Americans Hate ISPs Almost As Much As They Hate Gas Stations, Survey Finds
Internet service providers ranked second-lowest on a list of 43 consumer industries, outperforming only gas stations.
Not sure why people would hate gas stations, I hate the gas companies setting the insane prices, but the stations themselves are often just local businesses.
ISPs on the other hand are like abusive partners, they do an awful job until you say you're going to leave. Then they start begging you to stay and promising to get better. Then they're good for about a week before starting to completely screw you again.
Yeah, I don't hate gas stations at all, but fuck ISPs: Greedy fucking thieves.
I hate gas stations because of the smell. That's not the fault of the business, just an inevitable thing that I do hate.
Thankfully, I never need to go to gas stations anymore so it doesn't really matter.
That said, ISPs are infinitely worse than gas stations.
Above gas stations? About the only thing that annoys me about them is half the stuff not having a price listed. I guess I'd hate them more if they kept jacking up prices the longer I was a customer. 🤨
I wish non-evil convenience stores existed because nothing's better than the gas station when you're stoned to the bone
I wish non-evil anything existed. Unfortunately, the world is set up so that only the evil truly succeed.
Food Co-ops are the closest thing I think, or farmer’s markets but those aren’t particularly convenient
Also, the trees that freely offer blackberries in a public park near me.
Gas stations have also gotten unbearable. I loathe the screen that forces advertising content in front of me while I'm already paying for gas.
Is this a common practice? I don't have any of those in the US
Yes, I’m surprised out haven’t seen it. The screen that takes card information will start playing some insufferable advertisement while the gas pumps.
For those who don’t know: one of the physical unlabeled buttons on the side of the screen always mutes it, so just push all of them if some kind stranger hasn’t marked it for you.
They are all over California.
I've seen one in the US, but it was in a small town with only one has station. No need to treat your customers nice if there is no competition, haha
Oh yeah this has started happening here in central Illinois and I fucking hate it.
National ISPs like Spectrum/Time Warner Cable, AT&T, and Comcast/Xfinity have an oligopoly. They have divided up America into their own markets and purposely avoid entering each other's markets to avoid competing with each other. With no competition, they are free to charge as much as possible, avoid providing good support, and can provide suboptimal service (ie, low and asymmetric download/upload speeds, terrible latency). [1] The problem worsens if you live in suburban or rural areas. Of course there are exceptions where coverage overlaps due to sharing infra, but that is rare and possibly priced in.
Those same ISPs compleatly ignored rural areas. 10 years ago I could only get internet through Dish network ( the worst ISP) today thanks to the government helping small ISPs I can choose from 2 companies offering high speed fiber.
Right now I'm on 200 up/down for $70.
I have the small town ISP also, it's great. I get 100Mb symmetrical fiber for $50/mo with no contract and no data caps. Very reliable, almost never goes down.
It's worse than collusion. The break up of AT&T resulted in a legal construction of Franchise Agreements that legally granted regional monopolies in all major population centers in the country in a deliberate bid to avoid Sherman antitrust rules. It's not merely collusion, you literally cannot compete by law.
I hate ISP way more than any gas station. In fact I don’t hate gas stations at all. Weird.
Gas stations:
My ISP:
Don't forget the random charges for a few bucks that they stick on all the time banking on people not bothering to call and removed about it because an hour on the phone isn't worth it for ~$5.
Having moved to Oregon from a state where I could pump my own gas, nothing could annoy me more than the gas station.
Well, good news on that front, the house and senate passed a bill to let us pump our own. As long as Kotek signs it, it would go into effect immediately.
Not pumping your own gas sounds weird as hell. I didn't even know that was still a thing.
Us and New Jersey I think are the only two now.
Having moved to jersey from a state where I could pump my own gas, the worst part about it is when it's 2am, there's an emergency and you're rushing to the hospital, only to notice you need gas, only to realize that the only station within 20 miles doesn't have anyone working that late, and while the pumps are there and functional, they're turned off so you're stuck there.
But above all that, Fuck comcast.
Is that more or less than your health system?
You won’t see Americans united in that hate, because our system is actually great for the top 30% of people. It’s the bottom 30% who are really fucked by it. And the people in the middle are merely fingerfucked by it.
I think it’s more like top 5%. Between my husband and I we’re top 30% and it’s still terrible for us. But, point taken, like everything else in the US it’s serving the powerful few so it’s unlikely to change.
Yeah, the other heavily regulated industry.
