Today, The Consumerist announced the results of their annual "Worst Company in America" competition.
Electronic Arts, the videogame giant, "won", making it the only company in the history of the poll to "win" in consecutive years.
(It vanquished "runner-up" Bank of America with 78 percent of the vote).
It was a bad year for EA, most notably for their release of Sim City, which was plagued by server issues that prevented people from playing the game. This follows last year's game Mass Effect 3, which was nominated for game of the year by several publications, but disastrously had an ending that some people thought was a little unsatisfying. The Consumerist did not release data regarding what percentage of respondents identify as gamers.
1. Carnival Cruise Lines
Passengers on the so-called "poop ship" lived for five days in a "floating toilet" after their Carnival cruise lost power.
2. Kmart
Kmart was rated America's 6th worst company to work for in 2012. An inmate from a Chinese labor camp smuggled a letter pleading for help into some Halloween decorations sold at Kmart.
3. Bank of America
"The Justice Department is seeking $1 billion from Bank of America, alleging the bank committed fraud by selling defective mortgages from a program it says was known within the bank as 'The Hustle.'"
4. Comcast
An antitrust lawsuit against the cable giant reached the Supreme Court in March (where it was rejected in a narrow, 5-4 decision written by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia). The suit alleged that Comcast unfairly overcharged millions of customers.
5. AT&T
"The Department of Justice alleges that the telecom giant has bilked U.S. customers out of millions of dollars by willfully failing to prevent the rampant abuse of a system designed to help the hearing impaired."
6. Equifax
The credit score company improperly sold information such as client credit scores and whether clients were late on mortgage payments to prospective money lenders.
7. AB InBev
The Budweiser manufacturer has been sued for deliberately overstating the amount of alcohol in Budweiser, the quintessential American beer.
8. Sallie Mae
Last year, Sallie Mae settled a lawsuit that alleged that they had schemed "to hide the rapidly deteriorating state of the company’s private student loan portfolio from Wall Street."
9. PayPal
