All of the notes regarding the degraded quality and customer support / experience for products and services is true. But the additional factor is that so many of us are pushed to the brink now, in terms of affordability and costs of goods and services. If you're making good money and you order a sub-par product, it's definitely a frustration, but it's not the end of the world. But now, for so many, there is less margin for that kind of error.
That scammy product, pushed to us by an algorithm we can't control or escape, sold with lies and guarantees that will never be enforced, with deceptive ads generated by AI that becomes increasingly undistinguishable from the real thing, and flooded with positive reviews generated by bots, is money that won't go to essential things like food, rent, and transport, let alone healthcare, all of which is also increasingly unaffordable. The rage is understandable.
Yes, when the budget is tight and the washing machine you got just two years ago has a major breakage (just outside the warranty period), the cost of fixing it or getting a new one become pretty close. Couple that with the fact that the washer you replaced it with worked fine for 30 years before it broke and I think the anger is very rightly justified.
The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or giving much of a shit about them. "Why are you complaining? It's free!"
Gmail envy makes it seem like you're some underachieving sucker if you bend over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.
It probably would be possible to have a billion customers and make them happy, but the number of employees it would take would only make you rich, instead of unfathomably rich.
I'm not sure Gmail is the right example here. When it came out, Gmail was way better than the other free email services (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc). It was the product that bent over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.
Gmail was a great product because they doled out a GB of storage for free. Agreed that they introduced other features people liked.
As a user, you were faceless. I have a vague memory from the early Gmail days. I'm pretty sure they charged me $5 to contact support.
Customer focus includes more than having a good product, though having a good product is a component. The business model Google chose (it was a choice) for Gmail wasn't compatible with focusing on Google's customers.
That said, there were other good examples. I chose Gmail because I believe it was one of the best known products of the era.
Customer focus means not just resolving issues or having a reachable customer service, it can also be pre-empting the need to reach out to customer service by making the product issue free as much as possible.
Gmail in its early stage had a simple surface area. These days a Google account could mean a gateway to entire digital life for some. It requires much more focus and responsibility to handle and Google never had plans to do any of that from the beginning.
“It feels like a war on consumers,” said Sally Greenberg, the executive director of the National Consumers League, a 125-year-old consumer advocacy group. Households are being hit by “a tsunami of fees and hidden charges and tricks and traps”, she said.
American consumers face a paradox – they have more choices and higher expectations than ever before, thanks to innovations like delivery-on-demand and streaming services, said Peter Fader, a Wharton School marketing professor. “But not only does service just suck,” Fader said, consumers “are starting to realize that a lot of the cool data and technology is being used against them”.
I think it is a wonderful time to start a business. Owner-run businesses tend to have great customer service. As consumers, we have some choice to give our attention to businesses where the people doing the work are the ones that own the company, if they aren't, then give your money to someone else. Stop supporting businesses that pay their taxes to Ireland.
This isn't a perfect solution and I know there are counter-examples, but I have been much more satisfied supporting small, local or owner-run shops.
I've realized this as well, the bigger the company the worse the experience.
The more customers they have the less they care about any individual customer.
The more products they have the less they care about any single product.
The more employees they have the less they care about each individual employee doing a good job. And there's no they any more, there's a big, soul-less profit glutton.
Yes, I agree. When shopping for goods and services locally, I look for the small shop that gets the best reviews. It's always been a better experience for me. The small companies can't afford to shaft 5% of their customers in the same way the big ones can.
> There’s a stew of factors at work behind the rise in consumer rage [including] the rise of AI customer service.
I'm not really sure the problem is AI here. I've had plenty of bad experiences with human customer service agents that were poorly-trained and hard to understand. An AI can be implemented in a shitty way, where it's at best a regurgitation of the help docs. Or, it can be implemented well, where it can autonomously take action without any human involved.
I have had a couple of experiences with the latter. Once you do, you realize that you actually don't need to talk to a person per se -- you just want your problem solved efficiently. That can be done with a human or an AI; it isn't really the most significant bit to be filtering on IMO.
I am only commenting from afar (haven’t been in the US since around 10 yrs ago, but consuming a lot of US centric information), but could it be that the US economy has simply become too extractional? In my eyes, healthy capitalism needs a balance between profit-seeking and customer-satisfying. And at least from what I read and hear, the balance is now gone, with consumers being nickled and dimed while the quality of products and services going down. I am thinking of all the hotel junk fees for example, or how airlines keep segmenting customers so everybody gets exactly the lowest level of experience they can cope with, while paying as much as possible.
I think so. There doesn't really feel like there are any "big names you can trust" anymore for mid-range things. It feels like there's only junk and expensive high-end. Its so tiring to shop for anything, having to look for every way a corner might have been cut.
As an cynical American, I view all publicly-traded companies as purely extractional at their core. Any positive customer experience is either coincidental or forced.
All these things add up, and when they sit on top of core issues, e.g. home ownership that is out of reach and expensive (and wasn't for their parents/grandparents), taxes that are too high as soon as you manage to make a half-decent salary, for too little benefit as far as they can feel...is it any wonder?
Go to a restaurant. Oh you better tip 20-30-50% (Because thats how they hide the bill, and put the lowest value on there). Bad service? YOU MONSTER YOU TIPPED 15% (15% is standard, and on top of higher prices- that is more money.. service+restaurant owners basically forced a 5%+ pay raise for no value). On top of that.. oh no menus.. get your own device so you can order from us.
Walk into a grocer.. no cashier so you can avoid the stupid self checkouts, oh wait now they want you to comply to scan to get out. Don't do that you'll get some employee trying to lecture you about "required behavior". (That was in the Freiberg (Germany) grocer) Not doing that. (Also apparently thats in the Edeka in the Munich airport as well)
Go to Walmart, they brought back receipt checkers at times. And they get pissy when you tell them to go pound sand.
Overall, security guards at these places have such an ego and power trip that affects the average honest customer.
Removing checkout staff for self checkout machines that grade and judge you on your cashier role. Yet you don't get paid.
Let's not forget that Walgreens over exagerated the loss.. and then ramped up their money recovery systems to lock up items + raise the prices. Then they admitted they were crappy.
15% was standard—15 years ago. Then it ticked up to 18%. Then 20%. I've heard that some people are saying it should be 25%...but that was before I moved out of the country, to where tipping is purely for exceptional service.
But see, this is the problem with tipping: it's all informal, so what's "standard" can only be determined by actually talking to people and getting an overall average. I bet there are a lot of people who still think the "standard" is 15% (as it was through most of my life)—or even 10%.
The debate should have been about why there is even a "standard" tip not what the standard percentage is.
I think the vocal minority advocating for tipping are probably the ones that receive (unaccountable) higher tips while the ones that are scraping by would actually feel more comfortable with a good wage than unpredictable tips.
This decade began with a pandemic. Its origins and impact can be debated, but it did enormous and lasting harm, unreasonably.
The last presidential election disenfranchised a party (and with it half the country), suppressing turnout. Half of this country had no say in their nominee, by design.
Then A.I. was predicted to end white collar employment.
And now we are at war, with threats to security and economic stability that are unpredictable.
Nobody wanted any of this. Such is the sentiment of our decade.
This article reads like rage bait and it's about rage bait. Reading this then taking to the comments to kvetch about your personal suffering is learned helplessness writ large.
There are so many beautiful parks. There are so many experiences to be had away from sources of rage & frustration.
But you won't find it from a publication that depends on your rage addiction.
There are many beautiful parks and it's wonderful to spend time in them. But at some point you have to return to domesticity, and if you can't live that part of your life without being repeatedly screwed over by greedy corporations that don't even bother to provide a good service for the money you pay them, I think it's understandable people are starting to rage.
Maybe - but not all the time. You might not notice when you get honest service for an honest price - or when a community service is awesome and free! Because the next time you're triggered it flushes all your happy memories away.
No. I don't want to go anywhere anymore. All the sidewalks are full of SUVs, blatantly blocking my way even though it's prohibited.
Police is looking the other way.
City council doesn't react to inquiries because (as stated in the protocol of one of the meetings) "complaints sent by citizens are anecdotal anyway, and they tend to be concerned with just the one street where they live."
I try to avoid leaving the house as best as I can. Going outside has become pure rage fuel for me.
This all comes down to humane treatment of your fellow human beings. I grew up in an era where that was a core expectation of our culture.
But I see that tenet degrading in various ways - how we broadcast our views on social media (reduced empathy), how we interact in the real world (less patience and understanding), the polarization of our politics (less compromise and thus less effectiveness), and how organizations treat their customers (even basics like Terms of Service and Privacy Policies that have trended much more user-hostile over the last decade).
