I think you missed the points of some of those posts Duder.
Anyway, my vote goes to Appleby’s. Not for being evil, just for having the worst service of any place I’ve ever been to.
I’ve gone 3 times and each time the service sucked. I won’t go back.
NTL.
Hell, yeah. They suck more than a nuclear powered vacuum cleaner.
As does Carlton TV.
Okay, Norwegian Dopers, all together now:
TELENOR!
Of course, they can’t, dammit.
Actually, my BiL works for them, so I don’t want them to go belly up unless he’s got another job. And I get all my cable and phone from them too. But MAN are they shit. 2+ hours on hold to get through to customer support? Fuck that.
Same here, as well as internet access. While I wouldn’t want them to go down the pan, because I’d then have a lot of hassle, they sure as hell deserve to go bust. Came close to it last year, iirc.
-
Every bank I’ve ever been with. Extortionate fees for nothing is standard practice pretty much everywhere in the world
-
British Telecom - If there is a right way and a wrong way to do something, BT will choose secret 3rd option which is so, so wrong that nobody even thought it was an option.
-
Any establishment that includes the words “car” and “sales” in the title
-
Another vote for the incompetent morons who run NTL. I think we’ll probably get our wish sooner or later in this case.
-
The BBC. They charge every household in the UK about 100 pounds a year to show repeats of shows everyone has seen a dozen times and still manage to lose 500 million pounds in a year. Boggles the mind.
-
In the UK, Curries, Comet, Dixons and all the other electronic retailers who constantly try to part you with cash by purchasing an extended warranty. I bought a VCR not too long ago for 80 pounds. The salesmoron tried to get me to buy a 3 year extended warranty. When I said no, salesmoron got annoyed and began questioning me as to why I didn’t want it. I said “how much is it” and salesmoron said 60 pounds. I said the VCR was only 80 pounds, if it breaks after a year I’ll throw it away and buy a new one.
puts on flame retardent suit
Apple Computer
If this company was a child, its school report would say “doesn’t play with others”.
No other company in history that I can think of has come up with so many terrific ideas, turned the ideas into great products and managed to completely and utterly screw up selling them to the general public. Will go down in history as one of the companies that could have had it all but threw it away for being too arrogant (same could be said of Sony).
Sears- ugh. High prices, crappy service, dirty stores, clueless, apathetic or slimy sales types- year after year of dubious schemes (aka the credit card disasters). They do nothing that Lowes, the Home Depot, Target, Kohls, Bed, Bath and Beyond ect do not do quicker, cheaper, better and faster. The various trainwrecks invovling their auto “service” centers is a joke in itself.
Many of the moving companies out there are beyond sleazy.
:mad:
I have to agree, but let’s not hijack this thread into a PC/Mac argument. The are the typical commercial where the guy is driving down the road with a brand new computer, arbitrarily, the X6. At a stop light he looks up to see two guys putting up a billboard for the new X7. My Mac friend is fiercely loyal, and despite pissing thousands of dollars down the drain, he makes excuses left and right trying to justify their marketing and sales strategies.
If you want to talk about a technical company that missed the boat or pissed away a goldmine of an opportunity, then IBM has to be mentioned, but also Xerox. The opportunities that Xerox missed are almost comical, if they weren’t so tragic.
Totally agree. Wasn’t it the boss of IBM who said there was a market for maybe a dozen personal computers in the world :smack:
And on the other side of this coin, we have Harley-Davidson who has been producing sub-standard, outdated crap that has had more recalls than a Florida election and the public lines up around the block with hands-on-ankles, ready for a sandy crack stuffing, and then will suck it clean without even wiping it off first. A real American sucess story. :rolleyes:
“Lets get them meek bastards NOW!”
The real estate brokerage I worked for. I was an administrative assistant there. I was told I had to learn several web languages so I could develop my boss’s personal website. Then I had to learn QuarkXPress, PhotoShop, etc. so I could do graphic design for the company. But my title was still administrative assistant. I learned really quickly. Then one day I got into a conversation with my boss. I admitted that I was taking some night classes. He asked which ones. When I told him I was taking graduate microbiology, he asked me if I was getting a masters. I admitted I was, and was fired for it a week later.
The reason he stated in our meeting with HR was “Oh, you’re just too intelligent for this job. The fact that you’re getting a masters really concerns us. We don’t think you’ll be happy here. We’re really looking for someone who can get excited about copying and faxing.” He was fucking serious! I guess they just wanted a monkey to do the job.
It turns out that being fired from that shit job was the best thing that ever happened to me, but I can’t believe I got fired for being too smart. More than that, I’m reasonably sure that it also had something to do with the fact that I knew one of the brokers was forging his clients’ signatures on his contracts. In the same conversation as the one where I naively admitted to wanting a masters, my boss asked me how everything was going with this broker I was having problems with. When I reported to him that he forged his client’s signature in front of me, he basically patted me on the head and told me not to worry about it. Then all of a sudden, I lost my job. Huh.
I don’t think it’s entirely Apple’s fault if the public prefers McDonalds to sirloin. 
United Airlines.
(Yes, I know they already did go bankrupt. I hope they get Chapter 7’d.)
Their customer service has, er, serviced me rudely more times that I care to remember. It was only a matter of time before those bumblers ran out of money (or idiots to loan them more money).
This statement makes about as much sense as telling a homeless person to “Just get a house”. Leaving to one side for a moment the socioeconomic pressures and factors that may result in a person having a poor education and having to take a menial job in order to survive (we don’t want them on welfare either, now do we? :rolleyes: ), think about the fact that the jobs that these folks are doing actually serve a purpose in the functioning whole of society (we do, after all, need people to watch our precious spawn while we are at work, and we need folks to serve us burgers at lunch). The fact that so many are willing to accept that the abuse of these folks is to be accepted and as inevitable as the tides or gravity is what is disgusting.
Quark, Inc. They have a stranglehold that is finally slipping (God Bless InDesign!) on the print publishing industry, and they have damn near train-wrecked the entire industry. Buggy products. Late products. Price gouging. Everything Microsoft does on a large scale, Quark does worse on a small scale.
Their last release, 5.0, was a giant dud. Hopefully 6.0 will land with a similar flop, and I pray that the process of trying to move all programming operations to India will result in such a delay for version 7.0 that InDesign takes the market right out from under those arrogant bastards.
The irony of whining about whiners is just delicious.
Honestly I hadn’t noticed anyone griping about a crummy job and wishing ill upon a company for it. Rather, everyone was pointing out the evils of their respective companies and wishing that they’d run themselves into the ground sooner rather than later.
Perhaps if less people followed your particular belief that those with unglorious jobs deserve to be treated badly, there’d be less people complaining about being treated badly by customers. Your disdain and lack of sympathy certainly doesn’t help. Those that do fulfill the “menial” jobs in society do have a right to complain because the companies they work for tend to treat them as expendable fodder with no rights.
It’s common practice for some of these places to work their employees a half an hour a week less than full time so they don’t have to pay out benefits and to alter work schedules at their whim, preventing employees from planning things outside of their job, like say for example, college classes.
A lack of education or a necessity to hold down a crummy job does not give a company license to treat their employees as less than human and until you’ve worn someone’s shoes, you have no right to get so disgusted by them when they vent a little.
Let’s send this well-deserved bitch session to the BBQ Pit.
While I don’t ‘wish’ Fair, Isaac to go out of business, I do wish that their entire Executive Staff would be suddenly and simultaneously afflicted with a severe case of Poetic Justice.
The details of which I leave up to Lady Irony and Lord Karma.