Vermont Teddy Bear Company evidently…
Vermont Teddy Bear Company evidently has a practice of selectively withholding negative product reviews unless the customer returns the product and the company agrees with the customer's assessment. I purchased a product from them and attempted to leave a one-star review due to its remarkably poor quality. The company refused to publish my review unless I returned the product for inspection. I explained that I could no longer return the product because my daughter had found it in my closet. Despite this explanation, the company continues to withhold my review. My concern is not simply that the company declined to publish one review. It is that the company's stated policy appears to impose additional conditions specifically on negative reviews, with publication contingent on the company inspecting the returned product and agreeing with the customer's assessment. This gives the company discretion to prevent unfavorable customer experiences from appearing on its website while allowing favorable reviews to be published without the same requirements. This practice raises concerns about whether the company's published reviews accurately represent customer experiences and whether its review-moderation practices constitute deceptive review suppression under the FTC Act or the Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, 16 C.F.R. Part 465. Consumers rely on product reviews to make informed purchasing decisions. A system in which unfavorable reviews are withheld unless the seller approves the customer's assessment risks misleading prospective purchasers about the quality of the product and the experiences of other customers. Everything I stated in my review was my opinion and well-substantiated by the photo I included, so their assessment of whether they agree with my concerns should be irrelevant to whether they allow an honest consumer review. Given that the reviews on all their products seem to be highly inflated, I suspect this suppression of negative reviews is not a one-time issue. Legally, they should not impose a different set of standards to screen negative reviews as they do for the positive ones, and there's simply no possible way they are demanding people return the product so they can assess whether they agree before they post positive reviews.








