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KBhomesucks.com Voted Top Corporate Hate Web Site |
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Wednesday, 09 March 2005 |
 Special Report
Top Corporate Hate Web Sites
 KB Homes
KBhomesucks.com
Lauched: January 2003
By: Brian Zaltsberg
Special Report
Top Corporate Hate Web Sites
Charles Wolrich, 03.08.05
NEW YORK - Sometimes it seems that shoddy products and atrocious customer service go together like peanut butter and chocolate.
But while your average disgruntled consumer simply vents their bile by bellowing at a bewildered service rep, a few go farther. Much farther. These perennially peeved people build--and obsessively maintain--sites devoted exclusively to complaining about their least favorite corporations.
To honor these quixotic champions, we spent hours trawling the Web looking for the very best corporate hate sites. After checking out more than 100 sites with names like dontflycontinentalairlines.com and fordlemon.com, we rated the best of them on a scale from one to five in six different categories: ease of use, frequency of updates, number of posts, hostility level (angrier is better), relevance, and entertainment value (Hey! Angry and funny!).
The following nine sites--there were ten, but one went unexpectedly dark during the editing of this story--are the crème de la crème of online rage. Note that we substantially cleaned up some of the posts, editing out odd capitulation schemes, iffy grammar and plain incoherence. Apparently blinding anger does not go hand in hand with dotting your i's and crossing your t's.
KB Homes
KBhomesucks.com
Lauched: January 2003
By: Brian Zaltsberg
| Why did you create the site?
"We bought a house from them, and the day we moved in, it rained and water started pouring into the garage. When I called them, they took a look at the problem, and it was clear they forgot to put any flashing [metal strips used for weatherproofing]. The sheetrock was soaked. They came over and supposedly fixed the problem. The next day it rained again, and the same thing happened. They didn't fix it right. They blatantly refused to replace the damaged sheetrock. That was just the beginning... " | What would KB Home need to do to get you to take down the site?
"Buy back everybody's houses. Not only mine, but everyone else's." | Company Says:
"The Internet makes it possible for a vocal few to broadly disseminate information that is unverified and often incomplete, inaccurate or out-of-date. We have earned a customer satisfaction rating of more than 95%, but we won't stop until that number is 100%. These sites are not designed to aid resolution. We encourage customers with any concern about their home to bring it to our attention directly. We contact customers that we are able to identify on the site and in cases where we have resolved any issues, the Webmaster of this site has refused customer requests to take down their complaints." | Typical Post:
"Ceiling is cracking, stucco is cracking, ant and cricket infestation (bugs coming through gaps/cracks in the foundation), windows are misaligned, sliding door misaligned, carpet is defective, air conditioning/heater sucks leaving farthest bedroom hot in summer and cold in winter, puddles of water/mud in backyard for weeks after it rains. The list goes on and on...KB Homes builds crappy houses, and when you complain they send their contractors (who did the crappy job to begin with) to perform a "band-aid" repair, which will never fix what is causing the problem. (And that's if the contractor even shows up!!)" ...
Reed more: KBhomesucks.com
http://www.forbes.com/home/commerce/2005/03/07/cx_cw_0308hate.htm
http://www.forbes.com/2005/03/07/cx_cw_0308hate_2.html |
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