The Companies You Hate

"To me, the ultimate is Microsoft (MSFT Quote). Windows is the worst product ever designed, an unfinished, untested piece of software with, on top of that, a high cost. Microsoft, the icon of the last 25 years, has set the tone of [the] 'Customer can suffer and we do not care!'"
-- Jacques Palpacuer

"To me, the most glaring example of companies cutting costs, at the expense of customers' TIME (capitalized because I mean more than a few minutes) is after-the-purchase support. Call Dell (DELL Quote) -- although I have heard rumors that the outcry about this has caused the company to start to revise its current policies -- or Hewlett-Packard (HPQ Quote), or a myriad of other tech companies. It even happened to me yesterday when I called American Express (AXP Quote). I wind up speaking to a customer support rep that 99% of the time is in India or some other Third World nation. Just the time wasted and aggravation level of dealing with reps that can speak English but that really don't UNDERSTAND what you are saying, makes one want to scream."
-- Dr. Steve H. Cohen

"I get so frustrated now with all this time wasting that I have been known to just abandon my $350 worth of goods in a cart at the cashier's lane of a Home Depot (HD Quote), where three kids are trying to serve the Saturday morning crowd of 300 in a 140,000 square-foot shop."
-- Russell Curry

"I took a prescription for glasses to the Wal-Mart (WMT Quote) optical center and when the glasses came in, the prescription was wrong. So I sent them back and waited another week for them. New glasses, wore them home, had a terrific headache, took them back, wrong prescription AGAIN. I'm not normally a patient man, but I was getting a good price on these glasses, so I let them do them one more time. They came in, and the prescription was still wrong. I gave up and asked for my money back, took the prescription to Pearle Vision."
-- William Smith