Paul, Philadelphia/Wilmington, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington. However, the nonprofit Consumers’ Checkbook magazines and Web site do this for local services (but not restaurants) in seven metro areas: Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. There is no nationwide, nonprofit ratings site for local services, supported entirely by subscribers and carrying no advertising-that is, nothing analogous to what Consumer Reports magazine does for national products. They also deny that their employees use promises or threats to persuade local businesses to advertise with them.īut these service-review sites are all young, for-profit businesses whose success is primarily based on selling advertising to the same local companies that their users review-a potential conflict of interest.
CONSUMER CHECKBOOK SOFTWARE
The online ratings firms say that their sophisticated software can reliably filter out bogus user reviews (an unverifiable claim). Small businesses have been strong-armed by Web sites’ ad-sales staff, who hint that paying for ads will induce the site to hide negative reviews and/or give advertisers favored positioning in search results. Businesses have paid people to post negative reviews of their competitors. Others have swayed customers with discounts for posting a positive review (a gentle bribe). Small businesses have paid strangers to write glowing reviews with no basis in customer experience (in other words, outright fraud). You can find Consumers’ Checkbook ratings of Boston-area veterinary practices as well as their report on pet insurance by clicking here.Here are a few of the unethical practices seen in this burgeoning Web industry: It is typically more affordable and will cover large unpredictable veterinary bills related to injuries or conditions that are the result of an accident.īut again, always read the fine print before signing up! So you can save money without sacrificing the quality of your pet's care.Īnother insurance option to consider is Accident Only pet insurance. Some of the lowest priced vet practices they looked at received very high ratings from customers. And so it does make sense to look for a low cost vet."Īnd Checkbook found that there is no correlation between quality and price. We often see five-fold price differences in terms of lowest cost versus the highest price among veterinary practices here in the Boston area.
"Veterinarians have very big price differences from practice to practice for the exact same care," said Brasler. "So spaying of a 6-mont-old cat, the lowest price we could find in the Boston area was around $200 for that procedure and the highest price was nearly $1,100. And realize most plans don’t cover pre-existing conditions.īond Vet Pet Primary and Urgent Care on Keeping Your Pet Safe This SummerĬonsumers’ Checkbook also evaluated more than 150 veterinary practices in the Boston area and found big price differences. If you are buying pet insurance, read the fine print, because not all plans are created equal. Avoid companies that charge high premiums and copays. "For a dog that was really unlucky, the less than 5% chance of having a pet that just needed a lot of expensive care, we found that that was really the only case where any of the pet insurance plans made sense for us," said Brasler. "On our analysis, we found that the vast, vast majority of pet owners, they'll do better without insurance than with it." But if your pet needed a high level of medical care, you may benefit from insurance. None of the policies that Checkbook looked at were determined to be a good deal for pets that had low or moderate levels of health problems. That's when your pet actually might need expensive veterinary care." "The real reason here that pet insurance often is a bad deal for pet owners is that most of the plans are priced to get really expensive, $250 a month or more is what they'll cost when your pet reaches age 10 or so,” said Executive Editor Kevin Brasler.
CONSUMER CHECKBOOK ANDROID
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