＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
Recently, “purchase” such as “disused article purchase,” “jewelry/precious metal/gold purchase,” and “kimono purchase” have become very popular, but I happened to find an interesting website called “Complaints Purchase Center” while browsing the Internet.
１．What is the “Complaints Buying Center”?
The Complaint Purchase Center is a service started in March 2015 by a company called Insight Tech, Inc. The number of complaints purchased has exceeded 10 million, and they currently have over 410,000 members. In addition, the company has done business with more than 100 companies.
The site was created based on “the philosophy of creating a better society by collecting all kinds of complaints from users and delivering them to companies.
For each complaint you post, you will receive 1 to 10 points, and when you accumulate 500 points, you can exchange them for Amazon gift certificates. If you enter your “profile information” (gender, year of birth, prefecture, and occupation) in advance, you will receive 4 points for each complaint you sell.
The “Complaints Buying Center” buys the complaints posted on the app and sells them to companies in the form of “consumer opinions.
２．不満買取センターのメリット・デメリット
（１）Advantages
① You can earn money by voicing (posting) your dissatisfaction on a daily basis.
② Complaints about products become valuable information for companies to improve their products.
③ Contributors can exercise their brains by shifting from “mere dissatisfaction” to “thinking of ways to improve” in a positive manner.
（２）Disadvantages
① The unit price for buying complaints is too low.
You can get at least 1 point (equivalent to 1 yen) for a simple survey on “survey sites” such as “Hapitus” and “Moppy. (However, some survey sites only offer 10.00 per survey.)
② It is extremely difficult to accumulate the minimum exchange unit of 500 points
Even if we include profile information and assume a minimum of 5 points per complaint, we would still need to submit 100 complaints. It takes a lot of effort to come up with this many complaints.
③Submission takes effort and time.
Compared to responding to a survey site, it takes more effort and time because you have to think about your “complaint” and then “describe” it.
３．How to make good use of “Big Data
There have been methods of communicating consumers’ “dissatisfaction, opinions, and requests” to manufacturers for a long time, such as posting to the “Customer’s Voice Section” on individual product containers and becoming a “product monitor” to express opinions, but this “dissatisfaction purchase center” is a new approach.
In the future, the way to make better use of big data like this is to use data narrowed down to “manufacturers” and “products” to absorb high-quality, positive “opinions for improvement” and provide them to companies after elaborate analysis using AI.
A good example is the design by France Bed to “allow objects to be placed at the head of the bed. This is not a complaint about the product, but rather a complaint about the lifestyle scene, in reference to the opinion that “there is no outlet for smartphone charging on the bed.
A representative from France Bed says, “In the past, there was a preconceived notion and assumption that a type of bed that allows objects to be placed at the head of the bed was a waste of space. However, with the spread of smartphones, they have found that there is a strong need to “place smartphones at the head of the bed and be able to charge them as well.
Come to think of it, the bed we bought when our second son got married a few years ago had a long, narrow space for putting things at the head of the bed, and it also had an outlet for charging smartphones.
I believe that the complaints received by the “Complaints Buying Center” are mixed up, and that there are not a few “trashy complaints”.
Therefore, I think it would be better to consolidate and analyze data in a way that Insight Tech’s “Complaints Buying Center” is “entrusted on behalf of” each company’s “Customer’s Voice Section” in order to pinpoint and improve results.
It would also be meaningful to collect “needs” such as “complaints and inconveniences of foreign tourists” from travel booking sites such as Trivago, conduct “big data analysis” and provide information to travel agencies, railroad companies, hotels, etc. This would contribute to further improvement of “Japanese hospitality” friendly to foreign tourists visiting Japan.