Cooperation is the fundamental basis on which civilization is built. I'm not sure what the start of a dark age looks like, but part of me feels like over the course of my lifetime I may be witnessing us entering one.
I fervently believe it's not too late to correct course, and I'm interested in ways individuals can have an impact. Set a personal example. Push back against dark patterns proposed by your corporate colleagues. Instill a deep sense of responsibility and healthy skepticism in your children. This is just a start, and I'm open to more suggestions.
Every little fight is what got us here, but that's also how we get out. Do good for the sake of good. Don't let others push you beyond your ethical bounds.
The good thing is we don't need everybody to do this. Even a small percentage can build momentum. So speak up and back up those who do. It makes it easier for others and causes people to be more nervous to float unethical ideas.
You must be very old, for one the murder rate is at the lowest point since 1900. I can agree that US political theater is getting more clownish but there were similar times throughout history (including brawls breaking out in the House over slavery. Slavery by the way was very much not humane treatment. Same for up to the 60s and beyond)
Western civilization has been built on exploitation not not cooperation, it's stil an open question if we can build a cooperative society, my guess is no.
I don’t think a high trust society is compatible with modernity. In my opinion, a high trust society comes from a relative naivety in most of the population that just sort of did what their grandparents did without thinking too much about it. In an “information” inundated populace, it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society. Maintaining a common culture isn’t easy either, it takes generations of shibboleth building, universal thought termination phrases and a brutal society-wide suppression of the “other”.
- Singapore pre-1965 was a low trust, racist society. The tensions were so bad that in 1964 there were racial riots.
- Today, after a lot of immigration, within 1-2 generations, Singapore became a high-trust society.
Similar stories in South Korea and Taiwan. In all 3 cases, the trust came recently, within 1-2 generations, and from different approaches of the state. They combine high institutional trust and the economic prosperity with medium-low interpersonal trust.
Singapore isn't high trust. It's brutal authoritarianism that squashes anything that looks remotely disharmonious between groups. High trust doesn't need a government boot stomping in the face of anyone who steps out of line.
singapore is an authoritarian state (ie. trust is forced) that presents a homogenous population, where after 2 generations of immigration, over three quarters of singapores populace are still ethnic chinese. let us now examine london's population and how it changed within 1 generation. london consisted of 90% ethnic english in the 1990s, nowadays this figure sits around 50%. concurrently, london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves. perhaps this occurred because england was not authoritarian enough?
"Ethnic Chinese" is a term covering 1.45 billion people. I don't even know where one would find a definition for "ethnic English", but if you take the NHS' "ethnic British" which ridiculously excludes even Irish heritage, I can see how you'd come to 50%.
A reasonable comparison would be to look at "Ethnic European", covering roughly 1.2 billion people.
> london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves
As someone who traveled the world a bit and lived for a decade in London, I'd beg to differ without further elaboration.
> it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society.
I think a large set of problems have come from this statement. We have, over time, become more intolerant of other cultures which is directly related to trust. Excluding the other isn't the path we need to take. We need to get back on the path where we can include other cultures.
Counter point: culture has been compressed, not widened, in the last 60 years.
Accents have gone away, we listen to the same music, food has homogenized. By almost any measure, culture across the US has become a monoculture compared to any time in its history.
I don't think your point is necessarily wrong, but how do you square the above?
The University of Georgia did a study and came to the conclusion that the Southern accent is fading. Less formally, a word game website did a survey that found the standard New York accent is fadingas well.
The Georgia study largely attributed it to migration and people moving more than they used to, with a focus on growing metro areas in the south. Though apparently some younger generations are trying to shed their accents to sound more professional, and the internet is creating a sort of average American accent.
Though nobody is worried they'll disappear entirely at the moment that I can find.
There has been a concerted push by the far right to delegitimize the idea of "human decency." It started to trickle into our mainstream culture by way of aspects of toxic masculinity, and "cringe culture"—can't be seen to be enjoying things unironically! Emotions (other than rage or contempt) aren't "manly"!
But with the rise of Trump through the mid-to-late 2010s, it became much more widespread and broad in scope: Dignity, respect (in the sense of "treat other people like humans"), and politeness are all "woke", and all that matters is me, me, me. Being a bully is the highest form of social capital.
And now with enshittification spreading to all our commercial services, the same basic ideas are expanded to the corporate realm. Customers are just numbers; "customer service" is for bots to provide; lock them in so they can't leave and it doesn't matter how terrible the service is.
It's not just cooperation that's needed—though you're absolutely right that it is the basis for our entire civilization; it's respect and dignity. Treating everyone you meet as if they're someone whose daily experience you care about, at least inasmuch as your interactions with them affect it.
It's never too late to shift a culture, and individuals can make an individual difference—very much in the sense of the old story about the girl throwing starfish back into the sea. But what's really needed is a cultural movement to restore dignity to our interactions, and I'm afraid I'm clueless as to how one starts one of those.
The Amazon app is unusable. I don't know what they are doing to it but today it wouldn't let me add more than 4 items.
Also the design choices suck; I have always accidentally ordered to the wrong address because Amazon uses a "default address". A good rule of design; assume that the user doesn't think about things that they don't explicitly select.
They also just advertise cheap crap and the app is so maximalist it feels more like a casino with all the lights and buttons.
You can not get an competitor, because US goverment is not enforcing the antitrust law.
In an market economy the market can make efficient decisions about investment, production, and the distribution of goods and services to consumers, guided by price signals created through the forces of supply and demand. But the market can not prevent companies from forming an oligopoly or a single company winning the competition race and becoming an monopoly, only the goverment can.
"In 1999 a coalition of 19 states and the federal Justice Department sued Microsoft. A highly publicized trial found that Microsoft had strong-armed many companies in an attempt to prevent competition from the Netscape browser. In 2000, the trial court ordered Microsoft split in two to punish it, and prevent it from future misbehavior; however the Court of Appeals reversed the decision and removed the judge from the case for improperly discussing the case with the media while it was still pending. With the case in front of a new judge, Microsoft and the government settled, with the government dropping the case in return for Microsoft agreeing to cease many of the practices the government challenged."
Not to mention that everyone from Walmart to what's left of Sears has online marketplaces to directly compete with Amazon's. Also, eBay never went away, with more than 85% of their sales being through fixed-price listings, like on Amazon's marketplace.
I know multiple people who don't buy from Amazon because they think Amazon is undercutting the competition. I don't buy from Amazon, because other markets are more competitive and have lower prices. The chance of Amazon having a lower price than eBay or Aliexpress are so low that it's not worth my time to look.
Yeah just go to a local store and buy something. Feel some community and support community. It’s the life you’ve been missing and trying to buy with Amazon
> Nearly 80% of Americans had a service or product problem in 2025, and about two-thirds of those felt “rage” about it
"Rage" is has been encouraged and reinforced as an appropriate reaction to what is most likely a simple mistake or process breakdown. Another way that social media and algorithmic feeds have pandered to our base emotions. We are becoming a world of tantrum-throwing toddlers.
> what is most likely a simple mistake or process breakdown
I think this needs justification. My status quo is to believe that most times I have a problem when dealing with these large corporations that they've made any process for getting support or remediating what _should_ be a simple process breakdown is a labyrinth of steps to make it as difficult as possible to reach any sort of remedy to discourage you from even trying. People are raging because calmly asking for assistance doesn't work, the only way to pierce through is to make a scene big enough that it risks reputational damage to simply get the attention that every individual deserves.
Have you ever worked for a large corporation? Have you seen how bureaucratic everything is? It's the nature of the beast. It's not calculated, and not personal. It's a process scaled to deal with thousands or millions of people. That's why when I have a problem with my internet service, I never call, or use the website, or use the app. I go to the Xfinity retail store and talk to someone. I almost always leave satisfied.
It doesn't have to be either of these things to be intentional. Pretty much every large system is too complex to be calculated or personal in the way we would apply those terms to a human. However, you can still describe a system as having values and goals, still analyse it in terms of its incentives and the mechanisms it evolves to achieve them in its environment.
The incentives are continued YoY growth, the environment is a saturated market, and so the mechanisms are monopolistic and anti-consumer practices. "Go to the Xfinity retail store" doesn't prove anything except that you passed an effort gate, segmenting you away from someone working two jobs with young children at home. 1% of customers costing the company $10 is the same as 100% of customers costing them 10c, with the added benefit that your segment is more likely to hurt retention than the one with no time or energy for comparison-shopping.
