Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said last week that he and his team “don’t wake up everyday and go to work and say we want to be hated” and then suggested that everyone hates Comcast because other companies such as TV studios are constantly forcing it to raise its customers’ prices. However, one story flagged by Consumerist actually shows perfectly well why Comcast is one of America’s two most hated companies and it has nothing to do with higher cable prices.
According to an investigative report from Houston-based television station KPRC, a family in Houston had been paying Comcast $30 a month for seven straight years to maintain an alarm system that was never once working. You heard that correctly: Comcast collected bills from customers for seven straight years for a service that was offline the entire time after being improperly installed.
Comcast defended itself by employing the legal strategy first seen in the precedent-setting case of Rubber v. Glue: It blamed the customer. According to Comcast’s terms of service, security system customers are responsible for testing their system once a month and if they don’t do that, then Comcast can’t be blamed for not noticing that it’s offline, even after seven consecutive years of non-service. Comcast refused to give the family any kind of refund and instead offered them a measly $20 credit.
The family eventually called Comcast’s corporate office and, apparently wary of negative media attention, Comcast apologized to the family and refunded its entire seven years worth of payments. All the same, this story is just one of many, many examples of inept Comcast customer service that has absolutely nothing to do with nasty Hollywood studios forcing Comcast to jack up its prices against its will.
For a more detailed account, be sure to check out KPRC’s full investigative report by clicking the source link below.
