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As seen in 'Cigar Aficionado'

Caption: Jeremy Dorosin celebrates the publishing of his Cigar-Themed book, 'Balance at Middlefork: An Adventure in Human Freedom'

"Rage Against the Machine"

Which features the Dorosin vs. Starbucks battle. From the April 1999 issue of Smart Money Magazine on this site. March 22, 1999

SmartMoney, April 1999 (p. 125-132)

Rage Against the Machine

By Clifton Leaf and Lisa Kalis

Michael S. McConnell just can’t help himself. When he and his wife and several of their friends were kept waiting at a T.G.I. Friday’s in suburban St. Louis for an hour past their dinner reservation, he was so determined to track down the manager that he marched right into the kitchen. But even after he’d complained—and the manager had handed him a coupon good for $70 off his party’s bill—McConnell wasn’t satisfied. He wrote to the company headquarters in Dallas and got an additional $70 back for his troubles. When the eyeglasses he purchased at a Sears optical center cost $30 more than the advertised price, the Maryland Heights, Mo., man angrily wrote the company, promising never to walk into the store again. (Sears responded with a letter offering 20 percent off on his next purchase.) And when CompUSA Direct, the retailer’s online and mail-order arm, failed to post what he says was a promised $55 credit to his Visa bill in October, McConnell unleashed an assault of seven letters and faxes, two e-mails and a half-dozen phone calls to the two companies.

"My wife thinks I go overboard sometimes," admits the 38-year-old college-textbook editor and father of two little girls, ages six and three. But when he feels wronged by corporate America, something inside takes over. His customary soft-spoken, self-deprecating manner peels away to reveal a hardened "consumer terrorist," he says, only partly joking. "I demand good customer service. And I demand accountability if I don’t get it."

So how far will McConnell go? Well, consider the short-ribs incident. After getting violently ill on what McConnell claims was a funny-tasting slab of meat at a South St. Louis hot spot, he called the restaurant owner and demanded $350 in compensation—what he said was the combined cost of his meal and lost wages. When the owner refused, McConnell called the local health inspector to register a complaint. That had little effect, so he made a 20-square-foot cardboard sign, with giant laser-printed letters, that could be read from two blocks away: ASK ME ABOUT MY FOOD POISONING!

After work, he stood across the street from the restaurant, banner aloft, for one hour. The next evening, at the start of the dinner rush, he was there again, chatting with passersby and acknowledging dozens of honking cars.

Within 24 hours, the restaurant’s insurance company called to offer a settlement.

"There is a certain glee in it," concedes McConnell. "You’re getting even. But mostly it’s a matter of economics. I don’t make enough money that I can afford not to get what I’m paying for."

Over the top? Maybe. A waste of time? Some would argue that. But this much is certain: McConnell is part of a new and growing movement of consumer activism in America. As corporate customer service has declined precipitously over the past few years (see "The Death of Customer Service," October 1998), it seems another sea change has occurred right alongside it: We consumers have gotten far more demanding. Not to mention crankier. When it comes to the act of complaining to companies, to government agencies, to consumer groups—or for that matter, to anyone who’ll listen—we’re as trigger-happy as a 12-year-old with a Nintendo joystick.

Witness the surge in complaints received by the nation’s 133 local Better Business Bureaus, a proxy for private-sector grievances. They topped 2 million in 1997, up 15 percent from 1996 and a remarkable 61 percent from 1995. (Figures for last year are not yet available.) While some 1.7 million of the 1997 complaints were then referred to more appropriate agencies or handled over the phone, the BBB processed 309,935 consumer grievances—the highest count of the decade.

And it’s not just America’s hot-blooded urbanites who are raising the ruckus. It’s everyone. In laid-back Washington state, where the official bird is the innocuous willow goldfinch and the motto, alki, is a Native American word that means "by and by," complaints to the consumer protection division reached an all-time high in 1997, the latest year reported. Next door, in hardscrabble Idaho, the picture looks much the same—a record year for consumer rants. Is Virginia for bellyachers? The state’s property insurance bureaus saw consumer grievances jump 11 percent in 1997 over 1996, well above previous years’ tallies. And Michigan, a stalwart of midwestern reticence, received a record number of gripes to its attorney grievance board for 1997. That same year, the state’s Public Service Commission, which handles resident inquiries and complaints about phone and utility companies, had to recruit part-time help to weed through all the angry calls.