I don't hate gas stations, but I do hate people who don't know how to pull up to a fucking gas pump without completely cocking it up for everyone else!
Hey now, how else am I supposed to let everyone know I hate them? Legally?
I switched to Sam's from Costco. The biggest issue is after the very orderly gas line at Costco, Sam's is the wild West.
Watching some woman lose her mind at Costco because the attendant refused to let her drive the wrong way through the pumps and made her go get in line properly while I was pumping my gas was so wonderful.
I hate Comcast so much
who.. what?
I've never heard any one really complain about gas stations. is the questioned and response worded poorly? I think people hate paying high prices for gas but I've never heard any one say they hate gas stations before.
ISP's tho, every one can agree that they can go gargle an entire warehouses of unwashed dicks
I don't hate either of them. I have 2 good ISPs in my small town, and they offer good + reliable service for a reasonable price, without data caps. I'm very lucky to have these choices, I know from past experiences.
I do hate bullshit ISPs like AT&T though. I formerly lived in a house where they were the only ISP option and the service was terrible, slow, and vastly overpriced. Also unreliable.
These local ISPs are great though. I hope more small towns get their own small ISPs like we have.
Personally I've never had any problems with my isp. Here in Norway, I pay about $50 pr month for 10Gbps up and down. Isp doesn't care if I selfhost websites or other things with my connection. Just hassle free
My family pays $160/month for a 4Mbps up/ 1 Mbps down internet and landline phone combo that usually tops out at half that speed in practice. It's amazing much of anything loads out here.
Kinda sad to see how people pay wayyy more for way less. I imagine this issue worsens in countries with more corrupt governments or countries that allow for bigger monopolies of infrastructure people rely on.
At least I can sort of choose gas stations. I have no choice in (non-wireless) ISPs.
But don't you love paying twice as much for half the average speed that people in other cou tries are getting?
Literally the only broadband provider in my area is Comcast. If an avatar of Comcast appeared before me, I would shit on its head. Data cap bullshit assholes
This is a really strange comparison.
gas stations are not that bad!
I wonder why...
People hate gas stations? Wtf
Like the US ones where you have to pay in advance, I can see...
Paying in advance is pretty outdated. Cards are much more common.
I hated Gas stations so much, I bought a EV car.
Honestly, I've had Verizon Fios for a while and I actually don't mind it. Service only really dropped during serious storms and I've only ever experienced throttling a few times during my time with them.
Two things bug me about US gas stations. One is the 9/10 of cent thing they persist in. So the gas isn't $3.29, it's $3.29 9/10. And of course you know who benefits from the rounding, the retailer. The other thing that bugs me is gas pumps that play ads loudly. Luckily those seem to be getting more rare.
Well of course, Lust and Greed are part of the 7 deadly sins. They dance together in hell.
Well, if ISPs didn’t artificially limit your service and then charge you prices that don’t match what you signed up for maybe people would not hate them. Personally, my ISP in my area works well for me though. Reasonably priced and haven’t run into limits.
The reason their customer service sucks is that they see it as a cost they want to minimize, not a value add. Why do they want to eliminate cost? Because they are in a constant price war with competitors. Because we’ll switch if we can get $5 / month less. No one ever thinks twice about switching to get $5 / month less, and they they complain about bad customer service…
ISPs in the US are not in a price war with competition, that's ridiculous. The price per gig has been going down as infrastructure build out happens in the middle mile. In the last mile, prices are still abusively high with predatory bundling contracts. The reason their customer service sucks is because their customers don't have 30 options. They have at most 2 and in many places they have 1 option.
eh, I like ISP's, thats how I get online. seems like false equivalency
You like internet, not ISPs
I'm fine with my ISP.
At one point, I had service from Comcast, and I recall being a little annoyed with them as they started blocking TCP port 25 inbound to stop people running mail servers, but I can understand why they did it -- because they had a ton of people unwittingly acting as spam relays and didn't want to deal with that.
I get that people don't like technical support from ISPs, but frankly, the level of desktop of tech support that people are willing to pay for anywhere is generally going to kind of suck. I mean, you want to pay for a senior network engineer expert in your platform to figure out why you can't get your email, he can maybe do a great job, but you're not going to be a happy camper with the kind of bill that that would result in.
I was a little bummed when my ISP stopped providing bundled Usenet service, but I could hardly complain -- I mean, only a tiny fraction of users would have been using it, and it made no sense to ask them to foot the bill for the few of us who used the service.