Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Why do companies try to fool us?

I made a purchase online on an online company that seems to partner with bizrate for customer surveys. If you fill the survey, you automatically enter to win $25 on a daily drawing. Because I like to give feedback, I decided to enter all the data. At the end of the survey you are asked to provide your name and email address for the $25 drawing with the following options:

Yes. Enter me to win in the daily cash giveaway and send me bizrate's money saving newsletters!
No Thanks. - but, still enter me in the daily cash giveaway.

The boldface is actually the same they provide on their page. If you only read that you conclude that if you check the first one you will enter to win the prize, while if you check the second one you are forfeiting the option of entering to win $25. But when you read the whole phrase you see that actually the first one you are entering the drawing and signing up for their spam, while the second one you are still entering the drawing and not signing up for their email.

It's so dirty that makes me not want to buy at that company again. I know it's not their fault for this, but it just ruined my complete shopping experience.

But the bad quality of bizrate doesn't end there! After you enter it all it gives you your satisfaction rate compared to the average:



Do you see the problem there? Quite puzzling.

(by the way, "puzzling" seems to be my newest favorite word right now)

But just to end on a positive note, after one month wait I finally received my first printed board shipped from Bangkok through Hong Kong, from an Australian company. It looks exactly how I designed it and the components seem to fit as expected. Now I just need to have courage and do my first surface soldering of a component that requires a magnifying glass to see if it's in the right position (think of a 3mm x 3mm component). So it's going to be lots of fun! I ordered 4 boards so that I could make mistakes and I received 9! I can make lots of mistakes now!
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