There are those who place the blame squarely on corporate America’s unrepentant stubbornness. "There’s no place to get satisfaction," says Patricia Sturdevant, general counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Consumer Advocates. "I hear lots of examples of people who insist that if the company would simply say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and make any kind of reasonable response, they wouldn’t feel the need to take it any further." But take it further they do.

Andy Williams of Sonoma, Calif., takes it all the way to the bank. Or to be more precise, to his credit-card issuer. When the 52-year-old Williams feels that a company hasn’t delivered as promised, he doesn’t merely write a detailed letter of complaint, he also deducts the charge in question from his credit-card payment—$700 for a trouble-ridden Ryder truck rental, $900 for a take-home study seminar, $40 from a repair charge by his Chrysler dealership, to name a few. "If I’m more militant than I was a few years ago," notes the nutritional-industry sales manager, "it’s from the cumulative effect of companies not doing anything to correct their service problems.

Albert Silverman, a 71-year-old retired engineer from La Mesa, Calif., takes his frustration to court. He recently filed on complaints with the San Diego city attorney against a drugstore that advertised chunk white tuna on sale when it was actually chunk light. Another complaint is in the works against a supermarket that hawked a sale price for 100 percent cranberry juice instead of the juice "cocktail" that was marked down. And these come on top of four big wins—$50 plus court costs—in lawsuits regarding ads for things like margarine and cake mix.

But then, people will tell you: It’s not about the money.

Take the celebrated case of Jeremy Dorosin. Back in 1995, the Pinole, Calif., man, now 40, bought two espresso machines from Starbucks, which he claimed were faulty. He wasn’t happy with the company’s service, so he did what any piqued citizen would do: He purchased four ads in the local edition of The Wall Street Journal inviting others to write or call in with their complaints against the coffee chain. He set up a toll-free line with six telephones installed in his small scuba shop and hired extra employees to answer the calls. In one year he received about 6,000 responses. His total estimated outlay: $20,000.

The company offered Dorosin two new machines with accessories and an apology, which he rejected. He demanded that the company build a multimillion-dollar center for runaway youths and take out a $250,000 full-page ad in the Journal to apologize. The company refused.

Nearly four years later, vows Dorosin, "it’s not over." He’s recently expanded the toll-free number to take national calls and insists he wants to take out additional ads in the Journal. I plan on being alive for many years and talking about this for the rest of my life," he says.

Not that Dorosin will have to focus all his wrath on the famed java chain. It seems he’s found a new bête noire: TCI Communications, which, he explains, made him wait a full day for a no-show cable repairman, among other offenses. In a subsequent letter to CEO Leo Hindery, Dorosin wrote: "It is now my life’s mission to undermine your monopoly and erode your customer base."

Okay. So you’re not that determined. (Yet.) But consider this: These days, thousands of people are so desperate to have their complaints heard—by anyone, it seems—that they’re willing to pay good money for it.

In the old days, if you had a faulty muffler installed by your auto shop or if your roofer left you high and wet, you’d send a letter to the Better Business Bureau. Now there’s a 900 number. Frustrated consumers in Houston can fork over $9 to vent over the phone to an employee of the local BBB, one of a dozen (mostly urban) branches around the country that offer such pay-to-gripe services. The bureau will then file a grievance verbally with the company in question, requesting a response within two weeks’ time. "It generally cuts a few days off the process," notes Dan Parsons, a Houston BBB vice president. So what sorts of things are people in such a hurry to resolve? Among the 42 claims filed in the first two months of the pilot program: a $45 complaint for pool repair services, $40 for a parched Christmas tree and several dry-cleaning mishaps.

