Comcast, McDonald's, Facebook Lead America’s Most Hated Companies List

Some companies are hated by consumers. Some are hated by their employees. Some are hated by due to the scandalous behavior of their leaders. Having a bad reputation is something most companies try to avoid, as it tends to affect the bottom line. Some, however, do not appear to care at all. Comcast clearly falls into this last category.

24/7 Wall St. has published it's list of America's most hated companies, based on a number of sources, including the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), and the Zogby Analytics poll. Comcast, the largest broadcast, cable TV and Internet service provider in the US, is the top of the heap, and by a wide margin.

"Comcast received the worst scores in cost to consumer, performance, billing, and reliability," wrote 24/7 Wall St, noting that the media giant was one of a very few companies who received negative reviews from more than half of the respondents, the other being Sprint, a telecommunications competitor.

Comcast customer satisfaction typically ranks among the lowest in the cable industry. The company routinely violates net neutrality practices and, given Comcast's negotiating power as a large ISP, it is suspected that they leverage paid-peering agreements to unfairly influence end-user connection speeds. Comcast owns companies that produce content (NBCUniversal) and companies the distribute content (as an ISP), raising antitrust concerns. All of this has earned Comcast the title of "The Worst Company in America" by The Consumerist, a consumer-affairs blog.

The other two companies topping the list of most-hated are Bank of America, whose 44 percent negative customer satisfaction rating is one of the worst among any company according to ACSI, and Mylan, a pharmaceutical company that hiked the price of its emergency allergic-reaction treatment EpiPen, classified as a life-saving drug, by almost 400 percent in 2016.

These two are immediately followed by McDonald's, traditionally hated in America for bad food, extremely poor customer service, and scrutiny over ex-CEO Ed Rensi's statements against Service Employees International Union's campaign to increase the national minimum wage to $15.

Right behind the reviled fast food chain is Wells Fargo Bank, whose managers and bosses created millions of fake credit accounts to inflate sales numbers, a blatantly fraudulent act for which the bank was fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Well's investment in the highly-controversial Dakota Access Pipeline did not help the company's reputation, either.

Facebook was an unexpected inclusion to the list. The company's controversial privacy policies and obsession with the mass collection of user personal data has been seen to damage its reputation. The social media giant has also been widely criticized for not preventing the spread of fake news ahead of the US presidential elections, and recently announced a series of new policies aimed at identifying and flagging fake news stories on its site.