This Is the Least Trusted Retailer in America

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 2, 7:30AM EDT

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This Is the Least Trusted Retailer in America — © jeepersmedia / Flickr

Trust is among the most important aspects of any business category or company. Presumably, consumers are most likely to do business with companies they trust the most. On the other hand, businesses that lack consumer trust are likely to lose customers to the competition.
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Morning Consult, one of the largest polling firms in America, recently announced its list of the most trusted retail brands. The companies in the evaluation included traditional retailers, e-commerce companies and grocery chain operations. The firm created its list by taking respondents who trust a given retailer and subtracting those who do not. The data comes from the ongoing polls it creates each day from 12,000 people. People who had no opinion of a retailer, or those who were not sure of an answer, were excluded. A key finding was:

That retailers emerged from the past 15 months with no deterioration in consumer trust shows they balanced high demand, low supply and the needs of consumers who typically don’t buy much online. Overall, a positive sign for the industry.

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Retailers as a category did slightly better than grocery chains. This has been true since Morning Consult started the survey in January 2018.

Morning Consult ended up with ratings for 20 retailers and grocery chains. The analysts who did the survey discovered an interesting trend. Of the most trusted retailers, three were home improvement companies: Home Depot, Lowe’s and Ace Hardware.

At the bottom of the list is one of America’s most troubled and oldest retailers: JCPenney. Founded in 1902, it has been downsizing for years, as customers moved to big-box retailers like Walmart and Target. The company continued to slice stores, and people, until it went bankrupt in May 2020. It emerged from bankruptcy in September of that year. It then closed another 150 stores, which left it with 670. The jury is still out on whether JCPenney can survive so much smaller and with such a low opinion among consumers.

Click here to read about the most trusted retailer in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.