All companies tell us that we are special and they’d do anything for us. Wal-Mart promises low prices and bountiful opportunities for careers. Carnival Cruise Lines offers seafaring adventures for the family at low prices. At&t promises countrywide coverage and superior service.

  What these prestigious companies have in common is not so much great customer service and keeping promises, but they ended up on the bracket for the Consumerists Worst Company in America award. Along with Ticketmaster and American Airlines, these companies were compared and moved up the ranks of the companies that love to rub us the wrong way. In the end, four companies had to compete for the much unsought Golden Poo. The final four were Bank of America, Electronic Arts, Ticketmaster, and Comcast.

  Ticketmaster has a history of poor customer service, but another nail in their semi-finalist coffin is the fact that they still want to charge interest and a processing fee. Issues with the website charging for extra tickets and failure to notify customers of cancelled shows are just unacceptable. But despite these problems, they did not take the prize.

  Comcast was a contender last year and bring the same mistakes to this year’s contest. Shoddy customer support is the obvious problem. Billing issues can add hundreds of dollars to a customer’s already high bill. HBO and other premium channels are often dropped or not honored on Comcast’s plan. Overall, they do a worse job than other companies, but that wasn’t enough to get them past the semi-finals.

  If you want to keep your money safe, keep it in a bank. If you want to fight a bank to use basic services, use Bank of America. Of course their customer service is bad, that’s the point of the award, but this finalist takes it to a new level. Throwing fees around and holding checks is something only a bank can do, and BoA does it wonderfully. Huge fees for overdrafts and account management fees make you wonder if you’re really storing money in the bank or just giving it to them. For a company that was bailed out with our money, they sure aren’t treating us very well.

  In the end, it came to no one’s surprise, except maybe to the winner, who would take home the Golden Poo. Electronic Arts won last year, and they won it again. If you don’t know how an entertainment provider could trump a bank in a contest of hate, don’t worry, they still aren’t completely sure either. They think they won because of homosexual romance options in their roleplaying games. The main focus in this contest is customer service. Create a good or provide a service for the consumer, support the consumer if issues arise, support the service you provide. EA failed in these completely. If you like FIFA or Madden, you’ll know that a new game appears every year. Suppose you liked Madden 2012 more than Madden 2013, I hope you like playing by yourself, because the online servers for last year’s game are going down. One of this year’s biggest releases was SimCity 5. It would be online all the time and could only be played online. Players who paid $60.00 for this game were unable to play because EA’s servers couldn’t handle the amount of people who wanted to play. Customers sat with a product that they could not use, because EA did not foresee that people would want to play it.

  To win the Golden Poo once should be a wakeup call for any company. Winning twice in a row should be a neon sign telling you to stop treating your customers like money-hemorrhaging homophobes.