These brands are so terrible that people have sworn intense vendettas against them. Seriously, each of these brands went above and beyond to terrorize these poor customers, trapping them in mind-numbingly frustrating encounters. Maybe bookmark this story, in order to avoid falling into these sorts of predatory places in the real world! Content has been edited for clarity.
Attack Of The Dastardly Delivery Driver
“It was Door Dash. Early on in lockdown, my wife and I ordered food from a local Mexican restaurant. All we got was two meals, chips and guacamole, and two Mexican cokes. The delivery guy shows up, drops the food on the front porch, and heads back to his car. I yell out, ‘Thank you!’ and he doesn’t even acknowledge me. He hops in his car and floors it in reverse, slams into our mailbox, and then takes off. There is absolutely no way he didn’t feel the impact. No way. As I’m telling my wife what happened, I notice one of our coke bottles is empty. That dude drank one of our drinks AND smashed our mailbox. We contact Door Dash and told them what happened. After a long back and forth, they eventually emailed us back saying they would give us a credit for the coke, but they couldn’t do anything about the mailbox because I had no other witnesses, and their driver denied doing it. It’s funny now because of how ridiculous the whole situation was, but I was beyond upset for like a week. In closing, Door Dash can get lost for all I care!
Door Dash refused to give us any more information on the driver without a subpoena, which makes perfect sense. My job wouldn’t give any information out on me if some random citizen asked for it. Too much trouble anyway. I didn’t even care about the money. I just wanted the dude to apologize. I also want to know why he drank our coke and put the bottle back. Like, if you stole a drink, wouldn’t you keep the empty bottle too?!”
Perilous Panties And Crabby Coworkers
“I worked at Victoria’s Secret for a while, and everyone who works there is the absolute worst. There is absolutely such a thing as toxic positivity, and if you ever need an example, Victoria’s Secret is the best one. I have learned to stay far, far away from that company. I was bullied by a coworker about how I apparently didn’t have any friends, and according to this coworker, ‘Your fiancé and pets do not count!’
That was especially difficult and painful to hear, since I have been going no-contact with my family with the lockdown in place No one else would protest. My coworkers merely laughed along! Despite having an in-depth conversation with the head manager about my mental health before I even started working there, no one ever took my depression seriously. Coworkers often wrote it off as, ‘She just feels bad!’ I felt so invalidated as a human being. When a coworker heard that I was ‘feeling bad’, they would tell my manager, who would give me forty-two dollars for food and gas. My manager would also give me a list of bible verses to ‘read and reflect upon.’
Working at Victoria’s Secret was fueling my depression, and I’m not a religious person at all, so being handed some cash and some empty words that meant nothing to me was beyond insulting. I needed to fix my schedule so I could attend some sort of therapy, but instead I was given a pity party. That forty-two dollars weren’t even enough for half of a therapy session! I really wish that I got out of there sooner than I did. My life and well-being are not worth folding all those panties just for entitled monsters to walk up and destroy the display, the folded stacks, the clean shelves, and everything that I had just spent my entire shift doing. It was degrading. I’m out now and I’m happy to share my retail horror stories, especially if it means some young person will be given a (somewhat) fair warning going into a job like that!”
Ferocious Furniture Henchman Strike
“Ashley Furniture is literally the absolute worst! I ordered two dressers and two bedside tables back in February. It was scheduled to be delivered in mid-March. Once I received my order, I opened up the boxes, only to find absolute trash. The furniture pieces were horribly water damaged and completely busted up. When I called them, it took a week to get anyone on the phone. I would call them three times a day and would sit on hold for forty-five minutes, only to have the call drop. I finally got ahold of them a week after the delivery date, and they had the guts to try and tell me they wouldn’t take the items back because I had to call within 72 hours of the delivery to cancel a delivered order. I told them I would give them my phone records to prove I had spent over two hours a day on hold, and they finally agreed to send me new furniture, in six weeks.
Three days before my furniture was supposed to come, they called and said the distributor was behind, and it would be another three weeks. I angrily agreed that I would wait. Three days before THAT delivery date, they did the same thing. Again, through gritted teeth, I said okay. That happened a third time, and I finally told them to cancel my order and come get their stuff. They told me it would be a month before they could come pick up the busted furniture. I offered to drop it off at their nearest showroom myself, and they said I couldn’t do that. I said you have three days before it moves from my garage to my backyard. After not showing up in three days, I moved their stuff to my backyard and covered it in a tarp. It was already destroyed, so I figured why not. So they showed up six weeks later (not four), and they brought replacement bedside tables, but no dressers. I asked them to load the busted stuff up first. They did and then asked where I wanted the bedside tables. I said I had cancelled that order, and they were not mine. The delivery guy tried to tell me he ‘had to’ leave them. In the meantime, the other delivery guy had looked at the furniture and tried to claim that the water damage came from the dressers being outside. So they called their office and Ashley’s corporate office. After that call, they tried to say they had to put the broken furniture back where they picked them up BECAUSE THEY WERE WATER DAMAGED. After arguing with him for thirty minutes and talking to someone at the Ashley corporation myself, I told him to get the heck off my property before I called the cops for trespassing. He left. I felt bad, since he was just the messenger, but it was my last resort.
