations like this, I get bored very easily. And when I’m bored I’m in trouble. Most often I end up creating trouble for myself through sheer stupidity. This time, I vowed to be smarter. An idea started forming to create a blog on the BBB. I started doing my due diligence. I found a number of isolated news stories on various local BBB offices that detailed similar complaints to those I had heard. The Internet is a wonderful thing! Then I got my hands on a deposition from William Mitchell, CEO of the Los Angeles BBB. Among other things, it revealed the algorithm (scoring system) for the Letter Grades given by the Los Angeles BBB Office and four other offices. (The remaining 100+ BBB Offices still were using the Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory Grading system at the time.) I was thinking of writing a ten part expose of the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau’s standards and practices, but was by no means committed to it. And then fate played its hand, and unbeknownst to me in advance, the National BBB Office rolled out a slightly tweaked version of the Letter Grade system in ALL of the BBB offices in January 2009. Suddenly, a lot of newspapers were covering the Pay for Play story on BBB Letter Grades. (David Lazarus of the LA Times being the first and the most thorough in exposing weird grades caused by the “new” Grading System--which was four years old at that time in Los Angeles). For the most part, these stories didn’t dig very deep, and were hit and run in nature—there being no follow-ups, and no further interest in the story. Except to me. I realized I had much more information in my hands than anyone else out there. I bought a domain name, bbbRoundup.com ( I originally envisioned a website that was a “roundup” of all the stories I could find.) A
word
about
“Jimmie
Rivers”
before
we
move
on. Jimmie Rivers
is a pen name, a pseudonym. I’ve never maintained
otherwise. During my research and due diligence on the BBB, I
discovered that they weren’t shy about suing previous critical websites
(ripoffreport comes to mind, there were others). I also thought
the BBB capable of taking revenge on my clients by giving them failing
grades. There was also a certain poetic justice in being
anonymous and unreachable, mirroring the BBB’s attitude and treatment
of small businesses that were trying to address the bad, and allegedly
undeserved grades they received from the BBB. A pen name seemed
to be the answer. Now, when I was in broadcast media in
Hawaii, many years ago, we used to kid around about Geraldo. We
called him Jimmie Rivers, his ‘Anglo’ name. Of course, we were
the ignorant ones, mistakenly translating Geraldo as Jimmie instead of
Jerry. In any event, Jimmie Rivers seemed appropriate for the
occasion. (As of now, seven people know who “Jimmie Rivers”
really is. Five friends and two people in the news
business. No clients, no sources have a clue to the identity of
“Jimmie Rivers.” Nobody paid “Jimmie Rivers,” bbbRoundup,
or the guy who really is “Jimmie Rivers” for bbbRoundup. In fact,
“Jimmie
Rivers” turned down several offers of funding. At some point I
knew this would come up, and I needed the story, and “Jimmie Rivers” to
be beyond reproach. They are.)
With the national adoption of the BBB Letter Grading system, a bunch of mainstream stories on the Pay for Play angle, and a few discoveries of my own on BBB grades that just didn’t make sense, it was time to go for it, or not. Almost two years later, here we are. Seems I went for it. From the beginning, I stated that I had no idea where bbbRoundup would go, that we’d have to see where the story took us. I also had an idea in the back of my mind, that maybe I could uncover enough “stuff” that mainstream media would pick up the story and run with it. bbbRoundup has always been about the story, even when we weren’t entirely sure where the story was taking us. So I started talking to, and corresponding with, sources, who led to other sources, who led to still more sources. The common feeling I was getting was that these small businesses lived in fear of the Better Business Bureau. Fear of the BBB was literally keeping these people from sleeping at night. Now, I suppose that in some cases, maybe the BBB was right in their assessment of these small businesses, and they deserved the sleepless nights. But I make my living from sizing up small businesses and I believed their version of what was happening over the BBB’s version. Finally, the first issue of bbbroundup was published. And a second, and a third. And suddenly, I had traffic to the site. Interestingly enough, over half the traffic those first months came from various BBB offices. It seems the BBB had noticed my site. And then I caught my first break. An anonymous source at one of the BBB offices forwarded me an internal BBB email from Steve Cox, President of the CBBB, the national BBB office. In it he talked about the existence of bbbRoundup and instructed the offices to not respond to Jimmie Rivers. He also “located” my cell phone in Santa Monica. Right state, wrong town. (I had purchased a prepaid minutes cell phone for cash so it dead ended right there.) And he discovered bbbRoundup was hosted overseas, another dead end and the domain was anonymously registered. He also made a statement that since Jimmie Rivers was a pen name, no main stream journalist would ever take me seriously. Thanks, Steve. I love challenges. They inspire me. And I relish the underdog role. So “Jimmie Rivers” reached out to those mainstream media reporters whose stories he liked. One of these reporters got in touch and provided “Jimmie Rivers” and bbbRoundup