"I was a little surprised," says Parsons of the response—especially considering that the free option takes just a few days longer. The bureau decided to set up the pilot program after conducting an informal survey on its voice-mail system. A staggering 90 percent of respondents said they were willing to pay as much as $25 to register a verbal complaint.

"People want to vent their anger and tell somebody," marvels Lona Luckett, senior trade-practices consultant for the Los Angeles BBB. "When you say, ‘You have to fill out a form,’ that discourages them." The Los Angeles BBB has had its own fee-based, complain-by-phone system for four years. There are even some public government agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission, that let citizens pay to play, as it were.

Frustrated, you say, but confrontation-shy? Not to worry. There’s a fast-growing army of complaint mercenaries who will do your dirty work for you. Ellen Phillips, who, until her early retirement this past December, taught speech and drama at Carl Sandburg Middle School in Alexandria, Va., pens between 100 and 200 letters a month for clients across the country. She has written on behalf of angry car owners, disgruntled soup buyers, frustrated computer users. She has complained about non-deploying airbags, lost luggage and unresponsive HMOs. She refused to write a letter for a triple murderer who’d been denied parole. ("I told him I did not feel comfortable," she says.) But she did agree to edit his letter if he sent one to her. (He did, she did, and she hasn’t heard back from either the prisoner or the parole board yet.)

In all, Phillips, who operates under the corporate auspices of Ellen’s Poison Pen, estimates that she’s recovered between $400,000 and $500,000 for her approximately 3,000 clients over the years, including $15,000 in child-support payments for one desperate customer. Typically, her fee runs about $70 ($50 an hour for preparation time, plus $20 per hundred words)—and that includes all courtesy copies, addressed envelopes and postage.

Phillips’ phenomenal success in the frustration market has even landed her a book: Shocked, Appalled, and Dismayed! How to Write Letters of Complaint That Get Results (Vintage, 1999). The title comes from the three words she claims she uses in nearly all of her epistolary assaults, as in "I am shocked and appalled by your employee’s behavior…" (In going through the 50-odd sample letters in her book, however, it’s clear that the word "dismayed" gets short shrift.)

Gary and Sandy Rattigan are scoring with the same game in Somerville, Mass. Since October 1997, when they opened their business, Complain to Us, the Rattigans have drawn some 200 clients. Gary, a former technician at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, and Sandy, who also does billings and collections for a non-profit hospital, charge a flat rate of $50 an hour, which includes no set number of letters or faxes.

It’s no wonder that Henrik Langhjelm of Bremerton, Wash., sees the complaint business as a potential "gold mine." Thus far, the former industrial-planning specialist has done only a bit of gratis griping for friends and relatives, yet he recently applied for a small-business license in order to complain for a living. One measure of his talent: It took just one sharply worded letter to retrieve more than $1,200 for a friend who’d been unhappy with his attorney bills. "If this thing takes off like a rocket," says the 43-year-old Langhjelm, "who knows where it will take me?"

To the Internet, no doubt. If the information superhighway is marked by anything these days, it is a kind of consumer road rage. Tens of thousands of Americans are now e-mailing perfect strangers, posting messages to usenet groups and online service forums—or setting up anticorporate domains on the Web—all to spread the gospel of their own customer horror stories.

Internet newsgroups like alt.consumers.experiences are a virtual kvetch-a-thon, with rants on everything from mis-marked software prices to grocery-store purchase limits on chickens. There are grouchy outbursts over the new 33-cent stamp and genuine frustration over a line of Old Spice deodorant. Still, it is the personal "gripe sites" on the Web—and they number in the thousands—that give cybersniping the force of a drive-by shooting.

Ranging from "Northworst Airlines" and "Just Do It! Boycott Nike" to "Macy’s Is an (Alleged) Criminal Organization," the rogue sites are so popular that search engine Yahoo! has begun its own subdirectory for them.

Yet what’s often most surprising about these Web pages isn’t so much their vehemence. It’s who’s behind them.

