Have to start out with a nomination for UHaul.

There's been lots of comments that had they been nominated, they'd have won hands down last year. Lets see if it happens!

Monsanto- slowly killing you from the inside out without your knowlege.

UHaul! After seeing the comments that recent post about them inspired, they're practically a shoo-in.

oops, sorry Cleigh -- that wasn't showing up yet when I commented.

APR? National Public Radio

I nominate Verizon as this was their A+ year in math.

woops.. never mind..

woops.. Never Mind.

Angry -- I think Marketplace is a syndicated show produced by American Public Radio (although most of us hear it on NPR).

For the next site redesign.. how about adding a delete button on the comments? Funny how I was listening to Marketplace on a podcast as I wrote that last comment...

No, American Public Media. NPR stations just buy it off of APM. BTW, those aren't my nominations. I don't have any bad experiences with companies this past year. Well, gas station attendents at Meijer stole my credit card number and were filling up friends's cars. But they got busted, and I got my money back....

Definitely put the US government back on the list like last year. I would normally nominate a cellular provider, but it's the whole cellular industry put together that's horrible, not just one company... it's like a clusterf*** voltron.

Comcast!

While we're doing this, we should also consider "Best Companies in America"

Comcast- how many work days do you think have been lost while people wait for their techs that never show up? I personally have 3. (I gave up after that and they never did show) How many people have canceled their account only to get billed? (I have) I could go on. BTW, I have DirecTV now which I highly recommend.

does the u.s. government count? i've seen my shareholder value plummet for years...

Sony... for their stupid*** rootkit nonsense and general egregious behavior over the last year or so.

Can I nominate IDT, or are they not national enough?

United Airlines - for their recent decision to limit airline miles, as well as for their bad customer service and often uncomfortable flying experience.

1.) Dollar/Thrifty Rental Car Group - after getting my LOCKED rental car stolen from a subway station, they treated me like a criminal, and were not even going to give me the same rate I had originally booked on the first car!!

2.) Runner-up Mastercard, for trying to dick me around on reimbursement of "loss of use fees" charged to me by Dollar/Thrifty from above incident, despite the fact that it's clearly outlined in the terms and conditions. Had to give them a little pep talk about how interested my state attorney general would be to hear about the story, to get them to finally pay the approximately four hundred bucks. Greedy bastards!

Between these two incidents, I would estimate 2 dozen phone calls and multiple faxes.

UHaul, most definitely. I had a run in with them too.

Verizon, for crippling their phones in order to plug "revenue leaks." If I take a picture on equipment I own, I should be able to transfer to my own PC or another device over bluetooth the way the phone was designed instead of having to send it to myself over their "network" and get dinged an MMS charge or unit.

I vote for AT&T due to the whole NSA thing. Not to mention the fact that they absorbed two other companies guilty of the same crime.

Walamrt?

Porn pedeling, false advertising, Nazi lovers....

I nominate Best Buy. The reasons are numerous, from a consumer point-of-view as well as from the employee point-of-view. Topping the list is:

- not honoring warranties
- lying to customers
- threatening to call the police when people complain

The site http://bestbuysux.org/ has documentation as far as the eye can see.

Any company that has smily, happy "people" clipart needs to get an automatic evil bonus. In recent years I've noticed close correlations with happy smily webpages and shitty service.

Also just to avoid derailing, I haven't had any bad service (mainly since we now avoid dealing with megacorps and use local services where possible). But I have to give bad marks to the energy company TXU. Though compared to what I've heard about ConEd I probably don't have much of a leg to stand on.

Home Depot for Bob Nardelli's golden parachute. The shareholders and employees have a right to be pissed.

Hmm, I nominate Cingular for teaching the American generation proprietary math.

I would really want to nominate comcast though... bastards.

Sam writes:

"Broadway Video. Why? Ask the Thomas Hawk and the rest of the internet..."

Altria, for making billions off of a product that kills people. Honestly, isn't that a little worse than being left waiting for the Comcast guy? (which I've done more than once...)

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for killing its employees and making every commute a gamble against smoky stations, broken escalators, and inexplicable outages

Here's a link to a story on endgadget that mentions why Verizon cripples Bluetooth and the entire revenue leak business.

i nominate micro$oft

Can we get Consumerist to provide us with a "count" of the 10 companies with the most posts on this site in the last year. It might make it a little more sporting. Then again if you count Nazi "T" shirt posts, WalMart would probably win it hands down.

Sony. They've been in the news a lot this year about all the stupid stunts they've pulled.

GP writes:

"Verizon -- Besides being bad at math (.02 cents vs. .02 dollars), its
customer service continues to rankle, dissemble, and to be generally
unhelpful. Specifically, their training is inconsistent for such a
large company, and when promised one thing by one rep, another will
claim that the other had no permission or authority to do so.

Time Warner Cable (NYC) -- Making and breaking service appointments
according to their own logic.

Aetna Health Insurance -- disallowing medication (non-generic,
without generic equivalent) specifically prescribed by a doctor,
claiming that they were under no obligation to cover medicine just
because a health care professional deemed it best for the patient.

Halliburton/KBR -- Same reason it won last year, only a year later.

Any ISP that is seeking to charge at both ends of the pipeline (i.e.,
opposed to the net neutrality law).

IDT -- for all the reasons you at Consumerist have listed.

Most airlines -- Passengers may have become mean to the front line
airline company reps. But I say that's in response to the airline
companies now treating passengers like they get in the way of them
doing business.

That's all for now."

