Better Homes and Gardens Store (bhg.com)

BHG.com has a lovely website. I hardy ever use it, however, because of their online advertising that captures your computer for several seconds. Pop up ads come several a minute, and are placed over where you want to click to go to another page, so you are held up until you view the ad. A recent one, for subscriptions, remained for several minutes waiting for me to click on it. I refuse to click on any ads on this site. Also, the site requires you to sign up so you can log in -- otherwise it is not functional. The site used to have a "comment" feature which was useful, but became full of people complaining about the popups. There is no way to contact the company from the site unless you want to subscribe to something; there is no "complaint" form. I used a general subscription question form once to complain about the ads, and eventually received a snotty response. Now I see the comment feature has simply been removed. The Coast to Coast AM talk show host Ian Punnit had a story tonight about porn sites using similar software that captures your computer until you pay. In my opinion, BHG.com is just a step away from this kind of practice. It's a shame because the content of the site is SO useful and lovely but they have no respect for their users.

A warning about Better Homes & Gardens: Although this rating does not relate to an order with BHG, it does relate to my experience with their website and deceptive advertising practices with the result that I have been receiving 400 + junk emails daily (yes, I said daily). A few months ago, I participated in a BHG online survey with the promise of a free trial for gardening planning software. After submitting my personal information (silly me!), I have been receiving all these emails and they started poring in soon after completion of that survey. Since I did not participate in any other surveys, I requested that my name & personal info, including email address be removed from all marketing lists of third party vendors of BHG immediately and received no response. In addition, their advertising practice was very misleading and deceptive by promising a free trial-version of software for completing the survey and then indicating at the end of the survey (many pages later) that a paid magazine subscription with credit card number had to be submitted before receipt of the trial software. Now I did NOT go there! FYI: In the time it took for me to write this posting, I received ten new junk mails. Emails are titled “getting paid for surveys, we value your opinion, single 30+, marriage, win a car, view adult movies, government grant, car loans, mortgage offers, other finance offers, i.e., get cash now, weight loss, hair loss, Viagra, Cialis, free business cards, US grant, scholarships, toner & printer supplies, great deals, cell tones, job openings, free quotes, no gimmicks, airline tickets, foreclosure, loan, and oh yeah, did I mention paid opinions? It is as the saying goes, nothing is free. Better yet, all comes with a price! BHG got to keep and distribute all of my personal info to seemingly the whole net and I got … tons of junk mails. Beware because even if you just visit their site, it will leave lots of tracking cookies on your computer!