Bruce Hatch, for one, never dreamed he’d be broadcasting his angst to the entire world. For most of his life, the owner of Laughing Duck Vineyards in Ukiah, Calif., recalls, he never complained to any company about anything. That changed on his 50th birthday in April 1996, he says, when he bought his dream car—a white $87,000 Mercedes S500V sedan. The first problem: a botched paint job that was followed by several more unsatisfactory attempts. Then the rotors had to be replaced every 5,000 miles, and the headlights had to be replaced. Hatch says he sent more than a dozen letters and e-mails to the Mercedes zone manager, the customer-service department, and the presidents of North American and of German operations, looking for a promise to fix the paint correctly, reimbursement, an apology—anything. The general response, he says, was: "You bought it, you got it."

After the car sat in service shops for about four of the 16 months he owned it, Hatch finally traded it in for a BMW, at an estimated loss of about $40,000. That same month, with the help of a family member, he founded a Web site called Mercedesproblems.com. And though Hatch no longer owns the car, he continues to pay his brother-in-law (who runs an Internet service provider) $600 a year to maintain and update his gripe site, which averages one submitted complaint every day.

"I want to shame them into doing something," says Hatch, though he doesn’t rule out buying another model in the future. "I’m hoping maybe Mercedes will wake up and say, ‘What can we do for you?’"—in which case he’d ask for a deal on a premium S600 sedan. (A spokesman for Mercedes says the company receives few complaints, and those it gets it tries to resolve directly with the customer.)

Drew Faber has had better luck with his BallySucks site, which he set up after several mishaps with Bally Total Fitness. Faber, of Long Beach, Calif., did eventually receive a settlement from the club—a prorated refund he received thanks to his Web page, he claims. But he still keeps it online. (He’s in the Internet business, so it doesn’t cost him a dime to maintain the site, he says.) Bally sued Faber for trademark infringement and trademark dilution, according to court records, but the lawsuit was unsuccessful. There is no law that says Faber can’t keep his cyber soapbox up forever.

Fear of such anticorporate crusaders, in fact, has inspired a number of large companies to do something rather bizarre—quietly register their own self-hating Web domains. Take Charles Schwab & Co., which has paid to sign up "screwschwab.com" and "schwabsucks.com." General Electric has snatched "gesucks.com." "Hyattsucks.com" was gobbled up by an advertising agency on behalf of one particular Hyatt resort. And even pinstriped Merrill Lynch and the low-profile Vanguard Group have registered nasty Web addresses in fear that outraged customers would otherwise snare them first.

Few companies, though, match the paranoia of Chase Manhattan Bank, which has scooped up the dot-coms of "chasesucks," "chasestinks," "chaseblows" and, for good measure, "ihatechase." The cost? A modest $70 for the first two years, according to Network Solutions, the domain-name registry in Herndon, Va. (A Chase spokeswoman declined to comment.)

There’s just one problem with this strategy: It won’t work. "There’s no way any company can register every nasty variation," says James Alexander, vice president of marketing for Phoenix-based WavePhore, whose eWatch division monitors up to 400,000 new Internet messages and postings each day for mentions of its 200 active corporate clients. "For someone to go out and spend time and money to set up a Web site, they have to be pretty motivated. And it doesn’t take much ingenuity to come up with a ‘chasebites’ if ‘chaseblows’ is already taken."

In fact, www.chasebanksucks.com is already up and running.

Even if you don’t know the first thing about programming a Web page, there’s no end to the possible venues for consumer venting. You can start at Gripenet.com, for instance, then post your way through Complainline.com and Grumbling.com. When you’ve had your fill at the Gripe Garage, go and bask for a while at the Gripe Palace or the unabashedly hip Gripe. One Web site, called the Slippery Squid, run by San Jose, Calif., artist Karen Carlo Salinger, will even forward your complaints to a friend, Adam Dworkin, "who probably won’t read them, but will pass them on to 45 friends on his e-mail list."

