Spectrum Store

Spectrum is a mess. Two stars, and the second star is for the woman who helped me who was doing her best with a system that was clearly not set up to help anyone efficiently.

The Bennie Road Cortland store has the structure of every Spectrum store: wait, get told something that doesn't match what you were told on the phone, wait more, leave with either the same problem or a new one. Two stars because the service at the store level is technically professional and the staff aren't the ones who designed the billing architecture or the customer service phone tree. They're doing their jobs in a corporate environment that makes those jobs unnecessarily difficult.

Spectrum as a company has a market position in much of rural New York that functions as a monopoly, which is why the experience of dealing with them consistently feels like all the friction of a competitive market with none of the incentives. The Cortland store is fine. Spectrum is a mess.