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Comcast Takes 2014 Prize For Worst Company In America
halfEvilTech writes with news that Comcast has emerged victorious from Consumerist's annual Worst Company In America contest. Comcast narrowly edged out Monsanto in the finals with 51.5% of the vote. The reigning champion for the past two years, Electronic Arts, lost in the first round to Time Warner Cable. TWC made the quarterfinals, which is notable because Comcast has proposed a merger with TWC. In fact, Comcast submitted an FCC filing today explaining why they think the deal should be allowed. They say, 'the companies don’t overlap or compete against each other.' Other strong contenders for the Worst Company in America included Chase, SeaWorld, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, and Verizon.
A video game company that makes shitty games.
Giant banking and investment firms that literally rend the economy that results in massive layoffs.
These two shouldn't even be in the same running.
Quality of internet access is viewed as more important than food quality.
And this is not the case with them as separate entities?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
don't get me wrong though. slightly bad hi-speed internet and cable TV service is right up there with starvation and ethnic cleansing.
Americans sure like to bitch about stuff.
I think that one would win hands down, were it an option.
My dealings with Comcast have been few but boy have they been terrible. From being accused of stealing their equipment, to getting billed seven times in a single month, I've had a lifetime of customer dissatisfaction in just a few short months of dealing with them. Well deserved honor Comcast.
I have to question the methodology here, I doubt that one in three people have even heard of Monsanto and have any idea what they do.
Not defending Monsanto but this smells like a targeted "survey" from a group with an agenda.
Just my $0.02
You are correct. Monsanto and Comcast are prime targets for anti-corporate rhetoric... So they are well-known in anti-corporate circles. That said, Comcast is still a pile of garbage. It should be buried next to the E.T. video game.
All the telecom oligopolies should get the award. Consumer choice, reliability, and customer service are in the crapper. I live in a well-populated suburb near a major city and we have shit choices, just like everybody else. Jeez Louise!
Table-ized A.I.
If they would have finished the merger, TWC and Comcast could have had a Hunger Games ending type thing going on where they both win by default :-D
Can we make them eat the berries?
I know its near impossible with a few of these companies since they are oligarchies but I feel that in order to vote for one of these companies you also should make a personal pledge to avoid doing business with the companies you vote for.
One big problem here is that on one hand people say EA is the worst company in America and then turn around and go out and buy the latest EA game. Companies will listen, but only if you affect them where it matters: the bottom line. No one at these companies gives a shit about this survey.
So how long have you worked there? 8^)
Okay, I'm not against GMO in general, but Monsanto has some of the most mustache-twirlingly-evil business practices ever.
trophy.
One marginally withing NRC limits. ;)
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Heck yeah, we know who Monsanto is. They're the scum who want to patent plant reproduction, and sue farmers for farming. If anything can give a company lots of bad press everywhere, not just in geek circles, it's victimizing innocent farmers with complicated legalese over a grossly obvious right. Aside from the huge problem of that ultimately leading to needing their permission to eat, they don't care if that also leads to the RIAA and MPAA winning the right to force DRM on everyone, and Big Pharma patenting our own genes and us having to pay them license fees just to exist. And some thought paying a levy for breathing the air was draconian.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
... I am not surprised that Comcast has won its second Poo award from The Consumerist.
I really expected them to pull it off again this year. Comcast, and Time Warner Cable must really be a crappy company to beat out Electronic Arts,
BF4 was one fouled up game release, Electronic Arts was even sued over the money they made by talking up a broken game (Battlefield 4), and having Dice release it much earlier than it should of been.
I am disappointed.
Comcast cable for internet seems fine to me if you don't try to use their DNS servers. Once I switched the DNS, it virtually never goes down. Consequently I've never needed to deal with their support staff. COX Cable on the other hand, seems to be pretty flaky, a friend of mine who is using them for Voip is always losing his connection. I'm using Vonage over Comcast and I never have any problems.
The food safety alarmists are all about FUD. However there is a serious problem of pesticide producing crops destroying critical parts of the ecosystem needed to sustain pollination (bees and butterflies for instance). There is legitimate reason for concern about the overuse of these sorts of crops.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I bet there was an office party after hearing this, as you know Comcast goes out of its way to be a PITA. It cant be by accident.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How can the 2014 contest be over?
It is pretty terrifying the scale at which Monsanto has been carless with its experimentation. Their projects seem to be escaping into the wild and replicating at an alarming rate. http://www.nature.com/news/201... and http://www.kgw.com/news/USDA-N...
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Shell.