E-mail may be a more powerful assault weapon than the Web itself, as Nancey Cambron discovered. When the plumber she’d hired to install her furnace seemed to stall the job for six weeks, Cambron, a registered nurse and director of staff development for a California psychiatric rehabilitation facility, went online and found a local e-mail directory of 600 people in the San Bernardino-Redlands-Crestline area. She then fired off a two-paragraph missive about her wayward contractor to everyone on the list: "I’ve been waiting six weeks for my furnace. It’s snowing. I have no heat. He cannot seem to get the right parts. He failed to show up when scheduled."

Forty responses came back from curious neighbors. And within two days of the e-mail blitz, Cambron reports, the plumber was at her house, completing his repairs.

Before you grab your pitchfork and head on down to the virtual levee to join the revolution, consider one thing: Maybe, just maybe, we’re overreacting a bit. True, customer service, as we once knew it, may be as quaint a notion as the guaranteed pension. But the flip side of this is the demise of customer restraint.

Alan Siebenmorgen, for instance, was so outraged over the charge Hertz levied for renter’s liability insurance that he sued the company for damages—$17.90, to be precise. The case wound its way through the Texas legal system all the way to a jury verdict: It found in favor of the car-rental company, leaving Siebenmorgen and his attorneys to deal with $1 million in legal expenses.

Indeed, there’s a good bit of evidence to suggest that much of our consumer angst is directed toward—dare we say it?—the small stuff.

Like bad hair days.

According to the Arlington, Va.-based Council of Better Business Bureaus, which breaks down by specific industry the complaints it processes for mediation, gripes about barbers and beauty shops jumped 8 percent from 1996 to 1997. Those related to tanning salons, meanwhile, surged 16 percent over that period, or four times the rate of consumer grievances over all. And these stats pale in comparison with America’s frustration with its dating services. Angry lonely hearts rang up 1,123 complaints in 1997, compared with 869 the year before—a 29 percent hike. More telling, perhaps, is that dating services moved up to 67th place in the complaint ranking of 594 business categories, from 85th (out of 336) in just one year.

So what types of business garnered fewer gripes, both in raw numbers and in relation to other categories? Big-ticket areas such as auto transmission shops, insurance companies, home builders and hospitals, to name a few. Tanning salons jumped five places higher in the rankings; tax-preparation firms dropped eight. Go figure.

Some researchers contend it’s not so much a shift in what’s important to Americans, but simply more evidence that the griping bar has been lowered. Thanks to the Web’s anonymity and a slew of other outlets, the psychological barrier to being a trouble-maker, a boat-rocker, a muckraker, is becoming ever more permeable. "There is a higher willingness to complain in the past year or two," observes Stephen Brown, Ph.D., who has studied consumer behavior for the past seven years as director of Arizona State University’s Center for Services Marketing. "While the majority of customers still don’t complain," he says, "those who do seem more eager to join the battle, whatever the issue.

That’s not to say a person can’t get a bad perm and a sunburn before a blind date and get legitimately hell-bent about it. But then, a formal complaint could arise from something as simple as "a nick with the dipper," to put it in the prosaic words of Lynda Elliott, an administrative assistant at the New Hampshire Barbering, Cosmetology and Esthetics Board. (The agency receives about 50 written complaints a year on issues ranging from hygiene concerns to licensing.)

Or consider the routine at the Utah Division of Real Estate, where agency personnel report that, typically, a full third of consumer complaints have so little merit that they don’t bother to open up a case number. "They’re usually vindictive things," explains the agency’s Kim Morris. One Florida woman even called her state’s attorney general to say she had paid for large shrimp from a local retailer and received the medium size instead.

But the size of the battle is immaterial to Andy Williams. As he sees it, every legitimate consumer gripe helps "to balance the scale of power." His largest fight with corporate America? An overcharge by FedEx. Two days before Christmas, it seems, Williams spent $15.50 to have a FedEx package delivered the following morning. It arrived in the afternoon instead, due to a massive ice and snow storm, the company said. But when he asked to be charged the $10.75 fee for afternoon delivery, the company’s customer-service rep, rather rudely, dismissed him out of hand, he claims. "It will probably cost me an hour to write the letter," Williams says, "but it’s the principle that counts."