I ended up having to dispute the charges with my bank to get my money back, then Ashley tried to recharge me for the furniture after that. I had to close my bank account just to get rid of them. Never again.”
There Never Was A Sister!
“Airbnb, unfortunately. I used to use it all the time to travel for work, pre-lockdown of course. The one time I stayed with a non ‘super host’, I had a super messed up experience that felt genuinely unsafe, and the company did nothing about it. There was no refund or even a temporary removal of the host profile. Let’s see how much of this I can remember: The host appeared to be a woman when I booked based on the name and profile picture. For context, I am also a woman. After making the booking, her ‘brother’ messaged to say that his sister was out of town, and that he was managing the bookings and staying at the condo. Slightly uncomfortable, but whatever. I should have cancelled at that point. When I arrived, he asked me not to tell Airbnb if I ran into a neighbor, just to them that I’m a friend. He also did not provide me a key, saying that he worked from home and would let me in and out. Fine, I’m pretty sure this is against policy, but it’s cheap and I’m there to work. I don’t need to go back and forth. He referred to his sister by a slightly different name than the Airbnb profile, which might have been a nickname, but either way I’m thoroughly annoyed and creeped out by this point. Unfortunately, I was completely exhausted from the eight-hour drive to get there. Oh, and all the carpeted floor was covered in plastic sheeting, to protect it I guess? I text my fiancé the address and the host’s name, so the police know where to look if I go missing.
I got up early and showered. I’m in the bathroom getting ready and hear a knock on the door. The host is there looking half asleep and asked me to ‘turn down the noise’. I’m confused, as I’m standing there silently putting on makeup and brushing my hair. I ask what he means, and he starts making a buzzing sound at me. A few seconds of this, and it dawns on me that he means the bathroom fan, which is a perfectly normal sounding fan. So I turn that off, he thanks me, and he goes back to bed. Half an hour later or so, I try to leave the building and the door was locked from the inside, as in I needed a key to get out. I start packing my stuff and planning my escape route, when the host wakes up and I tell him he needs to let me me out. He does and I get out of there immediately. When I get to my office, I looked up who owns the condo, and it was the person who hosted me, not anyone with a name similar to the ‘sister’.
I called Airbnb and report all of this, and they ‘opened an investigation’ and told me that they’ve started the process of refunding me. Great. I start getting messages from the host because they’ve contacted him. He’s making excuses, telling me that he would have given me a key, and other random statements. I told him I don’t care at this point, that I would not be back and that I was pursuing a refund. I ignore several more harassing messages from him. Over the course of two or three weeks, I called Airbnb every three days or so and never got anywhere with a refund. They told me that the host would actually have had to provide the refund and was declining to do so. I continued to contact their customer service, because I did not want for anyone else to deal with a similar situation, and I got the run-around every time. The profile was still active a month later, which is the last time I checked. I did also call the city and the condo board to report it.”
Bullied By An Internet Corporation
“Etsy is bullying my elderly parents, all because of a tiny mistake they made! My parents are semi-retired, but they can’t completely retire because of medical bills. Before the lockdown, they were running a small secondhand store, but as it has been the case for many people, they had to close down. My father used to be a tailor and knows how to sew well, so he started to make facemasks and selling them on Etsy.
This was going well for them considering the situation, but suddenly the store was shut down. There was no notice or warning of any kind. We thought my dad had pressed something and erased his store by accident, but we could still see some stuff, so it didn’t completely disappear. We contacted Etsy to see what’s going on, and they tell us that it was closed due to multiple copyright strikes. We then ask for more details, but they gave us none and sent us a wall of links to their policies and who knows what else. We keep pushing until they tell us that it was probably an account linked to their account. We then tell them there are no other accounts. It was hard enough to make one account, why would we be making more? We try to explain to them, but they again send us some canned response with a bunch of useless links and tell us to contact the companies that sent the strikes. We don’t even know what could be copyrighted in my parents’ store. It just facemasks, there are no logos, and it’s just materials you can buy at any fabric store.
It has been a nightmare dealing with their customer service. Like 99% of their emails are just useless jargon they send to everyone. My father gave up and is planning to try to sell again in person. I’m worried about my parents, since they are in their sixties, and I’m in another city going to school. It’s also sad because I like the idea of Etsy. It’s supposed to be a space where people share their skills and talents with others and make some money out of it. The sellers themselves are nice and very willing to work with you if you have any customization request, but the platform is horrendous. The people running this are ruining it.”
