>Banks would be a timely nominee these days. But the fact is I am with about the biggest of them, JP Morgan / Chase, and have had nothing but good experiences with any Chase employee or their superlative online banking service.
Banks are on the top for me too. It doesn't matter that they have superb personnel - even here, where personnel used to be grumpy everywhere - it's their policies, decided at the top level. The amount of small print, the weird language they use to confuse, the funny rules that jump out of the box every now and then - it all more than tenfold compensates for nice and friendly personnel.
On position #2, advertising as such, which insinuated itself between us and the manufacturers. The merchants are actually better than these guys - they, after all, do the heavy lifting, carry stuff around so we don't have to go far to get it, fine, they do something useful. The advertisers are a racket, and they also waste our time with annoying stuff. Posters, ads in the papers, small pieces of web pages are fine as long as they are small and not taking more space than the content itself, but forms of advertising where you have to wait them out, or, the worst of them all, when they call you on the phone or send a seller to your door - I can take those, at the same rate that I charge my customers, in 30 minute increments (and I don't care if they've used only 5 - I'll still charge them 30). Somehow, nobody took the offer.
>Same with insurance companies.
Specially when they are dealing through your real estate agent - actually, these agents generally share the #3 position with insurance. The number of rules that insurances impose is ridiculous, and most of them make sense only if you try to think like they do. During my years in the US, I've often found things done in insane ways, and when I had the chance to ask why, the answer was regularly "the insurance made me do it".
#4, Monsanto, big pharma, and other poisons.
>She said I came in here expecting a $20 oil change and it cost me $160.
All those places where they don't dare tell the price up front are around #5 for me, but that's easy to avoid. Just yesterday I was considering buying a VMWare (in case the vmWare player for a single machine was eval version... or in case they had a fair price for soloists), and guess what - on the product page, there was not a single "$". Nor "€". Nada. Want to buy? Call 1-800-xxxxxxx. I hate those, they expect I'd want to talk with a sales professional who'd speak fast and introduce dozen words that mean something inside their corporate culture but nothing to me... I fell for that once, would have cost me $30 but I called them back ten minutes later to cancel (the fastest case of buyers remorse I know of). If I can't find the price on their web page in ten clicks, ctrl+W.