its first national exposure. Thank you, George! (George Gombossy, one hell of a reporter for the Hartford Courant at the time, an even better reporter these days with Connecticut Watchdog for taking “Jimmie Rivers” seriously. It was fun to watch George work Bill Mitchell.) The stories got better, and suddenly they weren’t all about the Los Angeles BBB branch. And I started hearing from small businesses, lots of them. Across the board, what I was hearing and feeling was a tremendous amount of gratitude from these people that someone was finally listening to them. The BBB hadn’t. The News hadn’t. The Courts hadn’t. I had. Stories started piling in. Jan Norman from the Orange County Register gave bbbRoundup some valuable props. Thanks, Jan. That was about a year ago. Since then, the story has grown beyond anything I had imagined when starting this. New inside sources came through from several BBB offices and provided me more ammunition, some incredible backroom stuff. New BBB-Bashing websites appeared….there’s a full list of them on my home page. New sources came out of the woodwork. Readers began sending me more Goofy Grades. Things heated up. Before you know it, Bill O’Reilly used the BBB Defense in favor of Goldline (how can Goldline be bad, the BBB gave them an A+ grade) while debating Representative Weiner from New York) and the next morning bbbroundup covered that story and published its own exclusive HAMAS story. (You know, the one where HAMAS paid just over $400 to get an A- Grade from the LA BBB.) Mother Jones picked up the story and shortly thereafter ABC News got in touch. Immediately after, I found five really good stories in my inbox. Good stuff, inside stuff, the biggest to me being the BBB was beginning to outsource their membership sales. If you believed the BBB benign, you would say, “Great, the BBB is stripping out the telemarketing aspect from their offices so they can concentrate on consumer complaint resolution.” To me the only reason for this move was to increase sales, pure and simple. A profit motive was behind this action. To me this signals a major shift in the makeup of the BBB, it officially denotes that they are really a telemarketing company. That’s their core business. The product they are selling is memberships. Consumer concerns are now officially an afterthought. Wonder what the impact of this shift in the BBB business model will have on their not-for-profit status? Reporters live for scoops. I was sitting on five really good scoops. Great follow ups to the HAMAS story. But I’m not your normal reporter, or at least “Jimmie Rivers” isn’t. I/he believed there was a story that was worth telling. A bigger story than anyone had presented. A story that needed mainstream to take the ball and run with. Our
country
depends
on
small
businesses,
the
entrepreneurs,
the mom and pop
shops, the garage businesses and these are the very companies who are
hurt the most by the BBB’s errors. And the way things currently are,
these small businesses have absolutely NO RECOURSE.
bbbRoundup was doing well. Readership was at an all time high, but in the grand scheme of things, less than a mosquito on an elephant in magnitude. ABC News (20/20) was expressing an interest. Just what the story needed to have a chance to accomplish something. So I mailed in a couple of stories, pulled my punches, went through the motions and started feeding what I had to ABC. AND BOY, DID ABC RUN WITH THEM. The more I fed them, the more they wanted and the more resources they put into the story. It was fun to be involved, however peripherally, on the inside as the story developed. Not much impresses me. The time, the effort, the smarts, the relentlessness, the professionalism ABC News exhibited was like a time warp back to what real journalism used to be, but seldom is these days. ABC CAME UP WITH SOME INCREDIBLE STUFF. Thank you, I love it. As for the BBB’s next move, I hope for the best, but have serious doubts. I think they are too arrogant to care, certainly too arrogant to comprehend the problem. If they’d listen to me, I’d tell them to do two things:
What’s next for “Jimmie Rivers” and bbbRoundup? I honestly don’t have a clue. As always, I think the story will take care of itself, one way or another. To everyone who helped bbbRoundup along the way, “Jimmie Rivers” thanks you from the bottom of his heart. I know I greatly underestimated the hours and the work that I would end up devoting to bbbRoundup to this point. But at least I wasn’t bored. ###
November
12,
2010
Jimmie Rivers |
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| Editor's
note:
There
is
a
need
for
a
consumer
advocacy
group
that
the public can turn to, and it used to be that the Better Business
Bureau fulfilled this role adequately. No longer. It is
obvious the Better
Business Bureau does not now, nor ever will have, the resources to
fully investigate the four million businesses in their database, much
less grade them with any sense of accuracy. It's an impossible
job,
and to think otherwise is a mistake that the BBB should acknowledge so
they can get back to their reason for existence--protecting the
consumer. There's an old saying, "who will watch the watchers"
and it
applies here as the BBB has set themselves up to be above the
law. We
are simply here to help the Better Business Bureau do a better job so
that they may properly serve the consumer, the business community and
themselves. If they refuse to reform, then they must bear the
consequences. |
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| ©
2009-2010 bbbroundup.com. all rights reserved. |
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