The Consumerist

» see consumerist.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

every grievance on consumerist was against a company i could not have phoned. comcast on one end of the line, or an appliance warranty department in ohio. the specific villains were american and so were the rights being demanded, and reading it from turkey was closer to anthropology than to news.

it launched in december 2005 as a gawker media property under nick denton, with joel johnson editing and the tagline "shoppers bite back." ben popken took it over in february 2006 and gave it the thing it is remembered for, which is a method. not outrage at a company, but a documented procedure for getting a specific human being at that company to fix your specific problem.

the most durable of those was the executive email carpet bomb. you worked out the email format a company used internally and guessed the addresses of everybody in the executive suite. then all of them got the same polite factual complaint at the same moment. it worked often enough that the new york times was still writing about it a decade later.

what made the site travel past its own borders was that the pattern generalizes. any company large enough to have a call center is large enough to have a call center designed to exhaust you. that observation does not need an american zip code, which is why a blog about cable bills in new jersey had readers who would never receive one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the phone call ~

on 13 june 2006 a man named vincent ferrari tried to cancel his aol account and recorded it. the representative would not process the cancellation and spent several minutes asking him why he wanted it. consumerist posted the audio, the story went everywhere, and aol fired the representative.

that recording did more for consumer journalism than a hundred investigations, because it was not an allegation. it was five minutes of a company's retention policy playing out in real time, and everybody who heard it recognized the script from their own life. the format of the site after that was largely reader-supplied evidence, edited and given a headline.

~ the golden poo ~

every spring from 2006 to 2014, consumerist ran the worst company in america tournament. thirty-two companies were seeded into a bracket and readers voted each round down to one. the winner received a trophy in the shape of a golden pile of excrement.

it was a joke that companies took seriously, because losing was a news story. comcast took it in 2010 and again in 2014. electronic arts won in 2012 and repeated in 2013, which produced the strange spectacle of a video game publisher being voted worse than banks that had recently been bailed out. the bracket was retired after 2014, and the site got noticeably quieter without it.

~ under consumer reports ~

consumers union bought the site in december 2008. on paper it was a good match, since the buyer had spent seventy years testing products and had no real presence in the blog era, and the seller had an audience it could not monetize. what actually happened is that a careful institution acquired an aggressive one.

reader comments came off, which for a site built on people describing what had happened to them removed most of the reporting pipeline. popken was laid off in november 2011. the writing stayed good and the tone kept flattening, and by 2017 the masthead was down to five editorial staff attached to a nonprofit with a magazine to fund.

~ where the archive went ~

on 30 october 2017 the staff were called into a meeting and let go. a short post went up the same day saying it was the last one on consumerist.com, and marta tellado, the chief executive of consumer reports, described the site as a fearless watchdog in the announcement of its closure. deputy executive editor chris morran said publicly that the site was being punished for revenue problems it had not caused.

for a while the twelve-year archive stayed up, which was the one consolation. it does not anymore. consumerist.com now returns a redirect to consumerreports.org, so every link anybody ever posted to a specific complaint lands on a homepage selling subscriptions. the method survived and the evidence did not.

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