They’re Always Watching You
“Walmart. I finally stopped going after I went in last month and was treated like absolute garbage. It was never a surprise to me to be basically ignored, but this time was different. I grabbed some nail polish from the beauty area. My toddler wanted to hold it, so I let her and I went on about my shopping. I started looking for hair gel for my husband. Some lady come up to me and asked me, ‘Where did you get that nail polish?’
I told her where and asked if she could show me where the men’s hair gel was. She said, ‘Why, so you can steal that too?’
I look at her and ask her what she means. She tells me that items from the little closed off beauty section have to be paid for there. There was no cashier or other associate in there, and there is no sign saying that items have to be paid for there, nothing! How the heck should I have known? I tell her I’ll go right after I get the hair gel, and I’ll just pay for them both. She says no, I will go now or she will ‘confiscate the thing I was trying to steal’ and that I can’t bring other merchandise into the area and can’t pay anything else. After deducing that I have to do two transactions on my credit card for two items, I say forget it. I tell her to take the nail polish and I start to leave. On my way out, I’m approached by some weirdo in a rent-a-cop costume, asking me to show him what’s in my purse. If you think me and my 21-month-old have stolen something, you can call the actual cops! I asked for a manager, and the security dude told me I wasn’t entitled to see one. I’ve tried twice to contact corporate, and no one has responded to me, so I quit that place! I will never go there again. There was no way they had the right to actually detain me, so I got a bit more brazen and angry with the guy. It felt very satisfying.”
The Most Hateful Chicken
“Chick-fil-A. How cliché. However, there are a lot of reasons to despise them and never eat there. There are some reasons I find bigger and some I find smaller. The largest of course are those donations. They do so much shady business. Whereas some fast food establishments do a lot of good with their charities, like The David Thomas Foundation, for Wendy’s, the Ronald McDonald House charities, The Burger King McLamore Foundation, and Taco Bell Foundation, all focusing on children, bettering the community and education, Chick-fil-A has other efforts in mind. Chick-fil-A decided they were going to dedicate their money to keeping families apart by donating to charities that lobby against LGBTQ+ adoption. They donate to a ton of homophobic and transphobic ‘charities’ in general, including a lot of places that the nuns would have told me growing up are ‘terrorists in the heart of the USA.’ They have said they would try and do better, but the damage has already been done. They’ve funded a lot of stuff that makes your eyebrows raise that they’re pretty loud about. It’s not like McDonald’s CEO funding a politician because it’s good for McDonald’s bottom line. It’s Chick-fil-A funding people to go into politics because they’re gearing up for a mythical holy war. As a recovering Catholic school nerd kid, that terrifies me.
I’m both an adopted person and super gay, so anyone trying to rip that away from me makes it intensely personal. The good news is that Chick-fil-A is getting so much bad publicity for their efforts. The bad news is that they don’t keep their promise to stop donating, and they still continue to do so! I was raised in the foster system by Catholic nuns, but they were full of so much love and adoration. They promoted the idea of respecting other people, no matter who they were. Also, Chick-fil-A’s chicken tastes like gristle and fried sugar. If I wanted fried sugar, I could get something actually tasty, like a funnel cake or a beignet. Chicken shouldn’t taste strangely sweet, unless I’m trying out a fried chicken recipe in the comfort of my own home!”
The Predators Behind The Precious Birds
“Hear me out, but the mobile game company Rovio is so bizarre and spiteful. This is the company behind the Angry Birds mobile games. I remember playing the original game as a kid, so I wanted to get back into playing it. The closest thing I could find to the original was Angry Birds 2. With this newer game, you couldn’t play more than five times without losing your lives. You would then have to either wait over an hour for another life, or play real-world money. And don’t even get me started on how many ads will show up every two minutes! There are entire online forums dedicated to hating on these advertisements!
Judging by my experience, along with the reviews of others, if you start doing really well in the game but don’t spend any real world money, then you actually get banned. I leveled up for an entire year without spending any money. Then one day, I was banned just as I was reaching the upper ranks in various tournaments. The customer support person I talked to simply gave me a list of bannable offenses, none of which I had actually committed! The person I emailed said the ban was legitimate, but due to legal reasons, they could not tell me what exactly I had done. Apparently, quite a number of people experienced this while playing the game. Rovio knows exactly what it is doing. The funny thing was that after this happened, it was sort of a relief for me. I didn’t have to think about Angry Birds 2 any longer! But yeah, that game is weirdly predatory, steer clear of it!”
