As a astro supplier it's upsetting to hear a customer being verbally abused by their supplier.
There simply is no excuse for that and they should apologise.
Lately I had been abused by a supplier myself, one no other than Sensis/Yellow Pages. They started bullying us with debt collectors after we repeatedly told them to cancel a contract we never signed up for. Spent several hours on hold with the phone emailing etc. nothing helped.
Then I found their facebook page and went, aha!
I posted reviews I've found all over the web about things they've done to bully other customers onto their own facebook page. I threatened that I will continue doing this every hour until they solved our problems, kinda like hostage-taking I guess. (though they already had a lot of other complaints on thier fb page anyway)
The phone rang just minutes later and they backed off, though it took another reminder via another public shaming (and setting up a boycott YP page) to get them to actually call their legal reps off our tail.
So yes public shaming can work, but it can backfire, example below.
Here's one more experience, at the receiving end.
A notorious astro blogger and I had a misunderstanding once and he went on a facebook tirade, and our friend, who was a friend of his, told me about it and Asked why and how it happened.
Turns out he was asking for something in exchange for free advertising for his site, and because I hadn't replied on the same day before our 2-day weekend, he blew his top.
IT was only I pointed out to his commentors that he was just upset over the fact that he wasn't essentially getting anything for free. He contacted me, apologised, we agreed that the post was making both of us look bad--a number of people who commented had nasty things to say about him too so yeah... he took it down and offered to help us out with some publicity, though I haven't come up with any good ideas on what to work with.
Fling enough mud and some will stick, but sometimes if you have already tried all avenues and all you get is verbal abuse/bullying, you have to stop isolating yourself because likely other people would have been in the same situation.
Usually small businesses care more about their reputation and customers. When dealing with large companies, you're often a nobody, and will only respond to you if you're a major threat to their public image. So when I hear of a small business not caring...it doesn't make sense to me whey they'd do that.
) so Im not sure naming here will work out. Its a shame as good old freedom of speech gets quashed by legal threats too often.
