No matter how good your products, services or intentions are, nobody’s perfect. And the sooner you recognize that, the sooner you can use it to your advantage. So without further ado...
Current winner
GENERAL MOTORS
Runners
up
Warner Brothers Discovery, the media conglomerate that emerged from the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, is making waves in the industry, and not in a good way.
OpenAI, a prominent player in the field of artificial intelligence and language models, has recently attracted attention for its questionable practices, deserving of scrutiny and dishonour as a result.
Past winners
We hate to say it, but there’s more where that came from... In fact, there’s no shortage of companies behaving badly—and our past winners prove it. Find out how other brands have screwed up, letting down their employees, customers and communities.
JUNE 2023
bad business Winners
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a state-chartered commercial bank headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The 40-year-old bank was shut down by federal regulators in March 2023, making it the largest financial institution to collapse since Washington Mutual at the height of the financial crisis in 2008.
Credit Suisse is a global investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland. They’ve gained infamy for failing to prevent money laundering to a known Bulgarian criminal gang, their involvement in the Mozambique “tuna bonds” loan scandal and assisting banking clients with ties to trafficking and torture.
Robinhood is a stock trading and investing app that boasts commission-free, insured trading from the convenience of your phone. While their mission was admirable (democratizing finance for all, not just the wealthy), their execution was rotten. Robinhood faces accusations of bad business practices, inadequate risk management, and a need for more oversight.
MARCH 2023
bad business Winners
When Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment merged in 2013, it created a ticket distribution monopoly — something a “free market” is designed to prevent. And with botched presales, price gouging and a fake ticket scandal, consumers quickly learned how the concert cartel would behave with precious little competition or oversight.
Despite their increasingly glaring differences, conservatives and liberals agree on at least one thing: the FBI sucks. The intelligence and law enforcement entity is meant to protect American citizens. But with opaque practices and shadowy motives, the real concern becomes: “Who will protect us from the FBI?”
High fashion constantly pushes the limits of how we present ourselves to the world. In its ideal form, it’s an often ostentatious art that inspires pop culture. Spanish luxury outfitter Balenciaga has traditionally been a provocateur—but a campaign that seemed to promote pedophilia exposed their taste as despicable, not boundary-defining.
Eligibility
We love calling brands out on their sh*t as much as the next person…but only if we have a good reason for doing so. To determine our Bad Business Awards winners and runners up, we scour the web to figure out which brands are most getting on peoples’ nerves. Once that’s done, shortlisted companies are ranked based on:
- Their treatment of employees
- Their treatment of customers
- Their CSR initiatives
- Their treatment of employees
- Their treatment of customers
- Their CSR initiatives
We do this using their Trustpilot and Better Business Bureau ratings, Indeed Work Happiness scores, CSRHUB and MSCI ESG ratings, and other metrics. The brands with the lowest average scores across all three of the above categories wind up here.
The best way to avoid landing on this list? Take the criticism your brand receives to heart, respond authentically and keep asking for more feedback. At Vox Populi Registry, we believe .SUCKS domains can help with this. Every company will face the wrath of disgruntled employees, customers and competitors at some point or another—but the successful ones have a strategy that helps them use it to their advantage.