Worst Company In America Round One: Comcast Vs. Time Warner Cable

Finishing off this week of blood-drenched business battles is a pairing between two of the largest — and two of the least-favorite — cable companies in the country. The fight is scheduled to begin anywhere between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m.

Two years ago, Comcast rolled through the WCIA brackets like a Comcast truck rolling by your house without stopping to make the service appointment. Since then, the crew from Kabletown has done little to show that it doesn’t deserve to win the Golden Poo trophy once more.

But it’s not just the near-constant complaints about Comcast from our readers that have them as an early front-runner this year. Plenty of trusted researchers and news outlets say Kabletown is not a town you want to visit.

Out of 143 companies named on the Temkin Trust Ratings, Comcast managed to load up the back of the pack, coming in both 140th and 141st place for its untrusted Internet and cable service, respectively.

Even a recent Fortune survey of most-admired businesses showed what executives at other corporations think of Comcast — not much. You would think that the suits would be impressed by Comcast’s brazen hiring away of the FCC Commissioner who only months earlier had championed the company’s acquisition of NBC Universal.

And in an MSN Money customer service poll, Comcast had one of the 10 worst ratings, and the second worst rating for a cable company.

Which brings us to Time Warner Cable, which actually had a worse rating on that MSN survey.

TWC might not be snatching up bottom-tier broadcasters like NBC or have the political pull to lure away high-placed regulators, but they do appear to have a corporate culture that is just fine/dandy with ineptitude.

How else do you explain screwing up the cable bills of at least 15,000 people in one fell swoop? Or randomly performing an unauthorized credit check on a customer — and dinging his credit score in the process? And then there was the TWC subscriber who needed four service appointments just to have a tech come out and create a situation that required police intervention.

It’s Friday afternoon. Almost time to punch out for the weekend. But before you do, punch one of these companies where it hurts — in the Worst Company In America polling place.
(Voting for this poll will close at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, March 18)

This is a post in our Worst Company In America 2012 series. The companies competing for this honor were chosen by you, the readers. See the entire WCIA 2012 bracket and schedule of match-ups HERE.

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