Some companies seem to appreciate their customers and attempt to make their lives better, but others seem to absolutely loathe their customers and actively try to make them miserable.
It might seem odd that many of these companies stay in business, but many of them have monopolies or near-monopolies in their industry or area of the world.
Redditor NerfGronk asked:
"What company clearly hates its own customers?"
Ticketmaster
"Ticketmaster. They clearly hate music fans, bands and music itself."
- hoodlumonprowl
"Ticketmaster’s business model is being the bad guy, and business is good."
- RandomUser1914
"I recently had to sell tickets. I was charged a fee to buy them, another fee to sell them, and they added fees for whoever bought them from me. Then, they held my payout of over $500 for several months (still waiting, actually)."
- Amazing_Finance1269
Hewlett-Packard
"HP, f*ck those printers. They put so much R&D $ in to making sure they never work."
- gratusin
"I literally bought a new printer that came with ink because it was cheaper than buying ink for my current printer. The stupid setup process required me to create an account and download not one, but TWO different apps in order before I was finally able to print. They're turning into data mining companies that masquerade as printer companies."
- J4ck4lope9
"Of all the things I've ever bought, I regret my HP printers the most. This last one was the last thing I will ever buy from them. I'd be shocked if they don't have a 'VP of Customer Screwing' on their payroll."
"If I was literally dying and they sold the only cure for what was killing me for 25 cents, I'd spit in their face and die."
- scottimusprimus
NBA
"The NBA. Oh, want to pay to watch games? OK, but you better not want to watch a team close to you because we black out those games since cable companies pay us to do so! Oh, you're using a VPN? F*ck you! We're trying to stop that, yes, we will literally attempt to stop you from seeing content you literally pay us for."
"Yo ho, b*tches."
- DravenPrime
"I was so mad when the finals came around this year. I had gotten league pass to watch the playoffs, because these are the only games that are remotely watchable from a competitive point of view. Being from Germany, I had to stay up until 3am, but given that this was a finals pairing I had been rooting for all postseason, I thought it'd be worth it. And then I find out the finals are only on ESPN+ and some f***in TV channel and not on the NBA's own streaming service. What kind of backwards, dumb crap is that? But since I was on vacation during that time, I thought to myself 'Meh, I'm gonna treat myself.' So I tried to get a monthly subscription for whatever channel the games were on. Turns out it is impossible to even register if you're not a US citizen. VPN doesn't help, because you need a US credit card to even sign up. Seriously, what the f?"
- debiler
Comcast
"Comcast is the obvious first thing that comes to mind."
"Been free of them a few years and they just tried to sell to me again today. When I was a customer and had issues (related to internet and xfinity mobile) the issue never got fixed and actually drew out the process of switching providers."
- panopt1con
"Not sure if anyone remembers 'The Consumerist' blog/zine/whatever, but Comcast was the only 3-time winner of the annual Golden Poo. In 2007, they beat out Blackwater after the Nisour Square massacre was made public."
- IvanNemoy
Purdue Pharma
"Purdue PHARMA. Pieces of horsesh*t."
- Acceptable-Damage
"Don’t disrespect horse sh*t like that"
- Additional-Share4492
"As a pharmacist (US), 100% agree. Drug reps/ads/marketing/putting a financial incentive on any prescribing or dispensing AT ALL should be illegal."
- humpbackwhale88
Intuit
"I'm like 8 hours deep into trying to fix a Quickbooks issue for someone with their phone support, so I'm going to go with Intuit."
- teeth_03
"Used to have to call Intuit pretty much regularly to help with QuickBooks stuff at my old job and I can confirm this. I was always holding for over 40 minutes and then the person I got could never help me resolve anything. There was a time I had a case that didn't get resolved for like a month, and I called to see if they had a resolution and they'd closed out my case number without notifying me."
- OhSoNotS01mportant
"Intuit owns TurboTax which lobbies the government to make taxes more confusing to force people to use their ~$200 service."
- DigitalUnderstanding
"Every April my motto is 'F*ck TurboTax'"
- Inevitable_Bag_6232
Niantic
"Niantic"
- Leeser
"Hello fellow Pokémon Go player."