Did a single person design and orchestrate this state of affairs? Unlikely, but the company as a whole is more than capable of blobbing its bureaucratic way towards more efficient digestion of your funds. Never underestimate dumb optimisation processes at scale. Given enough time, such processes have turned monkeys into Shakespeare.
One can feel rage if something is intentional and annoying, unintentional but annoying, intentional and not annoying, unintentional and not annoying.
The first is justified. The second is understandable but a case of confusing it with the first. The last two also happen, and are not justified nor understandable.
Unfortunately there is currently an excess of the first case. I think people are arguing this is a problem. It probably causes the other 3 to happen more too.
> Have you ever worked for a large corporation? Have you seen how bureaucratic everything is? It's the nature of the beast. It's not calculated, and not personal
Yes I have, yes I have, yes it is, it absolutely is calculated, but you're right it's not personal.
It's "just good business"
But it absolutely is calculated. I've been in those rooms when those calculations were made. I've resigned in disgust when my pleas for them to show some humanity were ignored so they could continue turning the screws on their customers
> But it absolutely is calculated. I've been in those rooms when those calculations were made.
It's insane. I've watched so many people ridicule basic descriptions of utterly mundane predatory business strategies as "conspiracy theories" who I know for a fact have sat in meetings planning (or being told to implement) them.
I think that middle class professionals are so deeply in denial that they don't believe that they themselves exist. The avoidance of the moral consequences of their own work blinds them to anything that reminds them of what they do.
> It's the nature of the beast. It's not calculated, and not personal.
These are simply weird declarations that you're making, and 20 years ago the world was not like this.
> It's a process scaled to deal with thousands or millions of people.
You're saying this as if there weren't thousands or millions of people 20 years ago.
> I go to the Xfinity retail store and talk to someone. I almost always leave satisfied.
I've never seen an Xfinity retail store in my life. I guess we have to wait until they close them all for you to stop patronizing people. Everybody here understands how businesses work, and we also understand why they cut services and quality. People are not confused or ignorant, they're angry that they don't have functioning governments, so these companies don't have to compete anymore.
Processes are hollow and some AI isn’t making my life any better. Goods are junk and there are few examples of common physical craftsmanship in the marketplace. MAGA just want a well made jacket but they are on a life line of Walmart wages and goods. I get it. Rage is appropriate yet misguided.
Rage is not approprate in most cases. It gets your blood pressure and adrenaline spiking, but doesn't do anything to fix the problem. It probably makes it worse because it clouds rational thought.
Cheap goods have always been junk. Buy less, better stuff. Buy once, cry once.
I'm genuinely curious how you think we should avoid it? If I had to buy a household appliance tomorrow, or a new car, I cannot think of a single company I'd feel safe purchasing from.
With me on the older side of things, believe it when I tell you that things actually used to, for the most part, Just Work.
"Simple mistakes" and "process breakdowns" were uncommon, notable, and dealt with quickly. Even the cheap stuff tended to last for quite some time, and was often repairable when it failed.
Enshittification is not only real, it is accelerating.
I feel a very similar sentiment in Australia. Everything is poorly made and full of anti-features. It breaks prematurely, and software updates make it worse by disabling features, adding things I don't want, or holding functionality I already paid for to ransom as a subscription.
Warranties aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Every warranty claim I've made in the past 5 years (a fair few) has been a Kafka-esque nightmare of bouncing back and forth between reps who don't understand the issue, callbacks at inopportune times because of failure to understand timezones, and waiting for things to ship back and forth between repair centres across the country or overseas. Customer support is carefully crafted to be set up to fail, while still maintaining the plausible deniability of Hanlon's Razor. You may eventually get your widget repaired or replaced, but it'll cost you as much in time, effort, and frustration as it would have to just buy a new one. This is of course deliberate, but you'll never prove it. Companies exploit people's politeness and aversion to conflict by telling polite customers that there's nothing that can be done. You get nothing unless you dig your heels in and get combative with the rep who is just doing their job. And the consumer protection agencies are toothless tigers.
So now I don't buy new products unless there's no other option. Previously, buying new meant a product you could trust, and an assurance that they'd take care of you if something went wrong. Since that contract is broken, I see no point buying new. Especially not when last year's model often has more features, fewer anti-features, and better repairability than the current one. I'm not the only one responding like this: The snake cannot eat its own tail forever, and these companies will eventually discover that if they keep making their products shittier and shittier then people will just stop buying them. Especially once new competitors who need to build a reputation start to eat the established brands' lunches.
Australia's consumer guarantees cannot be replaced or excluded by warranties and offer huge protections for consumers who know how to exercise their rights. Companies try to apply friction to the process and I suspect that frustrates a lot of people to the point of giving up.
I used to think Australia's consumer protection legislation and enforcement agencies were the envy of the world, until I tried to actually exercise some of those rights. Companies will do everything they can to be as unhelpful and frustrating as possible while still following the letter of the law. It feels like something out of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
I don't mind paying a little more in exchange for good customer support. My internet provider has gone from having support in Arabic countries, that speak French good enough but don't really care about you, to support in France and it makes all the difference in the world.
I was astonished when I asked a question and the guy did actual research, called back and told me things that a simple Google search on my end wouldn't have find.
Usually it's very different, they either don't know/don't care or say things that are obviously false.
I believe it's also why Amazon took so much in popularity. If I got an issue with Amazon product, I know it well be dealt with swiftly, as long as it's sent by Amazon and not by a third party.
The key in Australia is to buy from a physical retailer. They often cannot give you the runaround as under consumer law, they're responsible for the resolution.
Online retailers are also responsible under the law, as the laws apply to all retailers.
In practical terms, if it's an online business with no Australian presence it makes it hard to apply the law. Overseas online companies with an Australian presence, such as Amazon, have been successfully prosecuted [1,2,3]. The ACCC is still working through responsibility for third-party sellers, but it seems to be the case that if it is fulfilled by Amazon then it is responsible.
I can't speak for "US consumers" broadly, but this is 100% why I'm angry as a consumer.
Everything is a fucking scam.
And often also a subscription for something that doesn't warrant being a subscription, and signing up is one click, cancelling is a written letter or a 3 hour long phone call (because see again the part where "Everything is a fucking scam").
It's incredible that a fucking TV is also a scam. I have an LG TV that only works as a dumb screen and it's really beautiful but now when I look at it, I don't see the technical marvel, I think "is someone at LG reading screencaps of my conversations and 4chan threads" because recently I got aware that this could be a very real possibility. And it's not about the TV itself, it's about having to be on 24/7 in order to avoid scams. You cannot just exchange one unit of money for one unit of product or service that gives you one unit of happiness, you have to first get PhD in avoiding scams. And often you watch yourself fall for the scam even though you're aware of it because realistically, you have no other options. Sometimes I need to buy something in a supermarket nearby and then it's "do you sir have our cattle-tracking ad-infested resource-draining attention-grabbing fucking-annoying useless dehumanizing app?" and if you don't you pay €5 extra because fuck you that's why, there's no winning move here. I sometimes go to a shop 30 minutes further down just to avoid the humiliation ritual.
Why does the US feel this way, while (it seems to me) most other places don't?
I've been traveling a bit lately, and (again, it seems to me) that the US is trapped by "exceptionalism". They are the self-proclaimed best at everything all the time. If that's the starting point, then improvement seems impossible.
I can only conclude that consumers are treated badly in the US simply because they want to be.
I don't mean to be flippant. I mean that it the US people (as a majority) vote against their own interest. A majority looked at a candidate who was an obvious grifter, who ran on a policy of gutting consumer protections, and said "I want that".
A majority looked at a man, obsessed with personal gain and transactional relationships, who constantly rewarded business over consumers and said "I want that."
The entire premise of the MAGA movement is to return to an era of limited company oversight, reduced voter franchise, poorer population. The very heart of it is taking a chainsaw to the state that grew around protecting people from robber barron's.
And this runs deeper than personality. More than half a nation, and all levels of govt, support a party that overtly supports business over consumers. They reduce taxes (for the rich), they bloat the deficit, they erode protections.
Therefore I think it is this way because deep down Americans want it this way. They are easily convinced that "both sides are the same" or "cutting taxes for rich people is good for less-rich people", or that "if you vote our way you'll be a billionaire like me".
Ultimately the US is the best at everything. To claim improvement is possible is, well, frankly Unamerican. To learn from anyone else is to suggest a weakness, when clearly there aren't any.
When in doubt, everyone suggesting that things can be better is obviously a communist. Because that's the only alternative to the status quo.
