Gregory Dunn came to Hawaii in 1994 from the West Coast to open up the first Barnes & Noble store in the state (in Kahala), fell in love with the place and has been here ever since.
Since June 2013, he has been president and chief executive officer of the Better Business Bureau of Hawaii, whose stated mission is “to be the leader in advancing marketplace trust.”
That trust takes on a greater significance during the holidays, when consumers are out in force buying gifts for loved ones and retailers are trying to attract their attention. BBB Hawaii helps consumers cope with the additional pressure, partly by requiring of its 2,684 accredited business members that they commit to dealing with consumers honestly and be willing to submit to dispute resolution when necessary.
Founded in the 1940s as a project of the then-Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, BBB has about 20 employees and dozens of volunteers and has an annual budget of about $1.5 million. It also accredits nonprofits, of which it has 32 as members and 28 others that also are authorized to display BBB Hawaii’s torch logo.
Dunn’s own business experiences — besides his six years with Barnes & Noble — include two years with Nike Inc. in Honolulu and operating a local realty investment firm for 2-1/2 years.
For nonprofits he was executive director for three years of YMCA Honolulu at Atherton and for nine years of The Hawaii Nature Center. He also served nine years as a director of the nonprofit Hawaii Dental Service Insurance Co. and eight years as chairman of the HDS Foundation.
Originally from Michigan, Dunn is a graduate of Homer High School, in Homer, Mich., and earned a bachelor’s degree, majoring in history, from Albion College, in Albion, Mich.
He is 48 and lives in Ewa Beach.
Question: Ten years ago I interviewed BBB Hawaii’s then-director of operations and she said the most typical complaint that you would get from consumers was about new cars and cellphones. Has that changed? Are you still keeping track of what gets the most complaints?
Answer: Oh boy. Yeah, we still do that. … During the last 12 months, we took in a total of 2,931 complaints and we provided over 992,000 business reviews on our local companies. … But, to answer your first question, the top five over the last 12 months, the most complained about, were No. 1, new car dealers; No. 2, airlines; No. 3, used car dealers; No. 4, travel clubs; and then No. 5 is property management companies.
Now the cars and the airlines are fairly perennial because, you know with cars … you have someone who’s not making very much in selling this product versus someone who perceives that they’re paying a lot of money. So the stage is set for trouble.
Airlines, you’re looking at an industry that has such a high volume of customers. Millions of people a year fly to Hawaii. So we see that as an area of concern.
The one that’s very concerning to me personally is the travel club complaints, and that’s because these are folks who are primarily nonresidents who’ve come to Hawaii on vacation and they’re sold something along the lines of a timeshare or a travel club, and what you are worried about is that with the number of people who go through those programs, you fear that Hawaii could be receiving a blemish on our reputation, because of organizations like that that are continuing to operate in our community. That’s very concerning.
Q: Have you talked to the Hawaii Tourism Authority or anyone else about that?
A: Yes, HTA, DCCA (the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs), the Office of Consumer Protection, the Attorney General’s Office, they’re all aware of these issues, and primarily the complaints surround deceptive advertising and unfulfilled promises that are made to induce people to purchase access to the travel clubs.
Q: Is this the time of the year when you get the most consumer complaints, when we’re pretty much in the thick of the holiday-buying season?
A: Absolutely. This is the Terrible Time, because the criminals — and let’s be clear about that: I don’t want to let them off the hook easy and call them scammers; really, they’re criminals, all right? — they’re deceiving people to take away your hard-earned money. What happens is that they recognize that at this time of the year people are stressed, you’re in a hurry, you’re not paying attention and your guard is down. …
The other thing that happens is that a lot of it now is online. It used to be that you had the criminals who would come primarily door to door and deal with you, but now they don’t have to come to your door; they come right into your living room through your computer. That happens in the form of look-alike websites, where instead of it being, for example, Amazon.com, it would be, like, gifts(dot)amazon(dot)something, something, so it makes it look like Amazon but it’s not really that website. ….
They come in emails, too. They say, like, “This is from Jane,” and you’re like, “Oh, which Jane is it?” And it’s not really from Jane, it’s from Johannes in Jamaica, but you press the button and put in your information, right?
Q: Are there a few tips you could offer for people to bear in mind as they’re out shopping, whether at the malls or online?
A: I think that if people are shopping in the malls, the No. 1 thing that I would suggest that they do is, if you’re buying something, don’t use your debit cards. And the reason is that when you use a debit card, that is directly linked to the cash normally in your checking account, and not to a credit card account. When that number gets stolen, or if you drop it and someone figures out your PIN number or uses it, that money comes directly out of your checking account and you more than likely will not get it back. If you use your credit card, you are protected under the terms of your credit card agreement that as long as you notify the credit card company under the terms of your agreement, you’re limited in the amount of loss that you could export. Debit cards generally don’t have that same protection.
Q: And your advice for online shopping would be what?
