The Consumer Bible

To address the needs of an ever-more-complex marketplace, Mark Green and co-author Nancy Youman have completely revised and updated The Consumer Bible, and added four chapters of all-new material. Green, a former top associate of Ralph Nader and current Public Advocate for the City of New York, incorporates new tips, strategies, and on-line information to guide consumers to the get the best in essential goods and services, and to avoid scams and schemes. The 65 chapters cover it all: food, health care, insurance, financial services including on-line trading, automobiles, travel and vacations, lawyers, outlet shopping, cable and direct satellite television, tax-preparation software, organic produce, buying a computer--even the best and worst times to purchase a product or service. And the authors and publisher so believe in this book that it comes with a guarantee: You'll save money with The Consumer Bible or get your money back. It demands to be placed at the top of every shopper's list. 48,000 copies in print.

Online shopping. You can order almost anything on the Internet these day: airplane tickets, rental cars, computers, clothes, cigars, kayaks, champagne flutes...the list goes on. Countless big-name retailers have gone online to peddle their goods, like Barnes if the seal is genuine, where you can investigate the company's profile. You can also check for any consumer alerts about the company at the Federal Trade Commission's site, www.ftc.gov, or check for news stories about the company by searching with one of the engines described above. Shop only on "secure" sites that use some kind of encryption - the scrambling and descrambling of information. Anything you send to the site, like a credit card number and other personal information, is scrambled automatically before you send it, making it unreadable to any prying eyes. At the other end of the transaction, the details are descrambled by the retailer using special programs that only they have access to. Secure sites are marked by an "s" after the "http" in the Web address, like this: "https:www.amazon.com". (Amazon.com is an online bookseller that uses encryption technology.) On Netscape, the small key symbol in the bottom left corner of the window, usually broken, will be whole when you're using secure sites. A small, locked padlock appears in the bottom right corner of Internet Explorer's window. If it still sounds risky, call the vendor. Any retail site worth its salt will also have a toll-free number that you can call to place orders. While Internet commerce has become safer in recent years, it's not so safe that hackers couldn't break into the online sites of ESPN Sportszone and Outside magazine in 1997 and find the credit card numbers of 2,400 customers who had purchased goods from those sites, Luckily, the intruders claimed they were trying to make a point about online security, and there were no reports of wrongful use of the card numbers. There are also the thousands and thousands of "classical ad" - like advertisements found in news groups and unsolicited e-mail messages offering used computers, used cars, even used sporting equipment. It's easy to spot a sound deal from a major store, such as Barnes they monitor, for example, which stories you read while at an online magazine or which products you're checking out in a Web store. They also record any other information they can about you - like where you work or what type of computer you're using. Site producers use this digital footprint you leave to manage a site's ads, directing ads to people in a particular occupation or in specific companies. While cookies can recognize you as a particular individual, they can't collect personal information, unless you've already provided it somewhere else on the site, like on a registration form. (You can check if anyone's handed you a cookie by searching your hard drive for files containing the word "cookie.") Excerpted from The Consumer Bible: 1001 Ways to Shop Smart. Copyright c 1998 by Mark Green. Reprinted by permission of Workman Publishing.

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Excerpted from The Consumer Bible: 1001 Ways to Shop Smart - Completely Revised by Mark Green, Nancy Youman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.