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this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Okay everyone here hates the BBB and I'm wondering what I missed. My only experience with them has been that they helped me get an insurance company to do the right thing. And it worked perfectly.
it's not that they're useless, it's that they're self-serving and parasitic. actually providing a service is incidental at best to lining their pockets.
In my situation, I went from hopelessly being screwed out of hundreds of dollars to having that cash in hand because the insurance company felt consequences coming. I still haven't been told what the BBB does that's so horrible. I'm genuinely curious. I understand they can do good and bad. I'm asking specifically about the bad.
'the bad' is that they shake companies down and give them bad ratings not based on how they treat consumers, but how they treat the BBB. meaning if they don't pay up and make other concessions to let the BBB twist their arm, they get bad grades.
Ok. What are they paying? Is it a yearly fee or something?
And what other concessions?
it scales with size. local companies with more than just a few employees can expect to pay four digits a year. looking at their website they even have a fee to apply lol ('may be waived in some regions', meaning it's charged anywhere it's legal to charge an application fee)
other concessions such as in this post's title, they have to agree to handle customer complaints within BBB's terms (the specifics of which i'm not privy to).
the reason they really strike a nerve in autistic online communities though is that they've committed the cardinal sin of offering a rating service where the rating isn't really about them, the consumers, but how good they are to the BBB. so does an F grade mean they have terrible customer service and a history of fraud or does it mean they wouldn't fork out for a membership? maybe bucees is an ass backward business of hucksters but the rating doesn't actually indicate that.
Thanks for this. I get it now. I think my opinion is now that it's overall a good thing we have BBB against big companies, but they're also themselves sort of shady and probably treat small businesses like trash pretty often.
Basically, any complaint made against you is an opportunity for the BBB to sell you a membership.
The argument is that if you don't buy a membership, then complaints against you tend to substantiated, and your response to those complaints is deemed inadequate. If you do buy a membership, then the complaints against you are generally unsubstantiated, and your responses are exceptional.
That definitely makes sense. I appreciate the explanation. I wonder if there's actually evidence of this being how it goes. Since again, my only experience with them is they made an instance company pay what they owed me.
They basically have a glorified mob protection racket going.
Consumers make complaints about a business. That business then receives rating on their site. This rating puts that business on a list (either a list of businesses already paying them, or a list of businesses to extort for money in exchange for a better rating).
The businesses that are already paying them get a phone call or an email etc about how their rating has dipped and they can raise it by doing X or paying X. The businesses not already paying them only get the second offer. Pay X and we will raise your rating.
The rating has no legal standing. It doesn't mean anything except in the court of public opinion.
What I don't totally get is how a business can be punished by not being a member. In the recent past a local company closed shop and took my prepayments with them without a peep. On BBB they weren't a member and the website explicitly said that is why I could not submit a complaint against them. So some of the hatred of BBB may be based on incorrect info, namely that you cannot as a business opt out of BBB. This scummy company seemed to have no issue at all opting out. And there was no rating posted.
Things may have changed but you used to be able to make complaints about a business regardless of whether they were a member. The main problem is that those complaints wouldn't be public because the BBB wouldn't post a profile for non-member businesses.
That may have changed because of legal pressure. I don't know what their requirements for making a business a member are and I wonder if you could have registered the business and then made your complaint and walked away. If you can do that, that's even more problematic but I don't know that for sure. My parents and grandparents always swore by The BBB. But my experience with it is exactly that it's basically a mob protection racket.
I don't feel like researching it now, but I'll keep this in mind for the future. Thanks for this response.
When i was younger i thought they were a public institution. Then i learned they are a private corporation beholden only to themselves. Companies basically pay for good ratings.
That may be true to a large extent, but in my case, they paid me (justifiable so) to reverse a bad rating.
Proto-Yelp
From a consumer perspective they are okay and can be helpful.
From a business perspective they use their position to coerce companies into giving them money to expunge both real and perceived mistakes. Which is a very sketchy practice.