Comcast starts out against Yahoo! and Facebook, two complete weenies compared to the companies Time Warner had to beat get the spot. Take EA, Koch, and Salie Mae, and put them in a blender and you won't get a mixture. All 3 turds have the exact same stink and consistency. It says a lot to see Monsato come out dirtier than a company that fought its way through that pile. Time Warner totally should have won.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I really don't see what the fuss about Comcast is. They are definitely the best for the money around here. I get 75 mbps down and 15 up with 4 phone lines and commercial TV for my business for around $300/ month. Nothing else comes close for that cost for commercial service. At&t would charge twice that for crappy 3mbps dsl with 4 phone lines, and then charge long distance on top of that. The only time Comcast service has gone down in the past year was when a tornado and storms ripped through our neighborhood and even then it was back online within 2 hours. Comcast has doubled my Internet speed at home and business at no extra charge during the past year. My sales rep even told me about new rates and encouraged me to get the new priced packages that provide faster speed at cheaper cost, and to inform my clients of such as well. They added HBO and Starz at my house for no additional charge for two years for being a good customer. They recently sent me a letter to inform me I was eligible for 100 mbps service at my home for the same price I previously was paying for 50 and I needed to call to get the new package for the same price. I have never heard about anything even close to that from other carriers. At&t would still charge $500/month for 3mbps awful sdsl if you didn't renegotiate. Comcast on-demand works quite well also. Maybe I am just lucky or in a good area. Most of the problems with service I have seen are due to bad cabling, like the customer using homemade ghetto rigged screw on coax ends and splitters from Walmart to terminate the cable, or trying to get a solid signal over RG58 in instead of RG6. Comcast is actually pretty good comparered to BoA or AT&T, Sprint, or a dozen other companies, for me at least. I really don't understand the hate.
They are the WORST. They are the biggest reason why I am a big supporter of municipal cable. When they have it, they abuse consumers with their monopoly power to the max.
A Company owned by Microsoft elected as the worst in America. Who could tell?
[rips off the patches and rubs his nipples] Aw gee, that's just too bad... I guess you could always switch to another cable company...
Worst. Signature. Ever.
I don't understand why this survey missed the big Wall Street Banks that gave us the 2008 crash but no one went to jail. They were (and are) much worse and harmful to us than Comcast and Monsanto. IMO.
But hey, at least they treat business customers just as crappilly as they do residential customers!
Okay, not really a good thing, but at least its fair. ish.
Alright, they are unrepentant bastards.
Hmm. Looks to me like all the contenders for the "worst" companies in the world are just the biggest companies in the world. It makes sense. More people have used Comcast, Verizon, and shopped at Walmart than they have other companies...
I was curious about historical results of this poll, so I did some digging.
2009 - AIG - Bailed out in 2008, makes big news for giving executives $165M in executive bonuses, $1.2B in total bonuses.
2010 - Comcast - Makes big news by buying NBCUniversal in 2009.
2011 - BP - Deepwater Horizon happened in 2010
2012 - EA - Mass Effect 3 (Not sure how much news this generated, but someone mentioned it above.)
2013 - EA - SimCity's problems made news. Not on the same level as, say BP in 2010, but it certainly came up outside of tech and gaming sites occasionally.
2014 - Comcast - Makes news by trying to buy TWC.
I'm noticing a bit of a pattern here. (Though there does seem to be a bit of a tech bias, unless someone did something particularly egregious.)
I live in the bottom of a little valley, and I'd need a hundred foot tower to get more than two TV stations.
In my state, it's illegal to have a tower so tall that it could fall outside your property line. My property isn't two hundred feet wide, so no go.
But I ditched Comcast anyway and got Verizon instead. Verizon sucks too, but marginally less, and the FIOS technology is nice, at least, even if the provider isn't.
I cancelled my cable because of the overpricing and the disregard for customers. How come when we don't pay we lose service, but when we lose service they don't provide a refund? Anyway I don't miss the harassment of cable at all. My only concerns now are they find some way to take away Netflix and over the air broadcasting. Because they have shown us that when you can't compete by being better, compete by being worse.
So, they suck because they are like pretty much every successful company with moderately happy customers and an advertising budget?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
If everyone sucks then it's ok, right?
I don't get where this line of defense is going.
There is no need to defend against "They suck because they are like everyone else!"
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Comcast totally deserves to be up near the top - I was just sad because for a while, the race was shaping up to be "banks vs. telecoms", which would have been a way more hilarious semifinals to watch. (More specifically, I was really hoping the *final* would come down to Comcast vs. Time Warner: Whoever Wins, We Lose!)
Regardless of how serious this problem is, it does not affect consumers — not directly, not even the "first-level" indirectly — unlike Comcast's shoddy practices. Whey then did Monsanto not only appear on the list run by an organization called Consumerist, but also made it to the close second among the worst?
The only explanation is that Monsanto's competitors are behind the hysteria.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.