Bay Area Consumers’ Checkbook

What makes BACC special is that it is totally subscriber/​donor financed – no advertising or business memberships as with Angie’s List, Better Business Bureau or Unilocal – so there’s no question of conflict of interest in ratings or listings. BACC is an offshoot of Consumer Reports and uses the same subscriber survey approach for regional services that CR uses for nationwide products. I’ve used it for years to find auto repair shops, body shops, roofers and other local businesses, and I’ve never been disappointed.

Consumers Checkbook is really one of a kind. It allows people that actually used a company, nearly always a service business on standard measurable criteria, not personality driven, often emotional «experiences». The often updated magazine and even more up-​to-​date web site don’t contain advertizing and are produced by a non-​profit. These are qualities that help insure, along with their sound statistica methodology may not entertain, but you don’t get arbitrary ratings, or surveys that are mysteriously hidden from view. Nope, parties for reviewers or groupies or changes to presentation or statistical outcomes based on secret formulas or receiving «donations». This review not likely to survive pruning but should you read it do your homework before believing information manipulated and redacted in undisclosed ways. Note that Consumers Checkbook actually states when the data they have collected is inadequate for a valid statistical analysis. They collect the data, compile it, evaluate it, publish it and take responsibility for it. Refreshing.

I looked at this survey and can’t believe that they are using such a low number of survey responses to rate companies.
Checking further and you will see that they are asking their subscribers and consumer reports subscribers for opinions. This is not a random sampling of he population either.
It can’t be statistically accurate. For example:
The Home Depot in Pittsburg has 12 responses for the garden center. Clearly they have hundreds to thousands of customers a year in that garden center. Not a good sampling for rating a company.
To make it worse they got a rating of 8% for overall quality. The people that complete these surveys are not a cross section of the population either. They are the also the least expensive and being compared to companies that are more than 2 times the cost.
Don’t take this survey seriously either, it is easy to throw the numbers at these low numbers, companies just need to become subscribers and fill out the survey.
I don’t take this survey seriously and you should see the disclaimers hidden on page 88.

Not a fan of Bay Area Checkbook for the simple reason of it being a compiled information system based on just consumer ratings. I am better off getting a referral else. You also have to pay for the services.

Well, they do rate stuff, but they want to charge you for some of the reviews… that is, if you buy a subscription you don’t have full access to all articles/​reviews. Something they don’t tell you up front.
I wouldn’t recommend this service, too expensive with little value above what info you can get elsewhere.
For example, a highly rated carpet company in Pleasanton was over $ 1K more than Lowes of Pleasanton, for the identical wall to wall carpet. The highly rated company price was higher per yard, and they way over estimated the square footage needed.
I’m not going to re-​up my subscription.

It’s a bit pricey for what it is, especially with Unilocal,but for home stuff I find it worth it to cross correlate the data here with Unilocal to find good vendors. The articles for home maintenance/​repair are fairly useful too. Sometimes these are are also useful to find new leads:

Update ⁰²⁄₂₀₁₁: I canceled my subscription some time ago. I found them to be more and more out of date with current technology. As well, there were much more reliable ratings elsewhere.
Consumer Checkbook is A-​OK — three stars. I use them in combination with Unilocal and friends. Like every consumer rating system they suffer some idiosyncratic and sometimes unknowable biases.
In general, I’ve found that the practices they list tend to be the much older, established practices. For medicine, sometimes this means they’re not taking new patients. They also list a ton of Kaiser docs as best doctors, but no designation on their site notes they’re Kaiser docs.
Their web system is annoying in many, many different ways — they don’t seem to be using technology efficiently at all.

For the best things in life there’s Unilocal.For everything else there’s Bay Area Consumers’ Checkbook.
The Unilocal community has great taste, its where I go to find happy places. But for stuff I may need but not really want (hospitals, roofers, car repair, plumbers, grocery stores), BACCB is my first stop.
BACCB regularly sends out detailed questionnaires to their subscribers on a variety of topics (say, body shops) and based on the responses is able to pull together a data base showing customer satisfaction, relative price for work done and other information.
For example, I looked up plumbers within 5 miles of 94 109 on the BACCB website. They had thirty listed. The best was Otoshi Plumbing — 100% of 9 people Rated Otoshi Plumbing Excellent for Service and their job cost was 94% as expensive as the average for plumbers that met the search criteria. The table also showed any history of complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau. Doing the same thing with Unilocal brought me just two names, and not enough info to make a price/​quality/​complaint history apples-​to-​apples comparison.
BACB accepts no advertising so it ain’t free, but $ 34.00 buys you two years of the quarterly print volume and access to the website. For most people, its money well spent even if you won’t make new friends or hear how the cute boy put extra marshmallows in your hot chocolate.