"What if I had been shipping something really vital, like anti-snake venom or a blood transfusion?"

Williams chuckles, then pauses for a moment as if to consider if he’s serious after all. "It’s the principle," he continues. "It’s the nonfulfillment of a contract." (A FedEx spokesman counters, "It sounds like that was a day when the weather got the best of us, but we think customers have every right to expect the highest level of service.")

Ironically, it is precisely these penny-ante wars that B.L. Ochman is tired of waging. New York City’s grande dame of complainers for hire—she’s been at it since 1981—is taking down her shingle. "I started doing this because I like helping people," says Ochman, who now plans on devoting her energies to a consumer-advocacy Web site instead. "Frankly, most of this is stuff people can do on their own."

Is she perhaps referring to the man who hired her to complain to his cable company about a station’s use of dubbing on foreign films? (He preferred subtitles.) Or to the young woman who wanted a nasty letter sent to her roommates because they weren’t doing their fair share of the dishes? Or to the couple who insisted on more than $200 in compensation because their plastic deck chairs smelled funny?

"I guess," says the woman who is listed in the Manhattan phone book as Rent-a-Kvetch, "it’s gotten out of hand."

November 18, 1998

Leo Hindery
TCI
56101 DTC Parkway
Englewood, CO 80111
(303) 267-7480


Dear Mr. Hindery:

I am a TCI Cable customer of yours in Pinole, California, who is so entirely dissatisfied with your company and its inferior and unprofessional service, that it is now my life’s mission to undermine your monopoly and erode your customer base. These are the means by which I plan to effect such an end: I’m an author with a book coming out in January 1999 titled Balance at Middlefork—An Adventure in Human Freedom, published by Ten Speed Press. I have a 15-city book tour and university lecturing scheduled all across the United States and abroad, and I intend to mention your company by name and recount today’s experience in lectures and to anyone willing to listen.

This morning at 6:30 AM I turned on the TV but the remote failed to operate the set so I called TCI and reported the problem. TCI employee Stacey at extension 77102 told me my cable boxes weren’t in your computer and that she didn’t know what was wrong but if I went to all the cable boxes in the house and read her the numbers she would call them into repair at 7:00 AM and have them turned on. I told her none of that made sense but fine, if that worked to do it. She assured me she’d call back right after the problem was resolved, but that repair wasn’t open until 7:00 AM, so I should expect her call back shortly after 7:00.

No call back. I called, was put on hold for ten minutes and was connected to Joan at extension 99506, who said Stacey had left work and unfortunately the numbers I read to her were never inputted to repair. I had to go back to all three sets and read the numbers for a second time to Joan. She said she would input these to repair and in ten minutes my cable would be operating properly. No such luck. When I turned the sets back on they had a black screen and all read the same message: "Your converter is disconnected. Please call your cable operator."

I called back again and spoke to Scott Gwin, ext. 99509. Scott said the problem must be my cable boxes, which again made no sense. Then he said there had been some computer glitch and all my boxes needed to be replaced. He said he’d connect me to someone to schedule me for a repairman to come and replace everything.

An appointment wasn’t possible. I’d simply have to be home all day so your repair people could fix your problem at your convenience with no mention of my inconvenience and no signs yet the problem would be solved.
It gets better.

4:30 PM rolls around and no repairman so I call in to TCI and am told he’ll be here by 5:00 PM. By 5:05 PM nobody, so I call in to TCI and am told they didn’t mean 5:00 PM. They meant 7:00 PM. Someone would be here by 7:00. I get a call at 6:30 PM from the TCI cable repairman. He’s behind schedule and wants to know if they couldn’t just reschedule for tomorrow. I told him absolutely not. He reluctantly agreed to be here by 7:00 PM. I receive a call from TCI repair at 6:50 PM asking if my TVs are working. I say no, they aren’t working. He says he’ll send someone out right away and they’ll be there by 7:15 PM. At 7:30 two repairmen arrive to look at the set. I ask them where the new cable boxes are and they say they know nothing about new boxes, they only heard that there’s something wrong with my cable. They left.

