This is Round 19 in our Worst Company in America contest, Dell vs Home Depot.
Dell: Formerly the king of direct to customer PC sales, Dell now has a well-deserved reputation for abysmal bad customer service ever since they outsourced their Home and Home Office customer service departments (secret trick: always order from Small Business, it’s US based and the reps and techs still know what they’re doing). Horror stories of botched warranty repairs abound. Just Google “Dell Hell” and you’ll know what the company is so reviled.
Home Depot: Got rid of all the nice retired electricians and plumbers on its floor staff and replaced them with surly low-paid workers who didn’t know a brick from a brace, and didn’t care. They let their in-home installation business line be contracted out to incompetent unprofessional local contractors and then didn’t hold those teams accountable when egregious mistakes were made and seemed to make it a policy to, at the store level, ignore customers who complained. Perhaps because these were the same guys whose business Home Depot was trying to attract by focusing on the lucrative contracting and construction industries.
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: Sears vs Citibank, 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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Worst Company In America Round 1: Best Buy Vs. Walmart
Here’s a similar secret (to buying from Small Business) for Dish Network customers: when you need customer service SELECT TECH SUPPORT because, unlike customer service which has been outsourced to someplace where English is second language, Tech Support is answered in the United States.
If Dell doesn’t “win” this one they should be put in a special loser’s bracket. This was a case of two “number 1″ seeds meeting in the first round. This was just bad bracketology. Dell is definitely in the top ten worst companies.
Don’t shop at Home Depot but do have Dell computers at work and they suck.
Dell it is.
wow, i click this right after reading a story about the Pube laptop….
HOME DESPOT is the winner here. Yes I mispelled it deliberately. I would not let one of their phony ‘contractors’ into my house to save my life.
Dell might have crappy customer service, but at least they make a decent machine. Not as good as a Mac, but Apple has problems of their own I won’t go into.
I work in advertising, so to me this problem is not limited to just Home Depot. It’s American big business in general. American corporations reduce customers to sheer numbers. The individual consumer is meaningless. Stock price is all that counts
Rather than spend a God damned dime on customer relations, companies will instead spend billions on asinine TV and print ads touting how wonderful they are and how they LOVE their freespirited customers.
All their ads use the same basic formula: HAPPY HAPPY CHEERFUL INTELILGENT employees who in turn are EAGER top help and serve HAPPY HAPPY CHEERFUL customers.
If you, the individual, don’t have the same HAPPY HAPPY experience in real life, then YOU are the problem. Probably because you hate America. It certainly couldn’t be the fault of our company. Heaven forbid.
Rather than build a company’s reputation on solid customer care, quality and service, most companies find it more economical and profitable to create the ILLUSION of customer care, quality and service through expensive TV ads.
This is true of Home Depot, Best Buy, McDonalds, Verizon, Blue Shield, etc.
In fact the Bush administration is a glowing example of a presidential administration using a corporate playbook. Why spend billions rebuilding New Orleans when you can have a well staged PHOTO OP in front of a BIG BANNER that says WE CARE or some other meaningless slogan. TV propaganda in lieu of real solutions.
I cannot vote for Dell considering it is the only computer company remaining that still offers Windows XP for those of us who would rather sell our first born than use Vista.
I am probably going to buy a Dell laptop now just so I can get it with XP, as I have yet to find a set of instructions to remove Vista that is not riddled with “proceed at your own risk” cautions about one thing or another.
Dell is the worst when it comes to customer service. They stopped providing Resource CDs opting instead to partition hard drives to store the reinstall backup software. I almost returned my computer when I discovered about 20GBs missing and found out why. At the time their website did not disclose their partition practice in an obvious location. My computer only had 130GBs to start with. If I had known Dell was going to snatch 20GBs for its own purposes I would have purchased more. 20GBs was a lot to lose.
I also almost returned my last Dell computer when I discovered it didn’t come with a printer serial port–also not disclosed on their site. I was told new printers use USB connection and I should buy a new printer. (This was back in 2005 when USB printers had just become the norm). I have an old but perfectly functioning laser printer that uses a serial connection and I had no intention on spending over $200 to replace it.
A couple of customer service managers later, they agreed to send me a $90 multi-port station (for free) so I could connect my printer. Three years later, I am still using my perfectly functioning old printer that is connected to my much appreciated port station.