I’m only surprised it does not mention the road rage most drivers might only have in their mind but a few let it get the better of themselves and make the news -that’s always been present for most adult Americans daily lives.
I wonder if those old school knife cleaners which flung silver sand all over them in some rotary manner have some utility? Bone handled EPNS cutlery was definitely not designed for the modern age. (never seen one in action, seen them in victorian era catalogues and stately home kitchen-museums)
Please read the fine print before use. The steak knives are not to be used with animal products and poster will not be responsible in case of cracked blade.
In a way, shit quality/service is basically a form of high prices. If something that costs $20 and shouldn’t break for 4 years, breaks in 2 weeks, you effectively paid a high price for a $2 product.
Good point. Things cost more not just in unit cost but amortized over the item's lifetime (or I guess put differently, how much Refrigerator $ you spend over the course of your life).
>If something that costs $20 and shouldn’t break for 4 years, breaks in 2 weeks, you effectively paid a high price for a $2 product.
not true if all the other knives on the market at that price have the same performance, in which case that's just "the price of such a knife." in order to have paid too much there needs to be cheaper options with the same or better performance.
> in order to have paid too much there needs to be cheaper options
“Paid too much” from a consumer standpoint doesn’t need to have viable cheaper options. It’s about consumer expectations and results. If eggs in the grocery store cost $20/dozen, and you as a producer are taking a loss at that price because your producer costs arw $2/egg, consumers will still say they are paying too much. Because the expectation is coming from a market where a dozen costs $5-8.
> [..] the seminal 1976 White House Study that provided a host of provocative and first-ever insights about American customer care and its potential for profit-making. [..] corporate America is not getting the bang for its buck spent on customer complaint handling that is indeed possible. Billions of dollars in potential revenue continue to be lost [..]
The guardian never disappoints framing this whole series around the study of some og consulting business. Who needs conservative media when this is the leftmost mainstream outlet imaginable?
None of the comments seem to mention that companies get to just cheat you out of your money and get bailed out when caught by Trump:
> That toxic cycle is now being sped up by a Trump administration that is defanging government watchdogs, consumer rights advocates say.
> In late 2023, Toyota Motor Credit, the finance arm of the carmaker, was ordered to pay $60m after dealers sold thousands of customers unwanted insurance products with their loans, and the lender made it nearly impossible for car buyers to remove them.
> A complaint hotline was staffed by employees instructed not to cancel the products until a consumer asked three times, and then to tell callers they needed to write a letter. The lender “directed customers to dead-end cancellation hotline, withheld refunds, and knowingly tarnished credit reports with false data,” the order by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) found.
> Last May, the acting CFPB head, Russell Vought, terminated the payout agreement, part of sweeping changes that have gutted the agency, which was set up after the financial crisis to oversee financial firms and has returned $21bn to consumers.
This is actually making the case for why agencies like the CFPB are a bad way to go about this. If that was a class action lawsuit instead, the plaintiff's lawyers aren't going to drop the case just because there was a change of administrations.
Which system of government is capable of operating at the scale of the US without going sideways? It's not the EU, look at what just happened with Chat Control.
Maybe the problem is attempting to regulate at that scale to begin with.
Chat control is not relevant to consumer protection, which is what the article is about.
Of course, Americans also have much worse privacy rights than Europeans do, Chat Control notwithstanding. GDPR gives Europeans the right to delete their personal data. In the US, data brokers routinely launder highly personal information about Americans and nothing is done. Good luck figuring out how to delete that.
> Chat control is not relevant to consumer protection
It's relevant to demonstrating a failed government, however.
> Of course, Americans also have much worse privacy rights than Europeans do, Chat Control notwithstanding.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
> Europeans the right to delete their personal data. In the US, data brokers routinely launder highly personal information about Americans and nothing is done. Good luck figuring out how to delete that.
Good luck figuring out how to delete it from the databases of foreign companies even if you're in Europe. You think companies in China are complying with any of that when you have no way to prove whether they are or not?
That's why the only thing that works is ensuring they don't have your data to begin with, i.e. E2EE. Trying to regulate what they do with it once the cat is is out of the bag is too late.
And let's be clear: the free market will self correct eventually. There is absolutely no need for increased consumer legislation. Consumers can just go to another provider or retailer - and get a slightly different form of scammed. Letting the consumer choose their flavour of scam is the best possible system that can exist.
Impeding an organisation's right to scam customers is un-American and one step away from tyranny and communism.
In many markets the market is too consolidated and the consumer doesn't actually have an option that isn't a scam, but in those cases the solution shouldn't be to regulate the oligopolies while leaving them in place to buy off the regulators or weasel their way out of the rules with expensive lawyers, it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other.
In other markets there is competition, but in those markets the competition actually works. As soon as you have enough suppliers that at least one of them isn't scamming the customer, who is going to patronize the other ones by choice?
> it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other.
I wonder what the world would look like if you just prohibited any single organisation or controlling group over a certain size. Say you couldn't have a company over 100 million in value.
You could still have massive projects like semiconductor fabs and steelworks but they would have to be collectives of dozens of (competing) smaller companies. Efficiency may take a hit especially in the verticals but would it be be outweighed by greater market dynamism as no one company can dominate a sector and crush out competition and innovation?
Maybe provide a tapered relief for worker salaries and/or capital outlay to encourage employing people and building things rather that hoarding cash in financial structures.
Obviously this is impossible to do as the global system stands, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
> I wonder what the world would look like if you just prohibited any single organisation or controlling group over a certain size. Say you couldn't have a company over 100 million in value.
What you want is a maximum market share percentage, and for it to be something like 20%, with the market definition never including products that aren't actual substitutes for each other, e.g. the market is never "brake pads", it's "brake pads for Honda Civic", but that could still have a dozen independent suppliers or more.
> Efficiency may take a hit especially in the verticals
It's not obvious that this is even a thing at that scale. Economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) have diminishing returns once the fixed cost contribution per unit is already small, whereas diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, entity size exceeding Dunbar number, office politics, etc.) gets worse with size, and the latter comes to dominate long before anything reaches the scale of a global monopoly.
> Maybe provide a tapered relief for worker salaries and/or capital outlay to encourage employing people and building things rather that hoarding cash in financial structures.
Let worker salaries always be deducted in the year they're paid out instead of the existing nonsense where R&D money which is already spent can't immediately be deducted.
> Obviously this is impossible to do as the global system stands, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
Why is it impossible to do? The US or EU alone or any large enough coalition of other countries together could make the rule apply to anyone who wants to sell into that market, because they have an economy large enough that either the incumbents would comply or having excluded them for not complying, the market size would be enough to sustain new domestic suppliers.
Sarcasm is the problem? What an insane take. You'll need to explain that one for us lol.
Perhaps you meant "their (sarcastic) implication that the only solution is regulation is the problem"? I would agree. I just chose one thing to use in my sarcastic comment and believe there are multiple solutions – I'm glad it's sparked a sub thread.
The nature of sarcasm is to put up a straw man so weak that it falls over on its own rather than needing you to knock it down. The problem, of course, is that it's a straw man.
In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good. But the problem there is the lack of competition rather than its presence, and the markets that actually have vigorous competition do pretty well.
I really do have to admire your determination to make sarcasm the real problem on this topic. Take my upvote!
> In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good
Voters have supported politicians that have implicitly or explicitly supported conditions to enable oligopolies: reduced r
or no competition/market authorities, weak M&A oversight, increased subsidies, regulatory capture, etc
A thousand examples of efficiency and ease has me standing in a broken self checkout buying some fake-ocean scented deodorant I probably done need but was perfectly marketed to make me feel inept without it, in a plastic container that was bigger last year but now costs $9 and the scanner thinks I didn't put it in the bag yet and I’m just so sad to fight or resist after an 9 hour work day that ill end up going home and eat frozen food and watching a bad remake of an old blockbuster. Of course consumers should be angry. The lies and greed are gutting society while rewarding white color mid level VPs at PG and Kroger. What a future to be excited about.
All of the notes regarding the degraded quality and customer support / experience for products and services is true. But the additional factor is that so many of us are pushed to the brink now, in terms of affordability and costs of goods and services. If you're making good money and you order a sub-par product, it's definitely a frustration, but it's not the end of the world. But now, for so many, there is less margin for that kind of error.
That scammy product, pushed to us by an algorithm we can't control or escape, sold with lies and guarantees that will never be enforced, with deceptive ads generated by AI that becomes increasingly undistinguishable from the real thing, and flooded with positive reviews generated by bots, is money that won't go to essential things like food, rent, and transport, let alone healthcare, all of which is also increasingly unaffordable. The rage is understandable.
