A day before heading off to a Paris holiday in 1999, Jeff Harris called to confirm the hotel room he had reserved months earlier. The room was waiting, he was informed — but the price had tripled. That wasn't fair, Harris told a series of people, ending with the chain's regional manager. "What do we care?" was the reply. "Take your business somewhere else."
Mr. Harris did just that. But then he did something else too. A consultant to companies looking to maximize their exposure on the Internet, the Torontonian decided to give the chain the kind of exposure it didn't need. He created a Web page on which he described his experience, submitted its URL to search engines — and for every surfer visiting his site, an e-mail was sent to the chain.
About a month later, when the 5,000th such missive arrived in the company's mailbox, the target of Mr. Harris's wrath offered him a three-night stay in Vienna in exchange for taking down his site and never subsequently revealing the chain's name. Satisfied, Mr. Harris agreed to the deal.
But not to disappearing altogether. Soon after, he founded The Squeaky Wheel, where for $5 (U.S.) anyone can repeat his experiment in Internet rabble-rousing. All you have to do is type in your gripe and a neat little complaint page is created, fully equipped with e-mail bombardment capabilities.
The Squeaky Wheel makes no attempt to settle complaints, but Mr. Harris says he gets "a lot of thank-you notes," including several over the years from people ripped off by holiday time-share companies.
Certainly there's at least some motivation for any groused-about company to make things right: For your $5, Mr. Harris also provides access to a "complaint update link" that lets you erase your grievance once you feel it has been adequately addressed.
Indeed the Net may be at its most inventive as a worldwide virtual complaints department. In an era when dissatisfied customers have come to expect treatment that ranges from a perfunctory brush-off to willful neglect, there are some great sites out there that let you advertise your anger, share your hard-won wisdom and (when all else fails) just blow off steam.
Many are forums for people shopping for a certain item, but who are also in the market for some up-front advice. While mega-site Epinions, for instance, makes its money when people click to purchase the product they're investigating, it's packed with on-the-ground reviews for pretty much everything you can buy there.
What I like about Epinions is both its ease of use and its amusingly school-marmish insistence on at least a modicum of civility. While reviewers can ultimately howl at length, they must top their entry with a pro and con of no more than 15 words each. The site's "review-writing standards," meanwhile, insist that users stay on topic, watch their grammar and spelling, and don't swear. Yes, ma'am.
Far less formal than Epinions — think of it as the talk radio of on-line whining — is the refreshingly bracing Complaints.com, which displays, with zero fuss and no sales motive (aside from the site's ads), all the beefs its members have ever posted, organized by company.
Users often go on at length and in vivid detail about the kind of picayune slights and discourtesies that can drive any consumer around the bend. (They're also prone to describing salespeople and company reps as idiots, imbeciles, morons or worse.)
In a further nod to unfettered grumbling, Complaints.com displays its users' e-mail addresses, which can make for some potentially great one-on-one kvetching: Even if you couldn't be bothered trying to get back your $14.99 for that crappy cordless drill, it must feel mighty fine to share your thoughts with a fellow exasperated bellyacher.
Or how about thousands of them? Not unlike Complaints.com, but with a much sharper focus, are so-called vent sites, which take aim at a specific company, and are often started by one ticked-off customer of the Peter-Finch-in-Network variety. Among the most visited — it made it onto Forbes's list of the Top 10 "corporate hate sites" of 2005 — is Untied.com.
An anagram of United (as in Airlines), Untied was founded a few years back by Jeremy Cooperstock, now a professor of engineering at McGill University, after his written complaints about a series of glitches on a Toronto-to-Tokyo flight went unanswered.
In an interview, Mr. Cooperstock said the mishaps themselves — "so trivial, I don't want to dwell on them: a bungled seat assignment, misdirection at the airport" — were no big deal. Rather, it was the fact that United refused even to acknowledge his complaint that propelled him to launch Untied.
Today, the site, which gets 50,000 visitors a month, includes performance statistics and press reports on United, as well as a complaints forum, and a handy form with which visitors can e-mail their own grievances to the company — and copy its government overseers. A "success stories" area proves that United does sometimes listen.
But as Mr. Cooperstock told me, the sheer volume of visitors to Untied means that most of those complaints won't get addressed, and that the vast majority of those who visit are saying, in effect, "The airline may kiss me off, but at least I got the chance to tell a lot of other people what I went through."
I know for a fact that turning the Internet into a megaphone can feel pretty darn good: As an experiment in Web whining, my partner recently signed up at the Squeaky Wheel after a particularly irritating experience of sullen, substandard treatment at a Canadian fast-food chain that seems to be growing too fast for its own good.
Now, when you punch "Tim Horton's" and "slow service" into Google, the No. 1 item that pops up on your screen is the link to his Squeaky Wheel page. That'll never get us back the 20 minutes we spent in line. But for about the price of a dozen chocolate glazed, it still feels like sweet satisfaction.
