Cute Commercial Though
I go to the gym everyday at lunchtime, at the gym they have t.v.'s in front of all the cardio machines, so I watch CNN for a half hour while I work-out, almost every day without fail there is a commercial for a company called BlueHippo, which sells electronics, mainly computers. The reason the commercials interested me was that they made a huge point of saying how they didn't check your credit, and how the computers were paid off on an installment plan, etc. so obviously the company is geared towards selling to people with lower incomes or those who have had credit problems, okay cool, we definitely have a digital divide in this country, any effort to reduce it would be a good thing, right?, well, maybe not, I was instantly suspicious of BlueHippo as I am with any company that seems to be set up to entice working class people or those with limited incomes, I mean the whole no credit check, instant approval stuff always raises a red flag in my mind. So I went online to research them, and wow, the Baltimore Better Business Bureau has a page just for them, located here, here is a quote "the Bureau processed a total of 1055 complaints about this company in the last 36 months, our standard reporting period.", also see this piece at consumer-law.lawyers.com, or this one from the Illinois attorney general, or here from the Bad Business Bureau, or here for the BlueHippo Wikipedia entry, I mean the list just goes on and on, and on. Ive never had any personal experience with BlueHippo so I cant say if they are ripping people off or not maybe they aren't, they might be an okay company, but what I can say based on all the complaints and lawsuits is that you should definitely do your research on this one. Also really look at their prices, for example on their website the laptop that is offered is $49.99 PER WEEK, for 52 weeks, plus a $99 activation fee, that works out to $2698, wow, now check out the laptop, 256 MB RAM, 40 GIG's, 1.6 MHz processor, I mean not exactly top of the line, it also says it comes with $700.00 worth of free software, I checked out their software I had never heard of almost any of it, and alot of it is freeware, so I took the specs and tried to find computers comparable to the desktops and laptops from BlueHippo online, I did, they were around $400 or so for the desktops and not much more for laptops, well they weren't exactly comparable the $400 computers I found from the big computer retailers actually were better computers, I mean $400 versus $2698, I am just blown away. The difference between the computers I found and the ones that BlueHippo offers are sadly obvious, the computers I found from the big retailers checked your credit before allowing you to finance the computer, BlueHippo as it loudly advertises does not, thus the cost of having bad credit works out to $2400 or so. Being poor sure is expensive.