Yes, when the budget is tight and the washing machine you got just two years ago has a major breakage (just outside the warranty period), the cost of fixing it or getting a new one become pretty close. Couple that with the fact that the washer you replaced it with worked fine for 30 years before it broke and I think the anger is very rightly justified.
25 years ago, 'customer focus' was the buzz word.
Gmail (and similar products) killed it.
The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or giving much of a shit about them. "Why are you complaining? It's free!"
Gmail envy makes it seem like you're some underachieving sucker if you bend over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.
It probably would be possible to have a billion customers and make them happy, but the number of employees it would take would only make you rich, instead of unfathomably rich.
I'm not sure Gmail is the right example here. When it came out, Gmail was way better than the other free email services (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc). It was the product that bent over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.
Gmail was a great product because they doled out a GB of storage for free. Agreed that they introduced other features people liked.
As a user, you were faceless. I have a vague memory from the early Gmail days. I'm pretty sure they charged me $5 to contact support.
Customer focus includes more than having a good product, though having a good product is a component. The business model Google chose (it was a choice) for Gmail wasn't compatible with focusing on Google's customers.
That said, there were other good examples. I chose Gmail because I believe it was one of the best known products of the era.
Too late to edit my comment.
I'm embarrassed to say, I just realized the big problem with my original comment, and it is hackneyed: the end-users probably weren't the customers.
I doubt Google was cavalier about its relationships with advertisers back then.
Customer focus means not just resolving issues or having a reachable customer service, it can also be pre-empting the need to reach out to customer service by making the product issue free as much as possible.
Gmail in its early stage had a simple surface area. These days a Google account could mean a gateway to entire digital life for some. It requires much more focus and responsibility to handle and Google never had plans to do any of that from the beginning.
Quote>
“It feels like a war on consumers,” said Sally Greenberg, the executive director of the National Consumers League, a 125-year-old consumer advocacy group. Households are being hit by “a tsunami of fees and hidden charges and tricks and traps”, she said.
American consumers face a paradox – they have more choices and higher expectations than ever before, thanks to innovations like delivery-on-demand and streaming services, said Peter Fader, a Wharton School marketing professor. “But not only does service just suck,” Fader said, consumers “are starting to realize that a lot of the cool data and technology is being used against them”.
I think it is a wonderful time to start a business. Owner-run businesses tend to have great customer service. As consumers, we have some choice to give our attention to businesses where the people doing the work are the ones that own the company, if they aren't, then give your money to someone else. Stop supporting businesses that pay their taxes to Ireland.
This isn't a perfect solution and I know there are counter-examples, but I have been much more satisfied supporting small, local or owner-run shops.
I've realized this as well, the bigger the company the worse the experience.
The more customers they have the less they care about any individual customer.
The more products they have the less they care about any single product.
The more employees they have the less they care about each individual employee doing a good job. And there's no they any more, there's a big, soul-less profit glutton.
Yes, I agree. When shopping for goods and services locally, I look for the small shop that gets the best reviews. It's always been a better experience for me. The small companies can't afford to shaft 5% of their customers in the same way the big ones can.
> There’s a stew of factors at work behind the rise in consumer rage [including] the rise of AI customer service.
I'm not really sure the problem is AI here. I've had plenty of bad experiences with human customer service agents that were poorly-trained and hard to understand. An AI can be implemented in a shitty way, where it's at best a regurgitation of the help docs. Or, it can be implemented well, where it can autonomously take action without any human involved.
I have had a couple of experiences with the latter. Once you do, you realize that you actually don't need to talk to a person per se -- you just want your problem solved efficiently. That can be done with a human or an AI; it isn't really the most significant bit to be filtering on IMO.
I am only commenting from afar (haven’t been in the US since around 10 yrs ago, but consuming a lot of US centric information), but could it be that the US economy has simply become too extractional? In my eyes, healthy capitalism needs a balance between profit-seeking and customer-satisfying. And at least from what I read and hear, the balance is now gone, with consumers being nickled and dimed while the quality of products and services going down. I am thinking of all the hotel junk fees for example, or how airlines keep segmenting customers so everybody gets exactly the lowest level of experience they can cope with, while paying as much as possible.
I think so. There doesn't really feel like there are any "big names you can trust" anymore for mid-range things. It feels like there's only junk and expensive high-end. Its so tiring to shop for anything, having to look for every way a corner might have been cut.
As an cynical American, I view all publicly-traded companies as purely extractional at their core. Any positive customer experience is either coincidental or forced.
All these things add up, and when they sit on top of core issues, e.g. home ownership that is out of reach and expensive (and wasn't for their parents/grandparents), taxes that are too high as soon as you manage to make a half-decent salary, for too little benefit as far as they can feel...is it any wonder?
Maybe the increasingly common trend of companies making it impossible to contact human beings when help is needed has something to do with that.
I mean that's super easy.
Go to a restaurant. Oh you better tip 20-30-50% (Because thats how they hide the bill, and put the lowest value on there). Bad service? YOU MONSTER YOU TIPPED 15% (15% is standard, and on top of higher prices- that is more money.. service+restaurant owners basically forced a 5%+ pay raise for no value). On top of that.. oh no menus.. get your own device so you can order from us.
Walk into a grocer.. no cashier so you can avoid the stupid self checkouts, oh wait now they want you to comply to scan to get out. Don't do that you'll get some employee trying to lecture you about "required behavior". (That was in the Freiberg (Germany) grocer) Not doing that. (Also apparently thats in the Edeka in the Munich airport as well)
Go to Walmart, they brought back receipt checkers at times. And they get pissy when you tell them to go pound sand.
Overall, security guards at these places have such an ego and power trip that affects the average honest customer.
Removing checkout staff for self checkout machines that grade and judge you on your cashier role. Yet you don't get paid.
Let's not forget that Walgreens over exagerated the loss.. and then ramped up their money recovery systems to lock up items + raise the prices. Then they admitted they were crappy.
15% was standard—15 years ago. Then it ticked up to 18%. Then 20%. I've heard that some people are saying it should be 25%...but that was before I moved out of the country, to where tipping is purely for exceptional service.
But see, this is the problem with tipping: it's all informal, so what's "standard" can only be determined by actually talking to people and getting an overall average. I bet there are a lot of people who still think the "standard" is 15% (as it was through most of my life)—or even 10%.
The debate should have been about why there is even a "standard" tip not what the standard percentage is.
I think the vocal minority advocating for tipping are probably the ones that receive (unaccountable) higher tips while the ones that are scraping by would actually feel more comfortable with a good wage than unpredictable tips.
This decade began with a pandemic. Its origins and impact can be debated, but it did enormous and lasting harm, unreasonably.
The last presidential election disenfranchised a party (and with it half the country), suppressing turnout. Half of this country had no say in their nominee, by design.
Then A.I. was predicted to end white collar employment.
And now we are at war, with threats to security and economic stability that are unpredictable.
Nobody wanted any of this. Such is the sentiment of our decade.
This article reads like rage bait and it's about rage bait. Reading this then taking to the comments to kvetch about your personal suffering is learned helplessness writ large.
There are so many beautiful parks. There are so many experiences to be had away from sources of rage & frustration.
But you won't find it from a publication that depends on your rage addiction.
There are many beautiful parks and it's wonderful to spend time in them. But at some point you have to return to domesticity, and if you can't live that part of your life without being repeatedly screwed over by greedy corporations that don't even bother to provide a good service for the money you pay them, I think it's understandable people are starting to rage.
Maybe - but not all the time. You might not notice when you get honest service for an honest price - or when a community service is awesome and free! Because the next time you're triggered it flushes all your happy memories away.
And that is because you let it.
There's probably a name for the bias.
> There are so many beautiful parks.
No. I don't want to go anywhere anymore. All the sidewalks are full of SUVs, blatantly blocking my way even though it's prohibited.
Police is looking the other way.
City council doesn't react to inquiries because (as stated in the protocol of one of the meetings) "complaints sent by citizens are anecdotal anyway, and they tend to be concerned with just the one street where they live."
I try to avoid leaving the house as best as I can. Going outside has become pure rage fuel for me.
What exactly do you think your comment is? Metagriping is not somehow superior. Stop complaining about other people complaining.
At least they're complaining about systems and trying to think about how to regulate or change them. You're just complaining about your neighbors.
Please point to the part where I complained?
This all comes down to humane treatment of your fellow human beings. I grew up in an era where that was a core expectation of our culture.
