From the North County Times

REGION: Better Business Bureau gives letter grades now

By The Californian | Tuesday, January 13, 2009 7:40 PM PST

From A+ to F, the Better Business Bureau has started giving companies letter grades on their performance.

The grades replace the previous categories of "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory," giving consumers more information on which to judge companies, said Greg Almond, a spokesman for the local affiliate, the Better Business Bureau of the Southland, Inc., a group that promotes honest businesses practices and helps resolve customer complaints.

The new grading system has been applied to all of the hundreds of thousands of companies in its database, Almond said Tuesday. It's available at www.bbb.com.

"It's more specific and allows for more differentiation," Almond said." Customers have more information and insight into the behavior of the company." Grades are based on the sums of 16 weighted factors, with emphasis given to a company's history of complaints and how it deals with them, Almond said. Some violations give the company an automatic F, such as not having a required business license, or having been penalized by a government agency for an illegal action.

Michael Shames, executive director of the San Diego-based Utility Consumers' Action Network, said he welcomed the BBB's move to letter grades as being more informative. However, Shames said he hopes the new system will be more accurate than the previous one.

"For example, about a decade ago, the BBB gave Pacific Bell a satisfactory rating even after the (California Public Utilities Commission) had found that Pac Bell had scammed tens of thousands of customers and fined the company," Shames said. "When we raised this to the attention of BBB, they finally kicked Pac Bell out of the BBB. But it took effort on our part."

Pacific Bell was acquired several years ago by SBC, now known as AT&T.