First of all, the pubes thing! Secondly, the last Dell I bought was shipped with a broken keyboard. As soon as the excitement of a new computer that supposedly worked right out of the box died, I vowed this would be the last Dell I ever owned. Well, that’s being a bit harsh. What sealed the deal for me was when I attempted to call Dell about the broken keyboard the fourth time and was eventually transfered to someone on the shipping dock who of course had no idea why they were getting my call.
I’ve never had much of a problem with my Dells… There’s 4 of them down here. 3 Optiplex’s and 1 Precision. All work fine, save one optiplex which had bad RAM (Easily fixed). I never need to call Dell for customer service. Whoever came up with the idea for the LED’s on the back of the mother board, by the way: GENIUS.
As for Home Depot…
@Lambasted:
Not quite sure about the whole first born thing but I’ll second that.
wanna hear more good news about home depot? out here in the pacific northwest home depot is using general contractors who refuse to hire union workers. specifically, carpenters. guess lower wages are the reasoning behind the former ceo’s 300 million dollar golden parachute, right? don’t know about you but i no longer shop home depot, period.
I work weekends at HD, where we’re forced to use 19th century (or so they seem) Dell computers. Both suck, but I voted HD because our equipment is always broken, we carry far more products than we can reasonably fit on the shelves, and we’re severly understaffed. Today, I covered 6 departments.
I have worked for the Home Depot for a number of years. I voted for the Home Depot, and I hate Dell. HD stores are completely understaffed, and it might get worse. This is a bottom line issue for corporate. I once inquired at a district meeting as to the problem of having only 5 associates covering an entire store during the hours of 6-9 am. The response from district leadership was to respond to my question with a question “How many customers do you help between the hours of 6-9 am?”. You early morning shoppers are NOT important to the business.
TRUE: Stores replaced master electricians/plumbers/generally useful retired workers with underpaid kids who don’t give a frack if you leave unhappy.
TRUE: Since the replacement of Bob Nardelli, stores have been required to rehire one experienced plumber and one experienced electrician per store. My store fulfilled this requirement with 2 kids in their late 20′s who studied in each trade, but never made master.
But my biggest problem with the Home Depot is their hypocritical stance about going ‘green’. Over last weekend we handed out earth bags and pamphlets about how to save the earth. Tomorrow we are celebrating earth day.
TRUE: Today we threw away a cart load of brand new sockets, socket extensions, and other brand spanking new hand tools that were on clearance that wouldn’t sell. Because it is better to put them into a landfill than donate them or sell them on the cheap. This happens EVERY DAY. Light fixtures, ladders, tile, wire, virtually anything in the store, if it doesn’t sell, we are forced to put it into a dump rather than donate/sell at a significant loss.
Today a woman asked me to get a yellow tagged discounted fountain down for her. It was marked ~$50. When she got to the register, it rang up .01. ONE PENNY. The cashier asked me what to do, and if I had followed company policy, I would have denied her the fountain she wanted, taken it and put it in the trash. That was the ‘Right’ thing to do, according to THD. I gave a generic sku and charged the woman $20. It was originally $299.
But honestly, many of the complaints I am reading here are just bad luck with bad people, possibly with bad moods. I am not without sin. On a day to day basis, I am either the best associate you can encounter, or the biggest prick you have ever met. I will cut you deals that you won’t believe, or I will make you feel stupid and inferior if you rub me the wrong way. We are instructed to discount merchandise if customers mention they want to look elsewhere. I was commanded to do this by a “Senior Merchandising Executive” for the company. If we are out of a product, and you are told you can come back and get it in X number of days, that associate is not doing his job. We are supposed to offer you the next best product for the same price you wanted to pay. If you mention you want to go to Lowes/other local competitor to shop around, we are instructed to discount merchandise, even if it is only comparable, not exactly the same.
FRAK THD and every money grubbing, faceless multinational earth-raping corporation. FRAK Capitalism.
Dell should go through to the next round. Home Depot should have gone against Monster Cable.
Comment on Round 19: Dell vs Home Depot You think Home Depot is bad??? Lowe’s has them beat…..we initially
purchased kitchen cabinets on 4/7/08 and they were delivered
4/9/08…it is NOW 5/8/08 and guess what…we are still trying to get
the correct cabinets and sizes to do the kitchen…oh yea…by the
way…we tore out all of the old cabinets and went 3 days without
water due to their screw ups…..I DO have a temp sink base now…
but they keep apologizing….how nice…..I have such a HUGE file on
this company it is ridiculous….
so off to Lowe’s we go tomorrow to try to get our money back and go
somewhere else who maybe gives a crap about their customer
satisfaction….maybe I will go to Home Depot!!!!