But I see that tenet degrading in various ways - how we broadcast our views on social media (reduced empathy), how we interact in the real world (less patience and understanding), the polarization of our politics (less compromise and thus less effectiveness), and how organizations treat their customers (even basics like Terms of Service and Privacy Policies that have trended much more user-hostile over the last decade).
Cooperation is the fundamental basis on which civilization is built. I'm not sure what the start of a dark age looks like, but part of me feels like over the course of my lifetime I may be witnessing us entering one.
I fervently believe it's not too late to correct course, and I'm interested in ways individuals can have an impact. Set a personal example. Push back against dark patterns proposed by your corporate colleagues. Instill a deep sense of responsibility and healthy skepticism in your children. This is just a start, and I'm open to more suggestions.
Every little fight is what got us here, but that's also how we get out. Do good for the sake of good. Don't let others push you beyond your ethical bounds.
The good thing is we don't need everybody to do this. Even a small percentage can build momentum. So speak up and back up those who do. It makes it easier for others and causes people to be more nervous to float unethical ideas.
You must be very old, for one the murder rate is at the lowest point since 1900. I can agree that US political theater is getting more clownish but there were similar times throughout history (including brawls breaking out in the House over slavery. Slavery by the way was very much not humane treatment. Same for up to the 60s and beyond)
Western civilization has been built on exploitation not not cooperation, it's stil an open question if we can build a cooperative society, my guess is no.
I don’t think a high trust society is compatible with modernity. In my opinion, a high trust society comes from a relative naivety in most of the population that just sort of did what their grandparents did without thinking too much about it. In an “information” inundated populace, it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society. Maintaining a common culture isn’t easy either, it takes generations of shibboleth building, universal thought termination phrases and a brutal society-wide suppression of the “other”.
A datapoint that points to the contrary:
- Singapore pre-1965 was a low trust, racist society. The tensions were so bad that in 1964 there were racial riots.
- Today, after a lot of immigration, within 1-2 generations, Singapore became a high-trust society.
Similar stories in South Korea and Taiwan. In all 3 cases, the trust came recently, within 1-2 generations, and from different approaches of the state. They combine high institutional trust and the economic prosperity with medium-low interpersonal trust.
Singapore isn't high trust. It's brutal authoritarianism that squashes anything that looks remotely disharmonious between groups. High trust doesn't need a government boot stomping in the face of anyone who steps out of line.
singapore is an authoritarian state (ie. trust is forced) that presents a homogenous population, where after 2 generations of immigration, over three quarters of singapores populace are still ethnic chinese. let us now examine london's population and how it changed within 1 generation. london consisted of 90% ethnic english in the 1990s, nowadays this figure sits around 50%. concurrently, london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves. perhaps this occurred because england was not authoritarian enough?
"Ethnic Chinese" is a term covering 1.45 billion people. I don't even know where one would find a definition for "ethnic English", but if you take the NHS' "ethnic British" which ridiculously excludes even Irish heritage, I can see how you'd come to 50%.
A reasonable comparison would be to look at "Ethnic European", covering roughly 1.2 billion people.
> london's trust level and prosperity have become a shadow of their former selves
As someone who traveled the world a bit and lived for a decade in London, I'd beg to differ without further elaboration.
> it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society.
I think a large set of problems have come from this statement. We have, over time, become more intolerant of other cultures which is directly related to trust. Excluding the other isn't the path we need to take. We need to get back on the path where we can include other cultures.
> it becomes very hard to have a common culture
Counter point: culture has been compressed, not widened, in the last 60 years.
Accents have gone away, we listen to the same music, food has homogenized. By almost any measure, culture across the US has become a monoculture compared to any time in its history.
I don't think your point is necessarily wrong, but how do you square the above?
Accents have gone away?
The University of Georgia did a study and came to the conclusion that the Southern accent is fading. Less formally, a word game website did a survey that found the standard New York accent is fadingas well.
The Georgia study largely attributed it to migration and people moving more than they used to, with a focus on growing metro areas in the south. Though apparently some younger generations are trying to shed their accents to sound more professional, and the internet is creating a sort of average American accent.
Though nobody is worried they'll disappear entirely at the moment that I can find.
There has been a concerted push by the far right to delegitimize the idea of "human decency." It started to trickle into our mainstream culture by way of aspects of toxic masculinity, and "cringe culture"—can't be seen to be enjoying things unironically! Emotions (other than rage or contempt) aren't "manly"!
But with the rise of Trump through the mid-to-late 2010s, it became much more widespread and broad in scope: Dignity, respect (in the sense of "treat other people like humans"), and politeness are all "woke", and all that matters is me, me, me. Being a bully is the highest form of social capital.
And now with enshittification spreading to all our commercial services, the same basic ideas are expanded to the corporate realm. Customers are just numbers; "customer service" is for bots to provide; lock them in so they can't leave and it doesn't matter how terrible the service is.
It's not just cooperation that's needed—though you're absolutely right that it is the basis for our entire civilization; it's respect and dignity. Treating everyone you meet as if they're someone whose daily experience you care about, at least inasmuch as your interactions with them affect it.
It's never too late to shift a culture, and individuals can make an individual difference—very much in the sense of the old story about the girl throwing starfish back into the sea. But what's really needed is a cultural movement to restore dignity to our interactions, and I'm afraid I'm clueless as to how one starts one of those.
The Amazon app is unusable. I don't know what they are doing to it but today it wouldn't let me add more than 4 items.
Also the design choices suck; I have always accidentally ordered to the wrong address because Amazon uses a "default address". A good rule of design; assume that the user doesn't think about things that they don't explicitly select.
They also just advertise cheap crap and the app is so maximalist it feels more like a casino with all the lights and buttons.
Can we get a competitor please?
You can not get an competitor, because US goverment is not enforcing the antitrust law.
In an market economy the market can make efficient decisions about investment, production, and the distribution of goods and services to consumers, guided by price signals created through the forces of supply and demand. But the market can not prevent companies from forming an oligopoly or a single company winning the competition race and becoming an monopoly, only the goverment can.
"In 1999 a coalition of 19 states and the federal Justice Department sued Microsoft. A highly publicized trial found that Microsoft had strong-armed many companies in an attempt to prevent competition from the Netscape browser. In 2000, the trial court ordered Microsoft split in two to punish it, and prevent it from future misbehavior; however the Court of Appeals reversed the decision and removed the judge from the case for improperly discussing the case with the media while it was still pending. With the case in front of a new judge, Microsoft and the government settled, with the government dropping the case in return for Microsoft agreeing to cease many of the practices the government challenged."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit...
I don't know what you are speaking about You have millions of competitors.
From small business to big shopping centers, online resellers,...
I find that Amazon is still the best for new, niche items like stationery. Maybe I need a Bayesian update
Not to mention that everyone from Walmart to what's left of Sears has online marketplaces to directly compete with Amazon's. Also, eBay never went away, with more than 85% of their sales being through fixed-price listings, like on Amazon's marketplace.
I know multiple people who don't buy from Amazon because they think Amazon is undercutting the competition. I don't buy from Amazon, because other markets are more competitive and have lower prices. The chance of Amazon having a lower price than eBay or Aliexpress are so low that it's not worth my time to look.
Yeah. Target has been more than pleasant, but I know that they have always been good at design and ergonomics.
I should probably just switch to them
Yeah just go to a local store and buy something. Feel some community and support community. It’s the life you’ve been missing and trying to buy with Amazon
I use Amazon for niche products. Unfortunately the US doesn't have many niche stores like Japan does
>Can we get a competitor please?
Don’t shop on the internet. Shop in the real world.
Buying direct and not using the app is an option!
“Abuse will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to terminate the call.”
This reliably elicits the response they claim to want to avoid -it feels designed to prime the caller for anger.
> Nearly 80% of Americans had a service or product problem in 2025, and about two-thirds of those felt “rage” about it
"Rage" is has been encouraged and reinforced as an appropriate reaction to what is most likely a simple mistake or process breakdown. Another way that social media and algorithmic feeds have pandered to our base emotions. We are becoming a world of tantrum-throwing toddlers.
> what is most likely a simple mistake or process breakdown
I think this needs justification. My status quo is to believe that most times I have a problem when dealing with these large corporations that they've made any process for getting support or remediating what _should_ be a simple process breakdown is a labyrinth of steps to make it as difficult as possible to reach any sort of remedy to discourage you from even trying. People are raging because calmly asking for assistance doesn't work, the only way to pierce through is to make a scene big enough that it risks reputational damage to simply get the attention that every individual deserves.
