After purchasing our home last year, my wife and I went ahead and got a subscription to Angie’s List, the site that allows homeowners to share their experiences and reviews with contractors and service providers. The site also claims to offer discounts as well as provides a publication to subscribers.
Although we did find a couple of good contractors (a painter and a plumber), it appeared that a lot of the information on the site, which is user-generated, was growing stale. People stopped writing reviews and when you are paying $53 a year and pretty much be expected to write content for the site, enthusiasm does die quickly.As I said, the information on the site appeared to be sparse, especially in my zip code. Searches came out empty for many categories, even when using the categories Angie’s List uses.
What truly surprised me was that like several other rather crooked establishments and web sites, Angie’s List retains your credit card information and renews your subscription without asking for your explicit permission. I wrote about this before when talking how mlb.com does the same wretched thing. Beyond being just an evil trick to make more money on unsuspecting subscribers, you have to believe that to achieve this feat of rogue marketing credit card numbers are stored in their database. In this environment of corporate databases being hacked and credit information stolen almost every day, that makes me even more queasy than usual. I doubt Angie’s List has the data security prowess to make me sleep better at night.
Although I am loathe to say positive things about Bank of America (official bank of service fees, charges and awful customer service), one thing this mega bank acquired when it took over MBNA was its ShopSafe credit card feature, which generates one-time throw-away credit card numbers, which are so ideal for use. If only you could have a credit card that would have done that for you on every purchase. Then life would have been that much more difficult for the evil doers who make us worry about companies like TJX who cannot cover their own behinds properly and keep our credit information for reasons even they do not know.
