Cranky Customer

If Yahoo doesn't want its ads sent to non-US IP addresses, why don't they block it themselves? I don't have Yahoo ads on my site, but aren't the ads generated by Yahoo's servers? Can't they generate a simple "we have no ads targeting people in [your country]" message instead, rather than requiring every website to do the filtering for them?

After reading your rant and the many comments that followed, I would like to point out that this is not a problem with just Yahoo or, in fact, the Internet. I have been noticing a general decline in customer service from just about every company in America...or at least the ones I have dealt with over the past 5 or 6 years.

From the local grocery store and utilities company to Yahoo and Dell (and, of course, don't get me started on our politicians), I am amazed at how frequently I have to restate an issue (often more than once) before getting an answer that isn't a canned response or that actually addresses the issue. I fail to see why so many customer service people refuse to address the concerns of their customers when they are clearly written.

These companies, I believe, may be better off not having customer service departments! I have gotten to the point that after the second rephrase (or "spelling things out" like you were talking with a 4-year old), I send a nasty message asking if they learned their insane rambling in college or if a supervisor trained them to ignore their customer's actual questions.

It is unfortunate that it should come to such a condencending note, but the truly amazing (and sad) thing is that this is usually the only way to get them to actually answer a concern fully and without a canned response that does nothing to answer a concern. I would much rather these people behaved like the now rare CS agents that take the time to answer a question fully the first time or, at least, ask questions in response if they are unsure of the original problem or question.

Then, too, you have the companies that just don't even bother to reply (Dell - despite 3 attempts), but that is another story.

Kevin, you've reasonably succinctly stated why I started this site in the first place. Customer Service should matter to companies. For too many companies, it doesn't. If it takes shaming them in public to get them to improve, I'm all for it. My goal is for this web site to have no need to exist. We have a long way to go. -rc

I'm a little confused as to why the earlier commenter thought that it was common sense to just block the ads, and not the whole website from international surfers. Sheesh. Now, in all honesty, I'm not the webmaster of our site, but I am fairly certain that it would be beyond trouble to create a page for international surfers to view that didn't have the ads, than it would be to just keep all international sufers off the site.

But I'm even more baffled as to why anyone would want to limit their advertising to just the U.S.A. to begin with. The more people who see an ad, the more people who are likely to click on the ad, therefore the more customers the company is likely to get. If the company is really only useful to Americans, and they are concerned about paying too much per click, then they really shouldn't be advertising on the *World Wide* Web to begin with. That Yahoo is catering to the (I'm suspecting VERY few) people who are that concerned about international clicks, is just sad. I'm guessing that if most advertisers found out that Yahoo was limiting the access to their ads to only U.S. surfers, they'd be appalled themselves.

For your amusement:

I once looked up information about "Catholic Priest misconduct" and found a website with such info.

On the right side of the screen were ads, one of which was from Ebay, informing me that "Catholic Priest Misconduct" is available on Ebay!!!

I know those things are computer generated, but I am amazed there are no "stop" words, such as "misconduct".