A: Buyer beware. You gotta be careful. You know, if you look at something and you say, jeez, I really shouldn’t put my information in here, then you probably shouldn’t. It sounds too good to be true. It’s like you get a thing someone posts on Facebook that says, oh, get a free $250 gift card from Walmart, from a store, and what they do is they walk you into a link and you’re starting to put in information like your name, your address, your phone number and your email address, and it’s, like, you know, click here to get the card. Well, you’ve just subscribed to an email blast service and it takes you to another one and another one and another one. And it will take you months to undo that information. And now those people know who you are. They know your address and they can then use that information to try and get a hold of your credit card and bank account information. It’s called phishing.
Q: What about problems between businesses themselves?
A: We definitely do get those calls. You have certain industries that are highly competitive, and we’re constantly walking a fine line in those types of disputes, where if one company complains that another has deceptive practices, particularly in any of the door-to-door sales operations, that’s very prevalent. And then we work with companies not just to mitigate, not just to understand each position but then also to work with each of those entities to improve their business practices. We’ll give them tips and information on how to train their sales people on how to avoid problems in the future. And where we also provide support for our accredited businesses is that as a benefit of their accreditation we provide mediation services, if there’s a dispute that needs to get to a mediation level as opposed to just informal alternative dispute resolution process within the BBB system.
Q: I had some guy come by my residence not too long ago and offer to clean the rug, all for free. I declined. But the point being, I read somewhere that such sales people take advantage of older people, in that when they’re done, they say, here sign this and thank you very much, but apparently the seniors are signing a contract that says they owe $3,500 or something. Have you heard about that?
A: It happens all the time. …
What’s even worse is there was a case in court, I think it was about a year and a half ago. There was a senior citizen who had answered the door, in Manoa, and there was a contractor who said, hey, we’re right up the street and we’re doing a job putting asphalt down, and it looks like we’re going to have some extra, and it looks like you could use a new topcoat. Would you like to take advantage of it? Since we’re here, we can just topcoat your drive and it won’t cost you that much money.
And the person’s like, “Oh, wow, yeah, I can get a deal, that’s great, and I was meaning to get around to it.”
And the contractor hands them a blank sheet of paper basically, a work order, and the homeowner signs it; it’s blank, because the guy says we don’t know how much (asphalt) we’re going to have left, but why don’t you just sign this and we’ll fill out the work order when we’re done. And they go away. Later, the contractor comes in, they pave the driveway, and it was over $35,000 that senior had a bill for.
The homeowner wound up calling the Attorney General’s Office, because the contractor demanded payment, and the contractor took the homeowner to court, to demand the payment. And you what the court said?
Q: What?
A: The homeowner owed the money, because they signed the contract, and they were on the hook for the money.
Q: I know you can’t exact legal penalties, but is the ultimate thing you can do only to blacklist somebody?
A: Well, our entire focus is community information and education — and by our publishing information on our website about businesses, when we come across businesses that have unethical business practices, or have a history of shady dealings, our business reviews generally reflect that information. So that’s why we have a letter grade from A+ to F.
We encourage our local consumers to log into the local BBB website, it’s free of charge, and do the research on the companies that are available for you to work with. If they are not (BBB Hawaii) accredited, know that you have very little recourse. If they are an accredited business, that business has signed a commitment with the Better Business Bureau, a binding contract that says that if they have a problem with a consumer, that they are committed to working through alternative dispute resolution with that consumer if they unable to resolve their complaints.
We hold our businesses accountable to that. We’ve had businesses that left the BBB because they didn’t want to live up to that, and we wanted to hold them accountable to it.
Q: How much does BBB Hawaii interact with government agencies regarding these various problems?
A: Quite a bit. We share information back and forth. If we see trends of complaints or concerns or inquiries, we send information back and forth. If they’ve received a complaint about a particular entity that may be operating in Hawaii or is undertaking something online, it will contact us for our information and data as they’re working to understand if a case needs to be built against an entity.
Q: Does BBB Hawaii’s nonprofit status allow you to offer testimony at the Legislature and City Council?
A: We could offer testimony, but we choose not to do that, particularly from the standpoint that our purpose and our focus is not to lobby or make pronouncements on policy. There are other organizations in the community that do that very well and we let them take the lead in that.
We’re looking to focus on protecting consumers in the marketplace and providing consumers with a list of trusted, accredited businesses in their community that have committed to work with the consumer in resolving disputes and have already opened themselves up to review of their criminal history, if any, their tax status, any government complaints or other issues, and we aggregate that information in one place.
What makes it different from a governmental entity is it provides the community the ability to do their research and find out information before they are taken advantage of, versus turning to the Attorney General’s Office or the Office of Consumer Protection when something has already happened to them.
Q: Philosophically would you say the BBB is an effort by the business community at self-policing?
A: Absolutely. It’s about self-regulation. You have businesses in our community — they are around 2,700 strong right now — that recognize the importance of upholding the standards of trust and accountability and transparency. And they realize that as you’ve had this big rush toward online commerce, that it’s also opened up consumers in our marketplace to extreme levels of fraud that they didn’t have before. …
The underlying reason is that if you have a community that cannot trust each other, or that has been ripped off so much that they no longer have money to spend, commerce stops. Your economy will fail and you lose jobs.