Have you ever worked for a large corporation? Have you seen how bureaucratic everything is? It's the nature of the beast. It's not calculated, and not personal. It's a process scaled to deal with thousands or millions of people. That's why when I have a problem with my internet service, I never call, or use the website, or use the app. I go to the Xfinity retail store and talk to someone. I almost always leave satisfied.
> It's not calculated, and not personal.
It doesn't have to be either of these things to be intentional. Pretty much every large system is too complex to be calculated or personal in the way we would apply those terms to a human. However, you can still describe a system as having values and goals, still analyse it in terms of its incentives and the mechanisms it evolves to achieve them in its environment.
The incentives are continued YoY growth, the environment is a saturated market, and so the mechanisms are monopolistic and anti-consumer practices. "Go to the Xfinity retail store" doesn't prove anything except that you passed an effort gate, segmenting you away from someone working two jobs with young children at home. 1% of customers costing the company $10 is the same as 100% of customers costing them 10c, with the added benefit that your segment is more likely to hurt retention than the one with no time or energy for comparison-shopping.
Did a single person design and orchestrate this state of affairs? Unlikely, but the company as a whole is more than capable of blobbing its bureaucratic way towards more efficient digestion of your funds. Never underestimate dumb optimisation processes at scale. Given enough time, such processes have turned monkeys into Shakespeare.
One can feel rage if something is intentional and annoying, unintentional but annoying, intentional and not annoying, unintentional and not annoying.
The first is justified. The second is understandable but a case of confusing it with the first. The last two also happen, and are not justified nor understandable.
Unfortunately there is currently an excess of the first case. I think people are arguing this is a problem. It probably causes the other 3 to happen more too.
Maybe that means we shouldn't have so many large corporations.
> Have you ever worked for a large corporation? Have you seen how bureaucratic everything is? It's the nature of the beast. It's not calculated, and not personal
Yes I have, yes I have, yes it is, it absolutely is calculated, but you're right it's not personal.
It's "just good business"
But it absolutely is calculated. I've been in those rooms when those calculations were made. I've resigned in disgust when my pleas for them to show some humanity were ignored so they could continue turning the screws on their customers
You're absolutely wrong. It's calculated as hell
> But it absolutely is calculated. I've been in those rooms when those calculations were made.
It's insane. I've watched so many people ridicule basic descriptions of utterly mundane predatory business strategies as "conspiracy theories" who I know for a fact have sat in meetings planning (or being told to implement) them.
I think that middle class professionals are so deeply in denial that they don't believe that they themselves exist. The avoidance of the moral consequences of their own work blinds them to anything that reminds them of what they do.
> It's the nature of the beast. It's not calculated, and not personal.
These are simply weird declarations that you're making, and 20 years ago the world was not like this.
> It's a process scaled to deal with thousands or millions of people.
You're saying this as if there weren't thousands or millions of people 20 years ago.
> I go to the Xfinity retail store and talk to someone. I almost always leave satisfied.
I've never seen an Xfinity retail store in my life. I guess we have to wait until they close them all for you to stop patronizing people. Everybody here understands how businesses work, and we also understand why they cut services and quality. People are not confused or ignorant, they're angry that they don't have functioning governments, so these companies don't have to compete anymore.
You say "these companies don't have to compete anymore". How can you justify that statement? Do you have a reference/statistic/URL?
Processes are hollow and some AI isn’t making my life any better. Goods are junk and there are few examples of common physical craftsmanship in the marketplace. MAGA just want a well made jacket but they are on a life line of Walmart wages and goods. I get it. Rage is appropriate yet misguided.
Rage is not approprate in most cases. It gets your blood pressure and adrenaline spiking, but doesn't do anything to fix the problem. It probably makes it worse because it clouds rational thought.
Cheap goods have always been junk. Buy less, better stuff. Buy once, cry once.
Truly the response of a person of means who has never lived a life of do-withouts.
What do you do when the expensive options are also junk? Relatively few manufacturers actually focus on quality today.
Regardless of price why buy junk?
I'm genuinely curious how you think we should avoid it? If I had to buy a household appliance tomorrow, or a new car, I cannot think of a single company I'd feel safe purchasing from.
Gruen transfer confusion.
At this point I seriously don't agree with you.
Considering cheap "junk" from China has gotten a heck of a lot better and competitive.
However the average good in the US has been overly inflated.
You clearly have not seen the King of the Hill episode where Hank tries to tackle his anger
Self reflection would be more appropriate than rage. Buy less shit people don't need. Be more kind and compassionate.
In the words of Martin Luther King, "rage against poor services is the language of unheard customer".
Yes, I lately feel like the internet is lately mostly acting like a mob, and finger pointing "look, how stupid they are!" is the main content.
With me on the older side of things, believe it when I tell you that things actually used to, for the most part, Just Work.
"Simple mistakes" and "process breakdowns" were uncommon, notable, and dealt with quickly. Even the cheap stuff tended to last for quite some time, and was often repairable when it failed.
Enshittification is not only real, it is accelerating.
I feel a very similar sentiment in Australia. Everything is poorly made and full of anti-features. It breaks prematurely, and software updates make it worse by disabling features, adding things I don't want, or holding functionality I already paid for to ransom as a subscription.
Warranties aren't worth the paper they're printed on. Every warranty claim I've made in the past 5 years (a fair few) has been a Kafka-esque nightmare of bouncing back and forth between reps who don't understand the issue, callbacks at inopportune times because of failure to understand timezones, and waiting for things to ship back and forth between repair centres across the country or overseas. Customer support is carefully crafted to be set up to fail, while still maintaining the plausible deniability of Hanlon's Razor. You may eventually get your widget repaired or replaced, but it'll cost you as much in time, effort, and frustration as it would have to just buy a new one. This is of course deliberate, but you'll never prove it. Companies exploit people's politeness and aversion to conflict by telling polite customers that there's nothing that can be done. You get nothing unless you dig your heels in and get combative with the rep who is just doing their job. And the consumer protection agencies are toothless tigers.
So now I don't buy new products unless there's no other option. Previously, buying new meant a product you could trust, and an assurance that they'd take care of you if something went wrong. Since that contract is broken, I see no point buying new. Especially not when last year's model often has more features, fewer anti-features, and better repairability than the current one. I'm not the only one responding like this: The snake cannot eat its own tail forever, and these companies will eventually discover that if they keep making their products shittier and shittier then people will just stop buying them. Especially once new competitors who need to build a reputation start to eat the established brands' lunches.
Australia's consumer guarantees cannot be replaced or excluded by warranties and offer huge protections for consumers who know how to exercise their rights. Companies try to apply friction to the process and I suspect that frustrates a lot of people to the point of giving up.
I'd encourage Australians not to muck around in this regard. Fair Trading gives explicit instructions:
1) Contact the organisation
2) Suggest a resolution
3) give them a reasonable time to respond (ie. not forever)
4) Be polite
5) Lodge a complaint with Fair Trading
The more people that do this, the less sellers will try to do people over.
https://www.nsw.gov.au/legal-and-justice/consumer-rights-and...
(5) is often a waste of time, but filing an application in NCAT (or your state/territory’s equivalent) will get their attention.
I used to think Australia's consumer protection legislation and enforcement agencies were the envy of the world, until I tried to actually exercise some of those rights. Companies will do everything they can to be as unhelpful and frustrating as possible while still following the letter of the law. It feels like something out of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
I don't mind paying a little more in exchange for good customer support. My internet provider has gone from having support in Arabic countries, that speak French good enough but don't really care about you, to support in France and it makes all the difference in the world.
I was astonished when I asked a question and the guy did actual research, called back and told me things that a simple Google search on my end wouldn't have find.
Usually it's very different, they either don't know/don't care or say things that are obviously false.
I believe it's also why Amazon took so much in popularity. If I got an issue with Amazon product, I know it well be dealt with swiftly, as long as it's sent by Amazon and not by a third party.
The key in Australia is to buy from a physical retailer. They often cannot give you the runaround as under consumer law, they're responsible for the resolution.
Online retailers are also responsible under the law, as the laws apply to all retailers.
In practical terms, if it's an online business with no Australian presence it makes it hard to apply the law. Overseas online companies with an Australian presence, such as Amazon, have been successfully prosecuted [1,2,3]. The ACCC is still working through responsibility for third-party sellers, but it seems to be the case that if it is fulfilled by Amazon then it is responsible.
[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/amazon-in-court-for-in...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-29/accc-sues-amazon-butt...
[3] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-issues-takedown-r...
[4] https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/consumer-rights-and-advic...
Yep, but it's a lot easier for an online retailer to avoid you and give you more hassle (oh you have to post it back to us etc).
