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Comment by navyrain | Hacker News Reader

So Regretsy gets a (potentially) reasonable human to look at their case only after making a media fuss? This is pretty troubling, as for every Regretsy out there, there are many more smaller fish who will continue to get quietly screwed, simply because they cannot attract the attention of the media in the same manner.

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This has always been the case with PayPal. They deliberately make it as hard as possible to actually contact a real human, and then act all surprised if the victim manages to get enough publicity to get past the barriers.

http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/06/9252...

PayPal's business model seems to be based off of Kafka's novel The Trial.

It's not just PayPal. It's whole industries. Airlines. Banks. Google.

Seems like it's any industry which (i) has high startup costs so is dominated by big players and (ii) can cost you enough money in a single incident that you'd get seriously upset.

Log in to PayPal; scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Contact Us"; click "Call Us"; dial the phone number; when prompted, enter the number on the website; when asked why you want to call them, say you wish to speak with an operator; when they ask you why you want to speak to an operator, tell them you just want to speak to an operator; wait a few (maybe at most ten) minutes: congratulations, you are now speaking with an actual person; note: if this person cannot help you, they can usually find someone who can. Calling PayPal is trivial, and they do not in any way make it even remotely hard to "actually contact a real human".

> note: if this person cannot help you, they can usually find someone who can

Not according to http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0. Specifically:

> At this point, I asked to speak to a supervisor and was told that “No one above me will talk to you. No one at my level ever makes phone calls. We’re only doing this to help you.”

That entire conversation description is so over-the-top that it is difficult to take any of the details seriously... that said, I'd be very interested to know if they tried simply calling back and asking to speak to someone else.

1 - Write blog post

2 - Go viral

3 - ???

4 - Profit

Jokes apart, this seems to be the only to get attention from a company. I wonder if there is a startup opportunity here.

There is, called a PR firm, if you don't want to write up your own blog post and submit it everywhere.

Perhaps a consumerized PR firm that takes contract copy editors, submission bots, and some sentiment analysis to gauge the response of a NYT writer to a potential story (two lawyers suing each other far less emotional appeal than kids' xmas gifts getting shut down), and voila. Insta-noise-machine.

This is sorta consumerist.com's model.

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