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shopping
customer service
ponderables
Mistakes
Home Depot has started a nationwide compact flourescent light bulb recycling program. "At each The Home Depot store, customers can simply bring in any expired, unbroken CFL bulbs, and give them to the store associate behind the returns desk." CFL bulbs contain mercury and can be damaging to the environment if thrown into regular landfills. [New York Times]
receipt checking controversy
Perhaps you recall the strange story of Bob Dougherty, a Home Depot customer who sued the retailer after being glued to a toilet seat at their Louisville, CO location. Mr. Dougherty contended (before the case was dismissed) that the incident gave him post-traumatic stress disorder and that he developed diabetes as a direct result of Home Depot's negligence. Now, nearly 4 years after Mr. Dougherty became affixed to the Home Depot toilet, a Mr. Haywood R. Rosales of St. Louis, MO has filed a similar lawsuit, claiming that Home Depot was negligent in allowing a "copycat" incident to happen to him.
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above and beyond
home improvement
customer service
shut up
executive email carpet bomb
This is Round 42 in our Worst Company in America contest, Home Depot vs Wellpoint!
Here's what readers said in previous rounds about why they hate these two companies...
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privacy
deals
This is Round 20 in our Worst Company in America contest, Wellpoint vs Charter Cable.
Wellpoint: is a health insurance company that's part of BlueCrossBlueShield. They don't believe anesthesia is necessary for colonoscopies. That pretty much encapsulates all you need to know about them.
Charter Cable: gets all-around poor marks for quality of service, customer service, and technical support. They're on the record as admitting to blatantly lying to their customers. One time they irrevocably deleted 14,000 customer's email accounts, including all their emails, even the ones that you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the secret message. Whoops.
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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.
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