Comcast has spent the last few months as a public whipping boy for a series of customer service missteps -- missteps that come as the company's trying to win regulatory approval for their $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable. For what it's worth, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts proclaimed he was "embarrassed" by the recent attention to his company's historically poor customer service. Still, as he's done in the past, he seemed to brush aside said problems as a natural byproduct of being huge:

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At an event in San Francisco, Roberts said that he was “embarrassed” and “disappointed” when he heard the recording. “It was a teachable moment for employees and it was a teachable moment for all of us,” he said...Still, the Comcast CEO maintained that such customer service nightmares are not the norm. “We get 250 million phone calls a year,” he said. “The nature of our business is that we’re going to have these things."

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By that logic, when Comcast gets even more calls after acquiring Time Warner Cable, will the fact that the company has the worst customer satisfaction ratings in any industry still be a decent excuse? The problem is Comcast (and the media) acts like this is a new phenomenon; Comcast has had awful customer service for more than a decade, with Roberts usually bi-annually promising to fix it. It never gets fixed for one reason: Comcast doesn't want to spend the money to do so.