- Moon_Dark_Wolf
"I came here to say this. Most games add more and more quality of life fixes as the game goes on, whereas Niantic constantly takes things away and makes the experience worse."
- bound52
"The players are the product, not the consumer (Niantic sells the user data in bulk)."
"The fact Niantic was so hell bent on revoking the QOL improvements from the pandemic that made it a much better GAME shows how little they care about making a good game."
- SlapHappyDude
US Airlines
"Literally every US airline. Midwest Express was a brief exception until Frontier murdered them and mutilated the corpse."
- pinniped1
"🎶 because we’re Delta airlines, and life is a f*cking nightmare🎶"
- FlabbyFishFlaps
"Now go take this meal voucher that doesn’t work. Go! Fetch!!"
- insultant_
"I never got how they could book more passengers than seats. They're literally selling what they don't have. Yeah they may have no shows so what they've paid."
- ADelightfulC*nt
Pacific Gas & Electric
"PG&E here in California. They literally killed all those elderly people in the Camp Fire, got a slap on the wrist for it, and have upped all our bills to cover the fines they had to pay."
- melissamarieeee
"There was also this one time when a segment of gas pipe they didn't get to fixing leveled a neighborhood."
- J_B_La_Mighty
"Dont forget about them blowing up part of San Bruno... And the north bay fires.. and"
- ImMacksDaddy
Nursing Homes
"Nursing Homes. They keep you alive just to make money off of you. My mother is in a living hell."
- Limp_Distribution
"Paramedic here, can confirm. Sorry about your Mom."
- RXakis
"My wife just retired from one as a nurse and would agree with you. We are more humane to our pets than our elderly."
- marklar_the_malign
Insurance Companies
"Literally any insurance companies. Home, auto, life, health. Doesn’t matter they all hate their customers"
- Awkward_Dad2023
"When your whole business model revolves around NOT giving your customers money..."
- NotAnotherBookworm
"Former auto. We’re trained weekly on techniques for how to get you off the phone sooner over actually doing the work to fix their problem. Steering customers back to your scripts they made up for every situation because the customer holds no power in the situation. Also here’s some “best practices” for faking empathy!!"
"The thing about insurance is they 100% can help with many things that they simply won’t help with."
- Petrcechmate
AirBNB
"I'm shocked that AirBnB isn't on this list yet. They absolutely don't care about their customers and have significantly made real estate worse. Their fees are almost as bad as Ticketmaster."
- tcrudisi
"Yeah f*ck Airbnb. For lots of reasons, but their contribution to the housing crisis is top of my list."
- gakka-san
"I was just thinking this too. Not to mention how much gentrification it’s causing."
- loidalien
"Yes, omg. Some of these properties are awful. Stayed in one in which furniture was all covered in dog hair, and yet they gave me no vacuum. Found someone's old Pizza Hut in the oven as well. Air bnb claimed it had been 'professionally cleaned.'"
- DistrictHot1695
Spectrum
"Spectrum aka Speculum"
- hairy_ass_truman
"One of the two companies I wanted to add to this list was Time Warner Cable. They are freaking awful."
"They also changed their name to Spectrum. Probably because they were so hated they needed to ditch the name. I refuse to use their new name and still refer to them as TWC."
- tcrudisi
"Pretty much any Internet provider. They have colluded for 20 years now to ensure that no competitive region exists. In my state, there is 0 overlap of services for network speeds above 100MBps. you can get ATT DSL everywhere, but 25 MBps down and 1-2 up is insufficient for a huge swath of the population. I support a wide range of users who work remote. If their base speeds aren't 50mbps down and 10 up, we won't even process a trouble ticket."
- dapopeah
"How my blood boils even reading the name. Spectrum is the worst company I've ever had the misfortune of giving money to. They have a monopoly on internet on my street, so I have no choice but to deal with them."
- ZombieOfun
Netflix
"Netflix. Good show. Naw, let’s cancel it and renew cheap crap and raise the monthly cost."
- DukeRyder
"Not true, CEO said they never cancelled a popular show /s"
- Ph455ki1
"I lament the joke that in the future there would be a thousand channels, yet nothing to watch, came true."
- Deleted User
How do companies that so clearly hate their customers stay in business?
@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social
