Enterprise rent a car. Reserved a mid sized car, all they had when I showed up were compact cars. Ended up renting from Budget at $60 more.
At the end of the month got my credit car bill and Enterprise had charged me for a rental. And they charged me the rate for a mid sized car. They claimed they had the right to charge me because they held a car for me. They never had the car I wanted. My credit card company agreed with me and credited my account.
Six months later a collection agency then comes after me. It did no good fighting with them so I contacted the state attorney general. Suddenly all was well again and I never heard from Enterprise again.
AOL, definitely. I had dial-up through them in the dark days of the early internet (1995) and it was a bitch to cancel their service. We finally did, however, and got a credit back for the additional months they kept charging us after we cancelled the first time.
I seem to remember that we even contacted our credit card company to notify them to stop accepting AOL charges, too. I might be misremembering this, though.
Every time I have purchased from Radio Shack, I have regretted it. Nothing I’ve bought from Radio Shack has worked properly for any appreciable period of time. Their quality control is awful. And that’s assuming you can buy it. I recall walking into a Radio Shack and trying to buy an mp3 player a few years ago. The three staff on duty were busy chatting with each other and couldn’t be bothered to serve me. When I walked over to their coffee klatsch, they literally turned their backs on me. When I tried to interrupt them, then just raised their voices and continued chatting with each other. I shrugged my shoulders, left, and bought the mp3 player elsewhere.
I’ve worked for companies like NACHA. Citi certainly should (will/must) know who is giving them money. ACH transactions do not hide either end from each other, they just keep things on a regular schedule, and reduce the complexity of processing all the transactions (no, really). Whether or not the drudges who answer the phones would be able to find out is another matter entirely.
Heh. Reminds me of a time several years ago; EMC and HP had broken up like bad divorce. We had a big database on a few HP systems backed by big EMC storage. Oracle had a very convincing analysis that the issue was somewhere between the card and the controller, but wasn’t the switch. EMC and HP go back and forth about whose fault it is. We finally get fed up, call a big meeting between us, them, and Oracle. Sales managers, sales execs, and few techs from each. We managed to get the techs into a room with me, and none of the feuding political types. Six minutes later I had scheduled a tech to update the controller cards on the storage side, and an unpublished update to the firmware for the fiber card on the server side.
Not sure there’s a worst company, but I do remember some airline desk woman adding a security check to my boarding pass because I laughed when she apologized for being slow because their computers were down. (I’d been awake for close to 15 hours at that point, and slept less than 40 hours in the previous 11 days while fixing “computer problems”).
They were truely horrible.
I had the misfortune of working for BestBuy while they were running the “get a computer for free or almost for free by signing up with AOL for 2-3 years”. AOL was horrible to deal with even as a their promoter. You could get someone signed up in a matter of minutes but to get them canceled took hours on the phone followed by months to get their money back. A complete waste of the customers time, a complete waste of the employees time. Stores flooded corporate with complaints on behalf of customers and employees however they didn’t seem to care. All they saw was $$$ at how may computers we were selling.
Funny, I had the exact opposite experience with Teva. Bought a pair of sandals on clearance at DSW. Wore them for a month and one of the buckles broke. I didn’t have the original receipt and had worn them for a while, so I couldn’t take them back to DSW. I wrote Teva an e-mail and attached a couple of pictures, and they gave me $80 to pick new shoes out from their website. I ended up with a pair of Tevas that were much nicer than the original pair (which had been half-off, so I only paid about $30 for those) and those have held together remarkably well for three summers now.
Well, I’ll tell you mine. Far from the worst company I’ve dealt with but this was frustrating.
I booked tickets for an overseas flight for my family. When the tickets arrived, they had gotten my son’s name wrong. Definitely a showstopper for international travel. I called customer service and they agreed that there was an error (not clear if the error was theirs or the airline’s) and they said I should FedEx the ticket back at their expense and they would reissue it. They instructed me to go to a FedEx office and ask FedEx to bill it to Travelocity. Well, FedEx said they can’t do that, that I need to provide the account number. So I called Travelocity back from the FedEx office and asked for the account number, and they told me they weren’t allowed to give it out. They insisted again to tell FedEx to bill it to them.
