National Companies With Poor Service

Merchants Tire and Auto broadcasts your private information to everyone that walks in the building, and that's not cool. Whether you are going to buy tires or have them rotated or get an oil and filter change or a state inspection, this company turns the computers around for everyone to see. This might not be a big deal for men, but I can tell you women do not want their home address and phone number available to the public. There are already too many stalkers out there and now Merchants just made it easier. They say they do this in order for the customer to view the charges and all the pertinent information and verify it is correct before they print and have you sign the service order. So maybe it's wrong at first, but all you would have wasted is a few keystrokes and a piece of paper, instead of someone's identity. This is a bad company policy and a bad business decision all the way around. They are lucky they haven't been sued. In the picture below there is one employee (face erased to protect privacy) that is using the computer in his job, while the 2nd computer is unattended. That's even worse! You can't just walk away from the desk and leave the information there to face the public. My gosh that's a privacy violation!

Humana health insurance is so disorganized and inept. They actually wrote to tell me that a claim for lab tests was denied that had already previously been approved. How do you un-approve something? They also have a long, complicated process for obtaining a prior authorization (or PA) for medication. There is one phone line for a PA for surgeries and tests and another one for pharmacy, but there is also another line for pharmacy review. These lines are hard to get through to, and you end up holding a lot, and then getting transferred many times and sometimes to the wrong department. Then you have to re-up the Rx meds PA yearly to get them to cover it for the next calendar year, which is unnecessary because if your doctor didn't think you still needed it, he/ she wouldn't still be prescribing it. I mean that's a no-brainer. Then they messed that up too, whereas I thought all paperwork was complete because when I went to the pharmacy it was covered and I paid less than $10 for something that would have been $1600, yet I got a letter in the mail about that too, saying my meds are not covered and the PA process isn't finished and my doctor dropped the ball. I said, "well you paid it, because I just got back from the pharmacy." They scratched their heads, claimed it must have been an error and said goodbye. The next month the price is back up to $1600. I called again and round and round we go.

Additionally, their HMO booklet on providers in network is incorrect as well as their website. The website says they updated or "refreshed" it 9-13-15, but when I checked it 9-14-15 it still had old information and here in 2016 the info is erroneous still. I even tried contacting them by website to report the inaccurate information and later went back and checked and still the information had not been corrected. I have heard they will soon be taken over or bought out by Aetna or Cigna, so there is always hope, but then again the takeover could be worse.

Here are some of the errors for Humana:

• Wrong phone number to the doctor's practice
• Wrong address for the practice or testing facility
• Fax number listed only, with no other contact
• Wrong field of expertise for doctor
• Doctors who no longer take Humana insurance but are listed as if they do
• Doctors who have retired from the practice

Extended Stay America has all kinds of issues. The first room they assigned to me had lights over the bed that didn't come on, because they were ripped out of the sockets. I reported this and asked for a room where the lights work. I was then assigned another room, but that was even worse, because the refrigerator didn't work and I had been traveling and needed a place to stash my perishable food. I again returned to the front desk, made the complaint and returned the key and again I was given another room. This room had no ironing board, no coffee, and no coffee pot. I returned to the front desk and by now I was tired of the up and down and back and forth, but also frustrated that they couldn't get this right. Since I really didn't need an ironing board in the morning, I just focused on the coffee and pot. I was told they were out of pots. I said, "out of pots? How can you be a hotel that supposedly provides pots in every room, yet you are out of pots?" No real reason was given, except "well we are." In shock, I asked rhetorically "you are an extended stay hotel are you not?" The reply was "it is first come, first serve." I said exasperated, "if guests stay an extended period I would think you would have ordered enough pots for all the rooms." After 3 tries, I just took the room, because I needed something.

The next night I returned and although I originally had a bad experience I needed a place that took pets, so I was kind of stuck using that place again. Originally, my stay was to be for 1 night, but I was delayed and ended up in that town for an additional night, so I had to repeat the room rental process again, because I had already checked out. The same thing happened that night with the room changes 3 to 4 times, before there was one that I found acceptable to me. Incidentally, they didn't send me to the same 3 rooms as the night before, which further emphasized that way more than 3 rooms were under-par. In fact one room didn't even have air conditioning (in summer) that worked and another one had some small vandalism whereas the button to turn on the lights was pulled out of the wall.

In fact on my way back to the front desk, I passed by a room that had the mattress and box spring taken off the bed and leaning up against walls. Now this was not being rented obviously and yet the lights were on to waste electricity and the curtains were drawn for everyone to see the mess. Why is this important? Well if your company is having maintenance issues, staffing issues and vandalism you don't telegraph to the whole world that your company has problems. Why would anyone air their dirty laundry? You would have to be some sort of numbskull to do this.

What really takes the cake though is the fact that each time I returned to the front desk they seemed annoyed that I complained, and with a blank stare seemed apathetic to my plight. Upon check out the 2nd morning I expressed my concerns to the day shift hoping for a little more interest or caring, and was only told that they had just hired a new maintenance man and hoped to be up to speed in a couple weeks. I was also told that 1 person had been splitting his time between 2 of their communities side by side. I told her you really need 2 maintenance people for each community, so even by hiring 1 more, they were 2 short.

This was still an unacceptable excuse, because no one bothered to note which units are bad, because if they had they wouldn't have tried to re-rent them. Additionally, why are they NOT patrolling the community and looking for lights left on in un-rented units wasting electricity and ringing up a bill? Why are they renting units with lights or appliances that don't work? Those things are part of good property management skills, of which they have none. So either this is a laziness issue or a lack of training, but either way this is much more than just a maintenance issue, but instead a management issue. During the day they should be staffed with 2 people, so that one can watch the counter for check-ins, and one can ride through the community looking for problems to address, and checking un-rented rooms to make sure the lights are off, write up work tickets, and stock each room with coffee and pot prior to rental. People should be fired for not doing their job when they are nothing more than excess baggage (pun intended).