I called their supervisor in Livermore named Leroy Ford and explained everything again for what seemed a nightmarish 50,000th time. He had someone else, Kathleen, call me who said they’d fix the problem tonight. I haven’t heard back from her and it’s almost 9:00 PM.

This kind of service is the sort people should learn to expect from the huge monopolies that have grown away from their original core values and evolve into economic predators who monopolize the marketplace by eliminating competition and usurping service with chaos. Your company is such a predator and the public must be allowed to evaluate and select service providers based on choice and information. I intend to provide a public view which you refuse to acknowledge and that’s badly in need of recognition.

Sincerely,



Jeremy L. Dorosin

P.S. I’ve included a bound galley of Balance, book synopsis, newspaper and magazine articles relating to a public battle with Starbucks Coffee and the Dorosin v. Starbucks case study currently being published in the Case Research Journal – that goes out in January to over 500 colleges and universities nationwide. I’ve also included news video coverage of my book and Starbucks battle.

Chief Executive, Number 111, March 1996, CE Roundtable, page unknown.

Lesson No. 3: Nothing to Learn

Grin and Bear It

Many have heard the horror story of the customer who demanded that Starbucks Coffee fund a runaway youth center and publish a two-page apology in The Wall Street Journal in recompense for selling him two allegedly defective espresso machines last April.

But the scariest part for the Seattle-based coffee retailer is that the only lesson to be learned is that even if you play by the rules, some customers simply can't be appeased. They are, in short, "customers from hell." Starbucks faithfully followed the customer etiquette manual, sending Jeremy Dorosin of Pinole, CA, a letter of apology, a full refund for both machines, coffee, and related items. The 38-year-old former scuba shop owner returned everything, and spent $20,000 of his own money on a toll-free telephone number and newspaper advertisements seeking other dissatisfied Starbucks customers. He claims he's received 4,000 supportive calls so far.

Could Starbucks have applied any of the lessons it had learned from other customers to avoid the Dorosin debacle? Probably not; it was a rather unique situation. Would changing the manufacturing process eliminate defective machines? Perhaps, though Starbucks disputes the fact that the products were actually defective. Would changing the way the company handles complaints prevent a repeat of the Dorosin saga? The vagaries of human nature make it impossible to tell. Would caving in to the customer's demands early on have avoided the highly publicized saga that dragged on for months? Maybe, but at what price to Starbucks?

Of course, the big problem Starbucks faced with its customer from hell was where to draw the line: How do you determine when there is simply nothing to learn from the experience, and how do you behave accordingly?

"You can't tell the difference between the customer from hell and the customer who's been through hell, so you have to treat them all the same," says service expert Ron Zemke, who heads Performance Research Associates in Minneapolis.

"Absolutely," agrees Allan Milham, a vice president at human resources consultant TMI North America in San Francisco. His advice for dealing with disgruntled customers: First, say, "Thank you. I appreciate it, and I'm sorry it happened." Next, promise it won't happen again. Then ask what happened and follow through. Finally, check back with the customer and try to implement new ideas and policies in response to his or her input.

In fact, Milham believes companies should be grateful to complaining customers. "Complaints are the cheapest kind of market research," he explains.

Then again, some customers can go a little over the top. Milham admits, "Some people are saying, 'I want justice,' and they're seeking revenge."

Dorosin, who says he's writing a book about "social morality," now contends he wants nothing from Starbucks. Instead, he says, "I would like to get as high a profile as I possibly can and let people know they do make a difference. If companies ignore them, then those companies shouldn't be patronized. And the bigger a company you are, the more you have to lose."

For its part, Starbucks continues to defend its strong tradition of community service and customer relations, though it has given up the ghost in the Dorosin case. In a statement released last July, the company said, "As we have become convinced that Mr. Dorosin does not desire to resolve this matter constructively, we do not plan to pursue it further." 'J.B.