(By this time the FedEx counter clerk overheard my conversation and took pity on me. She said, “I’m really not supposed to do this” and she looked up the account number and put it on the airbill. Bless her heart.)
I lived in an apartment complex that required me to be there to accept any large packages. When I bought it, the sales rep assured me that the specific delivery time was accurate, it was “in the system”, and they will work around any scheduling difficulties.
So I take a day off of work as it was supposed to deliver by 9am. At noon (no TV) I call BB and get routed through a few service people who couldn’t determine the delivery status. I’m finally given the number of a third party delivery service who apparantly is contracted out to my specific region. I call, and the TV is “on the truck” and will be there anytime now…
6pm, no TV. I call, and leave a message. I call the next morning, and find out that they “accidently left it on the platform” and would deliver the next day or two when their driver works my route again. Can you narrow it down, BB says they can deliver anytime? The guy literally laughs, and says “Yeah, Best Buy tells everybody that. Really, we can only give you a full day window.”
I ended up complaining for a while, and had them hold it, and drove myself the whole 10 miles away to pick it up myself.
Teva is a local Santa Barbara company and I know many people who have worked there. Tevas used to be what’s called a technical sandal. They were designed for hard core river rafters and were made to be extremely durable. In around 1999 or so their patents expired and the market was flooded with cheap knockoffs. The parent company decided that in order to compete they needed to make a cheap sandal also. Most of the design types in the Teva business group went elsewhere. It is not in any way the same product that it used to be.
Yes. They are absolutely fucking awful. After years of them charging me more and more for progressively worse service and being lied to a treating like an idiot by their customer service reps, I had enough. I went and got DirecTV and I love them. DirecTV is the best. The few times that I’ve had to deal with their customer service, they have been competent and polite. They just gave me free Showtime for a year just because it’s my five year anniversary with them. I wish that I had dumped Cox years before.
Interesting. I bought my last pair of Tevas in 1996 and they lasted forever. I’ve looked at them lately at the stores and a thought “why do these things look way cheaper than the ones I bought years ago and are in no way as comfortable?”
I meant to mention that the parent company is Deckers Outdoor Corp. They make Teva Sandals, Simple Shoes and Ugg Boots. Obviously the manufacturing is offshore but the design and marketing is here.
Yes the first two pairs I bought were excellent and the very first pair I bought are still usable. The second pair were called Universals and were the best I ever had. I wore those out completely. I ordered a new pair of Universals and within a couple weeks of just walking around, almost all the plastic loops that held different parts of the webbing together had failed. After I sent them back it took months for them to “evaluate” broken plastic parts on nearly new sandals. If I recall correctly, they said there was a “backlog”. I bet there was!
Tell me about the Discover Card. I’ve had them for over 10 years and the only problem I’ve had with them was they sent me a card application several weeks before the expiration of my old card and so I signed up for two cards by mistake (and then of course several weeks after that the replacement for my old card arrived…)
Relatively minor nuisance for having a card for 10 years. Now businesses might feel differently about them as I hear they may charge them more than MC or Visa.
I had a succession of nightmare experiences with bank of america. the one that finally convinced me to leave the bank was a $50 fee on a trustee to trustee IRA transfer. I felt there should have been some warning about the fee, they felt that I should have remembered from my account disclosure agreement. In a sense, fair enough, though, given their history, it was the last straw.
As I’m arguing with them about the fee, they say it is listed in their Personal Schedule of Fees and that they would be happy to send the documentation to me. I agree, mostly to make them waste the stamp. A few weeks later, it turns up. The fee is listed as being $25. I call them up again, and now I have a check for $25 in the mail.
I hope they thought to update one of 1.) their actual fee sheet or 2.) their published fee sheet after that.
