The 15 Most Hated Companies in America

We all, without a doubt, have an ongoing list of companies that we dislike for a myriad of reasons ranging from poor customer service to poor quality of product.

Recently, 24/7 Wall St. has examined these issues with corporations to create a list of the 15 most hated companies in America. The list was created based on five criteria: employee impressions, return to shareholders, customer satisfaction numbers and reputation figures, brand valuation changes and lastly, views of taxpayers, Congress, and the Administration of these companies. 24/7 Wall St. analyzed hundreds of companies and produced the top 15 most hated corporations.

Surprisingly, some of the companies you would expect to see due to recent news or established poor reputations did not make the list such as Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Comcast and Wal-Mart.

Here are just a few of the companies that made the Top 15:


1. AIG: AIG is the most hated company in America; the prominent reason being taxpayers extreme dislike for the firm for receiving $180 billion in government aid. Additionally, employee morale is incredibly low due to the company firing a large amount of employees and operates to turn around its operations. In the last two years, AIG lost over 99% of its value, wiping out the firm's equity investors.

4. Hertz: Hertz, the largest car rental company in the US, has been suffering from financial problems that has resulted in massive layoffs. The company was also placed on the Audit Integrity list of American companies most likely to go bankrupt. The company also makes the Glassdoor list of "worst companies to work for" and Vanno gives Hertz low ratings in both customer and employee satisfaction.

8. Dell: Dell's shares are off over 30% over the last two years while its competitors Hewlett-Packard and IBM have shown impressive gains. The company also trails Apple, Toshiba and HP in many Customer Reports measurements of laptop computers by screen size and their score on the Customer Service Index has dropped from a 78 to a 75 out of 100. Additionally, Dell has laid off a massive amount of employees which included 8,000 in 2008 and at least 1,400 last year with their most recent group of layoffs fired in November.

12. Rite Aid's: Their stock is down nearly 50% over the last five years and and nearly 30% over the last two. The company has repeated labor problems and has faced legal and political actions because of the treatment of their employees and received low reputation scores from both Glassdoor and Vanno. With over 5,000 stores, tens of thousands of low-paid workers and millions of customers serving a population that is unhappy with the health care system, their reputation is unlikely to improve anytime soon.

Check out the full list here.