They are mad as Hell and they are not going to take it anymore. The old “Network’ rant is coming to life in The Bahamas.
More than 1,700 angry customers, tired of the lousy service that is so common in The Bahamas, have banded together in a Facebook Group designed to shame businesses they think are guilty of poor customer service.
‘Businesses That Suck in the Bahamas’ was started by Patrick Robinson, who said he had no idea the group would become so popular, so quickly.
Many people have used the group to express their dissatisfaction for supposed bad service in government agencies and corporations, banks, restaurants, retailers, nightclubs, even local mom and pop stores.
Mr Robinson told a local newspaper that he created the page shortly after he was forced to wait 15-minutes for service in an auto supply store, as he watched employees mingle about doing nothing.
“In the Bahamas bad service it seems is the norm, and people are sitting back and allowing it to happen. Businesses are offering a service, I don’t have to come to your company and spend money – you need me to survive,” Robinson wrote on the website.
Mr Robinson admitted that he has already been contacted by several concerned business owners who were mentioned on the page. They told him they were not aware of customers’ negative opinions.
That’s quite a diiferent reaction than what BahamasB2B.com received when they tried publishing a similar page eight years ago.
“In 2003, we published a page called, ‘Bad Business in The Bahamas’. Within 24 hours we had dozens of legitimate comments about poor service, and we also had about a dozen business owners and their lawyers threatening to sue us,” says Niki Bright, current Webmaster for the popular Bahamas website.
“Our own lawyer called and said he had been contacted by the Bahamas Bar Association, whose president at the time was Peter Maynard. Our lawyer told us that if we didn’t take down the page, he would no longer be able to represent us in any legal matters, as the Bar Association had threatened to “blacklist” him if he didn’t get us to remove the page. Out of respect for our own attorney, we took down the page.
“It’s good to see that consumerism in The Bahamas has matured and that there are others who are ready to stand up against bad service, as we have been doing for years,” she added.
Of course, as BahamasB2B has said many times, the worst businesses in The Bahamas are the lawyers, who think they deserve to get paid no matter how terrible a job they do, and they threaten to sue anybody who even tries to mentions how lousy their lawyer was.
Mr Robinson also created another Facebook group to allow people to post positive business experiences.
That group has attracted a mere 60 members.
