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Double Journal Entry #2: Services You Should Never Use
In the past few weeks, I have noticed that there are just some things and services that you should just never, ever use. Here are the four offenders that tick me off.
GameStop
These guys bought out Babbages, FuncoLand, and EBGames. Which means that they're now the biggest video game store in the world. But why are they terrible enough to be on this list?
Simple. Prices for old games are too high, customer service is crap, the employees are forced to push crap such as Game Informer subscriptions and cleaners on customers, and they hire complete idiots such as 19-year-old grammar school dropouts and 35-year-old virgins who still live with their parents to be the general managers of their stores. Hell, some of the people they hire don't know anything about the games they're selling, anyway. And if that's not enough, some local GameStops now refuse to take games and systems for NES, Super NES and Sega Genesis.
Let's see what prices I can find for NES here on GameStop.com:
1943 - Preowned - $14.99
G.I. Joe - Preowned - $17.99
The Jetsons: Cogwell's Caper - Preowned - $17.99
Super Mario Bros. 2 - Preowned - $14.99
Super Mario Bros. 3 - Preowned - $14.99
Little Samson - Preowned - $14.99
Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom - Preowned - $14.99
Rescue Rangers 2 - Preowned - $14.99...while the original is $7.99 preowned.
Super Dodge Ball - Preowned - $29.99...wtf?!? O_o'
I checked the Genesis and Super NES prices as well. Why the ******** would I want to pay $59.99 for a preowned copy of Chrono Trigger, $47.99 for a preowned copy of Secret of Mana, or $29.99 for Phantasy Star IV?
ezBoard
You can only have one account per e-mail address, unless you want more than one and want to pay a gigantic fee. Some of the good features such as Friendslists, multiple account management, HTML in sigs and customizable profile page are only available if you pay for ezSupporter status. sad And if you don't want ads and pop-ups on your forums (which you make up to 10 of for free), you have to pay for Gold Community status, and keep doing so on a regular 6 or 12 month basis to keep it free.
Also, you can't suspend people. You can only ban them from your forums...that's it. No probation, no silencing of people's posting privaleges, not even making it so that they can only post in one specific forum...just bannination. That's all you can do.
You also can't mark individual topics read, which is a pain in the a**. And earlier this year (back in June), ezBoard got hacked and lots of boards were affected. Some posts on some boards couldn't even be restored.
Plus, you can only post HTML on Gold Community status boards. Which is a real drag, since you can do quite a bit with HTML.
Trust me...Invision Power Boards, phpBB, YaBB, vBulletin...any message board system is better than ezBoard.
PayPal
Now I know what you're saying. "But PW, Gaia uses PayPal for its donations!" That's true. However, I want to tell you a little story.
Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka of Something Awful decided to make a temporary PayPal account to get money to donate to the Red Cross to help the people affected by . He donated $3,000 to it, and put the link to the account up so that the Something Awful Forum Goons could put money in it. In less than nine hours, they reached $30,000. Then PayPal pulled the plug on the account for no reason and without a warning.
Why was this? Apparently, PayPal thought it was all a scam. The customer service decided to give him a hard time, and he had to wait forever to talk to an actual human being. Even when he did, and the customer service agent said that they're working on it, it was pretty obvious that they weren't. Why? Because PayPal was taking a percentage of the profits they were making and donating them all to...
United Way
I think these links will tell all.
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues/1994/vp940927/09270294.htm
http://www.fdncenter.org/pnd/news/story_print.jhtml?id=63100013
http://www.unitedwaynca.org/website/content/media/pdf/wpost.1.3.4.04.pdf
Wow. They've had former chief executives/CEOs embezzle them and misuse the donations...one of them as early as the first half of this decade. Nice.
Not only do some workplaces "force" you to donate to United Way, they might make you embarrass yourself in front of the entire company if you don't, by making you write a written statement why you don't want to donate, or simply socially ostracizing you from the rest of the company. United Way doesn't support this, but they don't take steps to deal with reports from employees of companies who forced them to donate in such a way.
They also have a larger overhead to cover administrational costs...which is covered by your donation money. Compared to 5-15% of some charities, United Way has one of 10-20%. That's right, a smaller amount of the money donated actually goes to its target. The rest goes to them.
United Way has less-developed security for their donations. Wow. Expect the money you want to be stolen instead of helping the Hurricane Katrina victims or whatever.
Remember...don't use these four services unless you want to head into some money trouble.
This is a double journal entry. To see the other half, choose the next entry.
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