Comcast, the cable TV giant, has given its customers lots of reasons to hate the company. They’ve refused to embrace a la carte programming, charged people $2 to stop sending them junk mail, wrecked people’s credit reports, falsely advertised its Internet speed and generally abused the people who pay for its services. Comcast’s customer service problems are so acute that Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield started a blog called Comcast Must Die to compile all the gripes about the company from consumers (see the promo video above). But Comcast doesn’t really need any help generating bad press.
Last week, the company admitted that it paid people to take up all the seats at an FCC hearing examining complaints that Comcast was blocking file-sharing on its cable modem service. The reason? Comcast wanted to keep its critics out in the cold. The company apparently didn’t tell the seat-warmers to stay awake through the proceedings so as not to attract attention of reporters, who immediately suspected Comcast was up to no good.
It’s amazing that a company this bad could stay in business as long as it has. It’s either a testament to the power of monopolies or sad proof that Americans will endure any amount of corporate abuse to get their Law and Order fix every week. Garfield is hoping his new blog will help change corporate behavior, but I think there’s a better way to go than bitching online: just cancel. Pull the plug. Comcast will only die if people stop using it. Really, you can do it. The writers’ strike notwithstanding, network TV has never been better, and in these bad economic times, it has the added advantage of being free.
