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by John J. Byrne
If, like me, you get intimidated easily by salespeople and get terribly
frustrated following the yellow brick road to Complaintsville, let it be
known that there is help and immediate relief for consumers from
all walks of life. According to the Federal Trade Commission, Americans
we lose more than $1 billion a year due to consumer fraud. Thank our
consumer stars for the Internet!
 The Consumer Information Center contains full text versions of hundreds of federal consumer publications free of charge These publications are arranged by category, such as, cars, children, employment, environment, federal programs, food & nutrition, health, housing, money, small business, and travel and hobbies. You may read the Consumer's Resource Handbook online, which offers pre-purchase information about products, ways to resolve marketplace problems, and thousands of names, phone numbers, and electronic addresses of corporations, trade groups, state and local consumer protection offices, and federal agencies which help and protect the consumer. The site even has a search engine. And there in Part 2 of the Handbook was Corporate Consumer Contacts with the name and toll free number of the man in charge of customer complaints for my car. A quick fax brought a quick response, and the local dealer, more humble now, made permanent repairs.
 U.S. Consumer Product Safety CommissionThis site contains a search engine which allows the user to enter a product or a brand name to retrieve information about it from its enormous database. I typed in the brand name and the word "refrigerator," and, lo and behold, an article showed that my model had a defective defrost sensor. The article even supplied the manufacturer's Web site. I emailed my problem, and within two days received a call to set up a service call. This time it was my fault. I had never sent in the registration card. But thank goodness for this Web site.
The Consumer Law Page
A third button, Resources, leads to over 1,000 Internet resources from law libraries and government sites, covering laws, defective products, disability, toxic chemicals, and safety. The entire Consumer Law Page is searchable.
 Consumer World has links to over 1500 of the most useful consumer resources on the Internet. It has a site search engine and a News Department which alerts consumers to current scams, product recalls, and articles in newspapers and magazines of interest to the consumer. Click on "directory" to see a list of federal and state agencies as well as consumer organizations. A Companies page contains information about products, automobile manufacturers, and customer service numbers. Consumer World has a huge travel and entertainment section, and an equally impressive money, insurance, and banking department. The site also has a Product Reviews section where I clicked on Computer ESP and found prices of over 1,000,000 items at cyberstores around the country. After a few minutes of comparison shopping, I found an unbeatable deal and the location of the retailer in my area. I am writing this article with my brand new computer, which was only a little more expensive than the older one. The National Institute for Consumer Education (NICE) NICE is a nice site which has some very useful full text free mini-lessons on consumer related topics, ranging from Automobile Leasing to Fraud on the Internet to Women and Credit Laws. Click on NICE Mini-Lessons to choose a consumer topic of interest. It's great knowing that the American consumer no longer has to fiddle through phone books or be kept on phone lines with customer care reps. We can now locate the proper personnel and go straight to the top to get immediate action, often via email. There's nothing that helps the consumer more than name dropping!
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Last year was a very bad year for this consumer. Within the space of seven
months, my brand new car went back to the dealer for repairs three times,
my computer had a losing battle with age, and a new refrigerator -- advertised
as "completely self-defrosting" -- kept flooding my kitchen floor. Calls to
dealers and manufacturers went unanswered, while complaints to better
business bureaus were useless because they were "after the fact."