The heart of the BBB is their rating system applied to compare businesses

Consumers go to the BBB franchises’ web sites to determine which business to use and which one to avoid.
Consumers’ decision is influenced by the business rating as advertised on the BBB franchises’ web sites.

The advertised rating has financial consequences, especially in competitive industries.

When the BBB advertises one business rating as C+ and another as B and both businesses offer the same services, customers with “vivid memories from elementary school”, will prefer the business graded B.

The BBB rating scale consists of 14 levels.
The BBB represents itself as if they have an accurate, reliable, non biased and uniform mechanism to compare the quality of one business to another and to properly grade businesses over the 14 level spectrum.
This is a very serious undertaking.

Unfortunately this is not the case.
The truth is shocking!

The CBBB, the central body of more than 100 privately owned BBB franchises, advertises various information how a rating should be done, but it is not being followed.

Here is what really happens:

The main factor affecting a business rating is the number of valid complaints against the business; they call this process of passing a judgment and making the decision “validation”

Each privately owned BBB franchise is judging complaints submitted against businesses under its jurisdiction. The validation is done in-house by employees with no legal qualification, no thorough understanding of the industry of the business they are judging, no court of law experience, no time or resources to properly investigate each complaint, none of the requirements one would expect in order to carry on such a task properly.
Judgments are passed in haste according to the employee “flavor of the day”.

Many times judgments are passed by these individuals without any regard to the advertised description what makes a complaint valid and what does not.

It is well known and documented that businesses protesting against wrong validation manage to reverse the wrong judgment, but in most cases they are ignored; no matter how substantial the evidence is that they present. The BBB privately owned corporations act  as if they are beyond reproach, without any accountability to the financial damages their malpractice is causing.

Complaints from businesses about a franchisee wrong doings are ignored. Erroneously, the BBB franchises are not members of there own organization. They are the only business for which one can not find a rating. They are enjoying amnesty from being graded on the BBB web sites, allowing themselves to not follow descent and proper business etiquette or ethics.