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of home electronics. One third of all complaints dealt more generally with
consumers’ rights, mentioning no particular company or brand name. Among the
total of 523 companies targeted about those complaints that did implicate another
company, ten (2 per cent) had received more than thirty complaints each, and still
did not meet up to customers’ demands. They were all big corporations and nation-
ally famous chains of retailers in home electronics or network supply: the five worst
ones were, in descending order: Telia, Tele 2, Onoff, SIBA and City Stormarknad.
The firms organized in unified branches attracted considerably more critique than
the chains that were built up as voluntary associations of individual shops.
It is not surprising that the number of (satisfied or dissatisfied) customers increases
with the size of company sales, although these figures do not concern dissatisfaction
with bought products, but with misleading marketing. A large distribution network
need not by definition produce worse information than a smaller one. Complaints
could concern both the form and the content of an advertisement. A common criti-
cism was that ads promised much more than the shop could actually fulfil, for
instance by pushing attractive offers that in practice could not be found anywhere,
thus fooling consumers to visit the store in vain. Very few complaints (only 1 per cent
in all) resulted in some kind of legal action from state authorities.
Other dissatisfied customers had taken the matter into their own hands, discussing
the problems with the power of large corporations in letters to the press or on alter-
native web pages. Articles in the daily press could, for instance, debate the habit of
media companies to talk of ‘sales’ when prices were in fact not considerably lower
than normal. A growing number of websites make comparisons between different
suppliers of the same services, in terms of prices, offers and/or test results. There are
also channels for complaints, with blacklisting of companies that have refused to
follow the decisions of the National Board for Consumer Complaints. Two such
independently organized websites are ‘Crush the Low Price Giants’ (‘Krossa
lågprisjättarna’) and ‘The Black List’ (‘Svarta listan’). Many critical voices sharply
criticize the big corporations and instead praise the smaller, local, independent
retailers who can supply better support and more personal service to their customers.
A woman, for example, wished there were more female sellers of computers and cell-
phones, so that she could be treated with greater respect. On these websites, people
share experiences and good advice as to how to deal with difficult shops, forcing them
to live up to their promises. In all cases, they are forums for educating and empow-
ering consumers.
Still more radical critics frankly copied products of large corporations with their
own PCs or DVDs. Media piracy today is a mass movement in most media circuits
and world regions, and a fierce battle rages between the big corporations and the
underground movement of hackers, crackers and pirates, some of which are just after
money, others having idealistic motivations. Walter Benjamin once argued that the
technologies of reproduction added by each new medium tend to erode the ‘aura’ of
the unique work of art, pushing art from the sphere of religious rituals to that of mass
politics. 33 Copying techniques have since then been multiplied and perfected, in

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