Back And Forth Broke His Brain
“So my biggest tech brand I cannot stand is Apple. I had an iPhone for years and years. From the ages of seventeen to twenty-four, I had a single iPhone that worked perfectly fine. All of a sudden, my iPhone died out of nowhere. I would charge the battery until it was totally full, but then it would immediately switch to zero percent and shut down. I never dropped it, and it never got wet, so why was this happening?! It was older but if the issue were just age, you’d think it would gradually get worse. I also tried using an iPad for drawing, but it was so expensive and clunky, so it never clicked with me. I tried to update to one of the new ones, but it had so many problems with it that appeared within the week! I returned to my local Apple Store, asking for a refund, but they wouldn’t let me return it. It took FOUR iPads this year being mailed back and forth from Apple to me and back, because there were so many issues with the devices! Apps would constantly cash, the battery wouldn’t hold a charge, and trying to draw on it was such a nightmare. This year, I switched to a Samsung Galaxy, and I absolutely love it. Apple is so far behind in terms of their technology, and it becomes really apparent once you try out a Samsung device.
I also cannot stand fast fashion, like the sort of clothing you would find at H&M or Forever 21.A dryer fire happened in my studio apartment a few years ago, and half of my clothing was burned to a crisp. unfortunately, I only had the budget for cheap, fast fashion. But I refuse to shop at H&M anymore. The fact that they put on this whole show about recycling clothing, but there’s not much they actually do, and they are still creating this massive problem. I’m so done with them.
Finally, I absolutely hate Photoshop. I need it for work, but their services recently went subscription-only. Then the company started destroying everyone’s paid-for software, the last one released before the subscription was put into place. They forced everyone to update to the subscription, which had virtually no major changes to the software itself! I’ll just pirate it forever, especially when the pirated versions are more stable than the actual versions. The company refuses to fix common bugs that have made the program unusable for years now!”
Enjoy This Aggressive Robot Voice Instead!
“I have my own very personal reasons for hating Comcast. As soon as the lockdown started, around March, my internet kept disconnecting. For any sort of streaming, it just wouldn’t work anymore. This is a huge problem when I’m stuck at home and need the internet for work and entertainment, since I can’t go outside and everything in America was shut down. I go through the effort of checking every piece of equipment I have and narrow the problem down to the cable that connects to my house from outside. I’m a computer engineer, so I was 100% certain about this. So after doing all the work to find the problem, I call Comcast for a repair, since it’s not something I can fix myself. They refused to fix it because they ‘cared about the safety of their employees.’ This problem was entirely caused by a cable outside my house, so no one would even have to knock on my door! They would have zero chance of contracting disease because they wouldn’t even need to see me in order to fix it! Since my internet wasn’t fully out, they still said they were obliged to fix it. I was stuck with basically no internet for three months until these losers finally agreed to fix it! When an employee finally came out to my house to fix it, it took him ten minutes, and then he left! Comcast messed me up for months because they were panicked I would magically give their employees disease, despite never actually speaking to them!
Unfortunately, I don’t have any other choice for internet. So I’m perpetually stuck with this annoying and overpriced company, which doesn’t actually care about their customers. I had to call them twenty times to fix this issue, and every single time I would get stuck on the line with an automatic voice for ten minutes, until the voice decided to reset my modem and automatically hang up Only then, after calling for a second time and sitting through another ten minutes with the robot voice, I could finally speak to an actual human being. Comcast absolutely has the worst customer service on the planet!”
Stealing Your Credit Card When No One Is Looking
“Fabletics. I was reminded of this headache yesterday. I subscribed to them and got some workout sets, but their business model is a subscription, so on the first of the month, you go in to your account and skip if you don’t want to be charged for that month. If you don’t skip, they will charge you $50 and not send anything unless you go in and pick an outfit. You’ll be left with a $50 credit in your account until you want to buy something. So no matter what you do, you are required to complete a task every month whether you purchase or not. But wait, it gets better! If you have a ‘credit’ in your account and decide to purchase something later, then you put items that are marked down into your cart, when you click on use credit, your cart resets and charges you full price. You have to contact customer service to fix this, and if you wait too long to check out or make any changes to it, your cart will keep resetting to full price!
And there’s more! I kept getting charged, so I set a calendar alert and started taking a screenshot of my skips. So I go in and skip, take my screenshot, and later in the month notice that my main credit card has been charged $50. Wait a second, I skipped! Wait a second, that credit card is not stored in my account. Yep, they charged me after skipping, and charged a card that I had used for a previous purchase, not the one that they had an agreement for. I slapped a chargeback on them, which instantly gave my money back and cancelled the transaction. This year they offered veterans a discount for Veterans Day, but it was only for men. Then tried to backpedal and blame it on their customer service agents when they got called out. Just a terrible company all around. Also, there’s my size, which was really common, was also not in stock most of the time. They also create this artificial scarcity to get people to log in immediately on the first of the month, so they don’t miss out on their size, when they could just stock more! They are predatory and scammy, and I will never buy from them again.”