I can see both sides to this arguement. A post in here flaming some merchant can appear to be just one individual venting about one experience gone haywire, and it may not give an overall picture of the merchant's performance. Most people don't go out of their way to praise a company, but often you find them recounting their negative experiences. This medium (a very active forum) is not the most effective way of learning about retailers, for these reasons as well as the fact that there is just too much information to look through. Not everyone has the time to read every thread, so at best any resulting rating would be skewed and biased. I would imagine that the people who do have the time to read through every post probably already have pretty good contacts and know how to choose a good company from a bad one.

It would be nice if there were a system in place to rate hobby retailers, just as there are for most other items you can purchase online. For instance, nextag.com allows you to view a list of merchants selling a product, with a rating next to their logo of 1 to 5 stars. If the rating is not perfect, you can look at the number of people who rated the merchant, so a high number would show that a negative experience happens a lot, and a low number may indicate an isolated experience. If you want to look further still, you can read the reviews left by some of the people who rated their experience. This is a very common system which I am sure is probably available as a canned website addon.

Perhaps RCU could incorporate such a system into their website?