This is Round 18 in our Worst Company in America contest, Sears vs Citibank.
Sears stores are dirty and staffed by people who don’t give a damn. Getting a warranty repair is a nightmare. The company seems to be composed of different warring factions, with the customer as canon fodder.
Citibank: Like most retail banks excited by late 90′s deregulation, Citibank got hot and heavy into the subrpime mortgage industry and helped to precipitate the current economic crunch. They boost people’s credit card interest rates for no reason, sometimes have customer service completely impervious to logic, and otherwise behave like a typical gigantic bank, which is to say, horribly.
This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2008 series. The companies nominated for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. Keep track of all the goings on at consumerist.com/tag/worst-company-in-america/
STILL OPEN FOR VOTING: Wal-Mart vs TJMaxx, Mattel vs ATT, Capital One vs Video Professor, eBay/Paypal vs COX, Apple vs SallieMae, Diebold Vs Pfizer, MTV vs TransUnion
CompUSA vs DirecTV
Target vs Best Buy
Allstate vs Verizon,
DeBeers vs 1800 flowers, Starbucks vs United Airlines,
Exxon vs Crocs, Google Vs Sony, Ticketmaster vs Wachovia, Facebook vs The American Arbitration Association, Comcast vs Menu Foods
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Sears shows its irrelevance even in the voting count.
@Sarcasmic:
I work for Sears — and we are definitely are owned by Sears Holdings which is owned by the craphole formerly known as Kmart.
Unless you restructured our corporation last night.
Damn you, Consumerist (shakes fist!) 2 great evils pitted against one another.
Citibank: Sure, let’s sell you a mortgage you can’t afford, then package it for speculators. The US Government will bail us out when it all comes crashing down. We’re a bank, so we deserve huge fees for basic customer service, but when it comes to actual banking, we forgot how to do it right. Our bad. However, my recent customer service experience with them was totally painfree.
Sears: we’ll break your car and then bill you for a bunch of stuff that’s not broken, and that you don’t need or want. We won’t solve easy problems by phone, no, we have to send a technician for a minimum of $75, and you have to be home between 8 and 2. And, of course, we want you to buy this wildly overpriced extended warranty. My customer service experiences with Sears over the last few years have been horrible. So, I voted for Sears.
I voted Citibank because they had my student loans while I was an undergrad. In my senior year, they refused to process my in-school deferment and one of their reps told me that if I had continued taking out new Citibank loans they would have acted differently.
Despite my efforts to get them to acknowledge that I was in school, fulltime, and filed my paperwork by registered mail, they still refused to defer my payments and as such, I ran into default. It took a year of garnished wages before the DOE finally helped me move my loans over to Sallie Mae.
I hate Citibank and I know that I have cost them at least $100K in business by insuring that none of my friends or family ever open or use Citi accounts for anything. No one has a Sears, Home Depot, or other company card that is handled by this horrible company and I will continue to dissuade everyone from using them.
And no…there is nothing Citi can do short of erasing my loan debt to them completely, before I ever forgive them.
Congrats Citi…you made a lifelong enemy out of me and I will tell everyone I know what you did to me and I hope I can deny you $1 million or more in business by spreading the word.
Sub-par retail store vs. giant bank partially responsible for the US housing crisis and exacerbating the impending recession?
That’s not much of a contest.
As a sears employee, I can’t vote against sears. It’s a great company to work for. True there are some people who don’t care about their job, or the people involved, but if any of you had me as your cashier, I would change your mind.
Citibank, on the other hand, is an evil company. I am ashamed that we sold our card to them. Yes, it’s a Sears Card by Citibank. It’s citibank’s policies, and I’m tired of getting yelled at by customers over something I have no control over. On the Sears side, we fight for customers. I have been on the phone with many rude citibank people. Sears is trying to change as a company, so please try to give us another chance.
I cannot fathom why someone would vote for Sears here.
Citi makes more money off credit card fees than interest. Hence, it’s their duty to their stock holders to screw you over with small print, obfuscated copy, and traps.
Sears just makes me a little sad. Citi, on the other hand, pisses me off. No contest.
@engle22:
As a former Citi employee that had to deal with Sears cardholders I can assure you a large chunk of the credit issues start with Sears. The amount of dishonest salespeople was only overshadowed by the amount of salespeople that have no clue about the laws and oversight credit card issuers have and get mad because the phone agent won’t break the law for them.
Credit in general is evil, but I would much rather deal with a major bank than a subprime like hsbc.