25 Famous Companies That Make Customers Really Mad

Published: December 28, 2023 by Colman Andrews

Back in prehistoric times, if you had a bad experience with a company — poor service, shoddy merchandise, whatever — there wasn’t much you could do about it except to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and maybe write the offending enterprise a letter (which would probably not get a response) and/or tell your friends to avoid them.

How times have changed. Today, in addition to social media accounts, there are countless websites through which disappointed, or even downright furious, consumers can vent their rage with pungent prose and basement-level ratings. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot, Judy’s Book, PlanetRate…the list goes on.

Just how strongly people feel about their experiences with some companies, and which companies receive the most virulent negative comments, is the subject of “An Analysis of Critical Language in Brand Reviews,” published by the language tutoring site Preply.

The site analyzed all brands with a score of 4.5/5 or below on one major customer review site, Trustpilot, focusing only on those that had received at least 500 reviews in the previous 12 months. It then used a dataset called Emotion, through the French-American machine learning site Hugging Face, to analyze which of those brands elicited the most negative emotional language from its customers.

Based on customer comments, various emotions, including sadness, joy, love, anger, fear, and surprise, were assigned to each brand, with each emotion given a numerical score, from which Preply computed an anger quotient. The higher the quotient, the angrier customers appear to have been. Among the terms used most often in negative reviews were “fees,” “beware,” “lied,” “scam,” “fraud,” and “joke.”

The firms that made this list operate in many different arenas — retail, social media, travel, telecommunications, food and lodging, and more. Interestingly, two sites on which people can express their displeasure — Yelp and Facebook — are themselves on the list. (Barely half of people like the world’s most popular social platform.)