The Q1 2025 Bad Business Awards are a bit of a call back to industries that have appeared already on our list of shame. Airlines have not only had their trouble on take-off and landing, but in boarding and stowing luggage. Then there are the fast-food restaurants that are hoping to AI themselves out of rising staff costs. Between the two, surprising customers in a bad way is the definition of bad business.
Q1 ’25
Current winner
Q4 ’24
Runners up
You can’t spell fail without AI. No industry is working harder to make AI work than QSR – quick service restaurants, no strangers to the Bad Business Awards (McDonald’s took the top spot in the inaugural prizes). This time, it is Wendy’s making the list for rolling out its “FreshAI” voice assistant at drive-thrus, Wendy’s thought it had a winner. Nope. According to one news report, it was a loser: “Welp time to not eat at Wendys anymore.”
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.
MARCH 2025
bad business Winners
It was Frontier Airlines, after joining in on the rush to add on what we know junk fees – a la carte charges for things that used to be/ought to be part of the basic service like…leg room, whose CEO called passengers hoping to avoid those charges “shoplifters”.
Our first runner-up is a pair of household names who, thanks to a bit of bad business, are now reaching far fewer households.
Our second runner-up proves the adage that the answer to any question is “Money”.
NOVEMBER 2024
bad business Winners
It was a trio tech security firm, CrowdStrike, software leader Microsoft and Delta Airlines that compounded a mis-guided software update into a business disrupting cascade, leading affected businesses to act badly in the face of serious network disruption.
Our first runner-up shows you can create your own problems. It is a DIY company that did it by itself. Analysts put the U.S. do it yourself market is nearly $1 trillion. And one of the biggest players in that market is The Home Depot. So why would such a well-placed company run
Our second runner-up no longer does what it did to earn placement on our list of winner this quarter. That’s because Navient has been barred from managing federal student loans because they did it for its own benefit, not the students.
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.