UPS because, in addition to the other times things have shown up broken and late, I am currently waiting for a pair of glasses that were mistakenly delivered to the wrong address SIX miles from my house last Wednesday and they have provided me very little information, most of which has turned out to be untrue (deliver by Friday, deliver by Monday, deliver by Wednesday morning, etc.)

If there ever is a Best Company, I nominate Costco because of the reaming that they have been giving UPS over this.

Ooh, ooh, I have one: News Corporation, AKA Rupert Murdoch and All He Stands For.

If we make screenings of "Outfoxed" mandatory for all voters, I bet it wins.

Ooo, I missed you on Marketplace! I love that show.

The worst companies I've personally dealt with this past year are Cingular, Aetna, Sony, and Comcast. Funny, I don't seem to be the only one!

Can we nominate the cable industry as one? (Here's why)

Otherwise then my vote is Comcast, because they are Comcastic.

Comcast- not only for the sleeping technician caught on camera, or making customers wait on appointments, or raising their prices exorbitantly, but for also having a technician who raped and strangled two women in Chicago while on service calls, thus making me scared (whether rationally or not) of ever having a service technician in my apartment again.

I second Walmart, Altria and Monsanto.

And I'll add Clear Channel for, you know, censoring and all that.

Samantha writes:

"I Had a wickedly bad experience with uhaul about 7 years ago. My marriage has ended & I needed a change of scenery. I made a reservation on the phone to rent a truck. ON the day of the move, it took me hours and hours of waiting to FINALLY get some crappy little truck. I packed all my worldy possessions and headed out of the bay area to my new home in Nevada ALONE. and this was before I had a cell phone *joy*

bout 5 hours later, on highway 88 in california, about 15 minutes out of the last town, the entire truck just died. I was out in the middle of the Sierra Nevada's Mountains in May, and I was completed stranded. Lucky for Me, it was a sunday and it only took an HOUR for the CHP to find me and call uhaul. It took 6 hours for Uhaul to dispatch a tow truck to tow me to the nearest town....(reminder, divorced female single female, alone, I had no food, no water, and all my crap in the truck, oh and I was also broke and it was sunday)

7 hours after my truck died, This AMAZING Tow Truck Driver (aka My Knight in Shining Armor) appeared. He drove me nearly 100 miles to my home. I swear if he weren't married I would've married this man on the spot! If it weren't for him, I don't know what I would've done.

After about a week of the Uhaul being at my new apartment, they finally had it towed away. When they arrived, I had spoken to the mechanic before it was towed, we peered under the hood....battery acid all over the place. They FAILED to secure the battery and the entire way up there, the belts were rubbing thru the the battery casing.....

Of course, they then turned around and blamed me for the truck breaking down.

*sigh* They even sent me to collections to make me pay for the late rental and damage.

To this day I can not go on long trips without having an anxiety attack. Just remembering uhaul stranding me sends shivers up my spine.

Years later when I moved back to CA, I rented from budget and I had a caravan of friends help me back over that mountain. I will NEVER RENT FROM uhaul... they are just too damn evil.

Don't use my email on the site... it's been years and years and years since this happened. Not much good can come of this, but I have
learned and I won't use them... :) This letter is just to back up my vote for them getting the shiny turd.

They really don't deserve shiny golden turd... but if that's all you guys have I guess it's better then a bag full of the real thing... right?"

I vote, collectively, for the major record labels that constitute the RIAA. Ruining thousands of people's lives to protect their already dead and buried business model is just plain evil.

The Uinted Staes Postal Service. It has gotten to the pint with me and my neighbors that we are moderately happy if we get our mail. In this past year they have:

• Mis delivered my mail to a similar address 1 mile away at least 30 times after being told countless times about the mistake
• Left packages partly put in our box allowing them to get drenched in the rain on about six occasions
• Lost at least (3) Bill's that we were aware of resulting in (2) late fees from credit cards.
• On many occasions failed to open my nearest branch on time, meaning there is a crowd waiting to get in at 8:15 ready for blood.
• On December 15th mailing (6) boxes and watch the line behind me swell as the speed challenged clerk walked each package slowly to the back to apparently hand load it as people were looking at me like I was the asshat. Apparently in HOU the postal clerks all come pre-medicated.
• Being too lazy to deliver packages to our porch and instead leave notes directing us to pick them up at the local branch, the one that consistently opens 15 minutes late.
• Charging for tracking that is completely useless
• Installing a self service 24/7 machine but locking the opening for any package beyond an envelope
• Forgetting that they work for us.

Any insurance company, preferably auto insurance. I bought a new car right around the time of my policy expiration, got a better deal, and left Progressive. There was no pro-rated premium refund because I was ending it literally within days of the expiration, so no problem, right? They sent me a bill for $45, the early termination fee. I threw it in the fucking trash. Send it to a collection agency, I don't care. Close second is GE Money Bank which, like most if not all credit card companies, cannot competently process an online payment and expects people to pay $10, on top of their payment, to do so by phone. Fuck GE Money Bank in its conglomerate ass.

I nominate Home Depot for their screwing over of people with unreliable subcontractors.

That Would be United STATES Postal Service...god I'm a moron, and they still suck.

Hands down, the Federal government, and specifically the do-nothing Congress and the "stay the course" executive branch, a combination that refuses to do the will of the people and is systematically dismantling our ability to govern ourselves.

All corporate evils are enabled by corrupted government.

AT&T/Cingular/SBC
Can anyone spell UNCHECKED GROWTH which inevitably will lead to a scary monopoly?