Too Busy Counting Their Money to Care That You Hate Them

Think about the companies you love to hate: cable TV providers, cellphone carriers. It turns out that some of the most-hated companies out there don’t care that you hate them because they’re too busy going home to count all the money they’re making. From Bloomberg Businessweek:

For all the usual complaints — such as “I hate dealing with this company” or “These guys are the worst at customer service” — about the usual suspects from the ranks of cable and Internet providers, airlines, and banks, it turns out they just don’t have much incentive to care. The companies you hate are making plenty of money. In fact, the scorned tend to perform better than the companies you like…

Your contempt really, truly doesn’t matter to these companies, with no influence on the bottom line. If anything, it might hurt company profits to spend money making customers happy. For cable-TV providers, an industry whose customers famously have few options, happy users could be a waste of money and bad for shareholders. And so many of us angry subscribers are also the shareholders through, say, our retirement accounts.

It still pretty cathartic to get it all out, though. Now if only I could figure out a way to break away from Time Warner Cable’s hold on my neighborhood.

Photo: Consumerist

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