I’m not talking about evil; I’m talking about incompetence. For example, some people consider Wal-Mart to be evil, but there’s no doubt that it’s a tightly-run ship.
A few years ago, I was riding in a Greyhound bus, when all the sudden we were stopped in traffic. In the distance, the sky was filling with black smoke. Clearly, there was a small forest fire or maybe somebody’s car had caught on fire. We inched our way forward over the next half-hour or so, until we were next to the flames, which we couldn’t see because of a huge truck in the way. The truck pulled out of the way, and the entire bus gasped in unison. Somebody yelled “Oh my God!”. There, standing not 10 feet to our right, in all its flaming, smoking glory was
another Greyhound bus.
I’ve seen fights nearly break out on Greyhound buses. One time, a driver got lost for 2 hours and didn’t know where he was. The most disgusting bathroom I’ve seen in my life was probably the old Baltimore Greyhound station’s bathroom. It was like Shit City (band name!), and probably hadn’t been cleaned since the Eisenhower era. I’ve ridden Greyhound probably about 50 times because I’m such a cheap, skinflint bastard.
I’ll humbly suggest that “survival” is a pretty effective incompetence remover, and Greyhound has survived for a goodly long time (since 1914). And frankly I don’t see how your first example (the other burning greyhound bus) is an example of company incompetence at all. It’s more an example of “look how many greyhound buses there are”.
A far better example of an incompetent firm would be, say, the software company I founded with a partner in the mid 70s that lasted all of six months after generating nough revenue to pay our rent and secretary - but nothing else.
Best Buy certainly shows very little competence, especially in their service area. They get away with it because most of their customers don’t realize they’re being ripped off.
Well, Comcast’s customer service is certainly a section of a company that is horrible.
However, Comcast provides a reasonably reliable product for most people, I think. I mean, it might be poor even, but it’s better than the worst companies out there in general.
Ripping people off isn’t incompetence though (is it?). It might be mean but I’d hardly call Best Buy incompetent just because they’ve made a business out of charging people $50 to drop a memory stick into your computer. Quite the opposite, they’re quite competent at what they do.
Some of the most incompetent are probably the “me too” small businesses that open and close too quickly to note. Don’t get me wrong, I love small-time entrepreneur success stories, but the guys who look at a town with a phone book full of dry cleaners and diners and say, “You know what this town needs? My diner! My dry cleaners!” Maybe small businesses aren’t always considered companies, but that’s incompetence to me, business-wise.
Because it’s in the here and now for me, I’m gonna put in my vote for Medco (mail order pharmacy). To make a looong story short, my prescription was faxed in on December 28th…A LOT of phone calls and three weeks later and I still don’t have my meds.
ETA I just checked the website, it says it hasn’t shipped yet, but on the phone they promised I would have it tomarrow…we’ll see what happens (Oh, and I’ve had three arguments with them trying to explain that there’s a big difference between “no charge/we’ll pick up the tab” and $143.)
One of my worst experiences was on Amtrak. It was so bad, that I got over a terrifying fear of flying, so maybe in a way, I should thank them
When I complained, they actually told me, “next time you should take a plane.” They actually said that. Not “Sorry,” not, “too bad,” they told me I should take my business elsewhere.
Must be nice to have so much business you can tell people to get lost
Yes, the besainting of small business owners is one of my pet peeves! Most of them fail because they were a bad idea poorly executed, yet it somehow gets demagogued into being the fault of having to pay employees a decent wage. Pfft.
At the moment NBC seems pretty incompetent. People dislike Leno, Conan has been bought out and paid to do nothing, he will probably join a competitors network and the company looks stupid.
I talked to a representative from the SBA at the PA Farm Show a few weeks ago. He told me flat-out that he’s had to talk many people out of their “dream” because there was no way they could make their “dream” financially sustainable. It’s sad when it happens, but sometimes it’s necessary.
Listen, before I went back and finished college, I worked at Greyhound and Trailways for over 10 years! I’ve seen about everything there is to see in the bus business and all I can say is…
Umm…
Well, anyway, I don’t know about their business model–they have, as sevenwood said, survived all these years–but is sure as heck a suck-ass place to work. I’ve seen what you’ve described and a whole lot more.
Anecdote: The bathrooms are indeed a real problem to keep clean. Where I worked, it was mostly because of the damn drunks that kept wandering through. One time, our janitor told me about one passed out in the bathroom. I picked up the phone, called the police (mental speed dial), said “Hi” to the dispatcher as we were all on a first-name basis and told him we had another one to pick up. The police came by, and a minute later, they drag the drunk out of the pathroom, leaving a trail of urine behind him (peed his pants real good, he did), and out the door.
The unusual thing was next night a detective came by and started asking questions about the circumstances. Naturally, I inquired as to why, since they’d never done this before. The detective says, “It’s because he died last night at the station.” :eek::eek:
My recent experience with Dell easily explains to me why they are losing market share. The postponed shipment of a server 5 times. The 4 time I called and told them that my business needed the server and I would allow the postponement if and only if they were able to give me a real ship date. They promised that number four would be the last postponement. 4 days later they sent me an email saying that it was delayed again. I canceled the order, called a small company and they shipped with in 48 hours.
My last purchase from them was also a disappointment. I bought a desktop and loaded it with everything. Took the top of the line they were offering on every item. The total was more than 5K. It needed a new mother board in 13 months. One month after warranty expired. One might think that this is a good business model - after all they didn’t have to provide warranty. But they certainly have lost my business - and as I said this explains how and why they are losing market share.
Except all of these companies (other than AIG) are not in financial trouble, and Greyhound is approaching one century in business. Whatever customer service issues there may be, they’re not incompetent.
The incompetent ones are the companies in bankruptcy court.
Might I nominate either GM or Chrysler? There are a lot of incompetent small companies that manage to go out of business, but these are two huge friggin’ companies that have a huge “halo effect” on thousands of small companies that do business with them, many of which have gone out of business themselves as a result.
Not necessarily bad product from either of them (although Chrysler’s reliability is still sub-Korean), but the inability to manage their business operations have put them where they are. Think about it: GM’s sales are second only to Toyota; people obviously like and buy their products.
They have produced such bad customer service for so long that none of us expect anything but.
We pay in advance for crap service. They still can’t do better than a 12hr window for home service, after all this time.
I don’t know about where you live but their own channel, the tv guide scroll station has suck reception and has for years, barely even readable.
I have never known anyone to get satisfaction from them after a dispute, even when they are clearly in the wrong.
So, cable companies who cannot even rise to the level of low expectations that their customers have learned.
(Sorry, I can’t go with Greyhound. I live in the snowbelt and often the bus is actually on the highway when it discovers traffic is completely stopped by bad weather/ accidents. Yet they always seem to know how to exit and meander the back roads to get us to our destination. No easy feat with a big bus, back roads and bad weather.)
I just want to cast my vote for U-Haul, the horror stories I could tell would fill many, many, message boards. True, they have stayed in business for a long time, but I don’t think their competence played a roll in that. I can’t imagine any other company that could get away with the shit they pull.
I’ve dealt with them a few times and never really had any problems (the one time I did have an issue, involving pricing, it turned out to be mostly my fault). What are some of the problems you’ve had with them?