Everything is a scam now. You can’t exchange money for products or services anymore. We just exchange money for scams.
I can't speak for "US consumers" broadly, but this is 100% why I'm angry as a consumer.
Everything is a fucking scam.
And often also a subscription for something that doesn't warrant being a subscription, and signing up is one click, cancelling is a written letter or a 3 hour long phone call (because see again the part where "Everything is a fucking scam").
It's incredible that a fucking TV is also a scam. I have an LG TV that only works as a dumb screen and it's really beautiful but now when I look at it, I don't see the technical marvel, I think "is someone at LG reading screencaps of my conversations and 4chan threads" because recently I got aware that this could be a very real possibility. And it's not about the TV itself, it's about having to be on 24/7 in order to avoid scams. You cannot just exchange one unit of money for one unit of product or service that gives you one unit of happiness, you have to first get PhD in avoiding scams. And often you watch yourself fall for the scam even though you're aware of it because realistically, you have no other options. Sometimes I need to buy something in a supermarket nearby and then it's "do you sir have our cattle-tracking ad-infested resource-draining attention-grabbing fucking-annoying useless dehumanizing app?" and if you don't you pay €5 extra because fuck you that's why, there's no winning move here. I sometimes go to a shop 30 minutes further down just to avoid the humiliation ritual.
Why does the US feel this way, while (it seems to me) most other places don't?
I've been traveling a bit lately, and (again, it seems to me) that the US is trapped by "exceptionalism". They are the self-proclaimed best at everything all the time. If that's the starting point, then improvement seems impossible.
I can only conclude that consumers are treated badly in the US simply because they want to be.
I don't mean to be flippant. I mean that it the US people (as a majority) vote against their own interest. A majority looked at a candidate who was an obvious grifter, who ran on a policy of gutting consumer protections, and said "I want that".
A majority looked at a man, obsessed with personal gain and transactional relationships, who constantly rewarded business over consumers and said "I want that."
The entire premise of the MAGA movement is to return to an era of limited company oversight, reduced voter franchise, poorer population. The very heart of it is taking a chainsaw to the state that grew around protecting people from robber barron's.
And this runs deeper than personality. More than half a nation, and all levels of govt, support a party that overtly supports business over consumers. They reduce taxes (for the rich), they bloat the deficit, they erode protections.
Therefore I think it is this way because deep down Americans want it this way. They are easily convinced that "both sides are the same" or "cutting taxes for rich people is good for less-rich people", or that "if you vote our way you'll be a billionaire like me".
Ultimately the US is the best at everything. To claim improvement is possible is, well, frankly Unamerican. To learn from anyone else is to suggest a weakness, when clearly there aren't any.
When in doubt, everyone suggesting that things can be better is obviously a communist. Because that's the only alternative to the status quo.
[flagged]
but mostly the high prices
Before reading my guess is the shit quality of products.
Edit: 1/2 right, it's also shit service.
I’m only surprised it does not mention the road rage most drivers might only have in their mind but a few let it get the better of themselves and make the news -that’s always been present for most adult Americans daily lives.
One of the lead paragraph issues, yes. You win the steak knives!
I bought steak knives last year. The handles all shattered when I ran them through the dish washer.
Please don’t run them through the dish washer. Limited heat tolerance is common even for the really good ones.
I wonder if those old school knife cleaners which flung silver sand all over them in some rotary manner have some utility? Bone handled EPNS cutlery was definitely not designed for the modern age. (never seen one in action, seen them in victorian era catalogues and stately home kitchen-museums)
My dad has had the same set of steak knives for 25 years at least and has never washed them by hand even once I bet
We stopped making good products at some point
Please read the fine print before use. The steak knives are not to be used with animal products and poster will not be responsible in case of cracked blade.
You can curse at their dogshit customer service chatbot if you’re really upset about it, though.
In a way, shit quality/service is basically a form of high prices. If something that costs $20 and shouldn’t break for 4 years, breaks in 2 weeks, you effectively paid a high price for a $2 product.
Good point. Things cost more not just in unit cost but amortized over the item's lifetime (or I guess put differently, how much Refrigerator $ you spend over the course of your life).
>If something that costs $20 and shouldn’t break for 4 years, breaks in 2 weeks, you effectively paid a high price for a $2 product.
not true if all the other knives on the market at that price have the same performance, in which case that's just "the price of such a knife." in order to have paid too much there needs to be cheaper options with the same or better performance.
> in order to have paid too much there needs to be cheaper options
“Paid too much” from a consumer standpoint doesn’t need to have viable cheaper options. It’s about consumer expectations and results. If eggs in the grocery store cost $20/dozen, and you as a producer are taking a loss at that price because your producer costs arw $2/egg, consumers will still say they are paying too much. Because the expectation is coming from a market where a dozen costs $5-8.
buyer's remorse is not "paid too much"
> The History Of The Customer Rage Study
> [..] the seminal 1976 White House Study that provided a host of provocative and first-ever insights about American customer care and its potential for profit-making. [..] corporate America is not getting the bang for its buck spent on customer complaint handling that is indeed possible. Billions of dollars in potential revenue continue to be lost [..]
The guardian never disappoints framing this whole series around the study of some og consulting business. Who needs conservative media when this is the leftmost mainstream outlet imaginable?
None of the comments seem to mention that companies get to just cheat you out of your money and get bailed out when caught by Trump:
> That toxic cycle is now being sped up by a Trump administration that is defanging government watchdogs, consumer rights advocates say.
> In late 2023, Toyota Motor Credit, the finance arm of the carmaker, was ordered to pay $60m after dealers sold thousands of customers unwanted insurance products with their loans, and the lender made it nearly impossible for car buyers to remove them.
> A complaint hotline was staffed by employees instructed not to cancel the products until a consumer asked three times, and then to tell callers they needed to write a letter. The lender “directed customers to dead-end cancellation hotline, withheld refunds, and knowingly tarnished credit reports with false data,” the order by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) found.
> Last May, the acting CFPB head, Russell Vought, terminated the payout agreement, part of sweeping changes that have gutted the agency, which was set up after the financial crisis to oversee financial firms and has returned $21bn to consumers.
This is actually making the case for why agencies like the CFPB are a bad way to go about this. If that was a class action lawsuit instead, the plaintiff's lawyers aren't going to drop the case just because there was a change of administrations.
It's more a case for why the US system of government is a failure.
Which system of government is capable of operating at the scale of the US without going sideways? It's not the EU, look at what just happened with Chat Control.
Maybe the problem is attempting to regulate at that scale to begin with.
Chat control is not relevant to consumer protection, which is what the article is about.
Of course, Americans also have much worse privacy rights than Europeans do, Chat Control notwithstanding. GDPR gives Europeans the right to delete their personal data. In the US, data brokers routinely launder highly personal information about Americans and nothing is done. Good luck figuring out how to delete that.
> Chat control is not relevant to consumer protection
It's relevant to demonstrating a failed government, however.
> Of course, Americans also have much worse privacy rights than Europeans do, Chat Control notwithstanding.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
> Europeans the right to delete their personal data. In the US, data brokers routinely launder highly personal information about Americans and nothing is done. Good luck figuring out how to delete that.
Good luck figuring out how to delete it from the databases of foreign companies even if you're in Europe. You think companies in China are complying with any of that when you have no way to prove whether they are or not?
That's why the only thing that works is ensuring they don't have your data to begin with, i.e. E2EE. Trying to regulate what they do with it once the cat is is out of the bag is too late.
The US government is not a failure. It simply does not care about consumers. Those are two different things.
Perhaps it’s not the system, perhaps it’s the electorate.
And let's be clear: the free market will self correct eventually. There is absolutely no need for increased consumer legislation. Consumers can just go to another provider or retailer - and get a slightly different form of scammed. Letting the consumer choose their flavour of scam is the best possible system that can exist.
Impeding an organisation's right to scam customers is un-American and one step away from tyranny and communism.
edit: /s
Let me supply an /s tag, just in case.
The sarcasm is the problem.
In many markets the market is too consolidated and the consumer doesn't actually have an option that isn't a scam, but in those cases the solution shouldn't be to regulate the oligopolies while leaving them in place to buy off the regulators or weasel their way out of the rules with expensive lawyers, it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other.
In other markets there is competition, but in those markets the competition actually works. As soon as you have enough suppliers that at least one of them isn't scamming the customer, who is going to patronize the other ones by choice?
> it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other.
I wonder what the world would look like if you just prohibited any single organisation or controlling group over a certain size. Say you couldn't have a company over 100 million in value.
You could still have massive projects like semiconductor fabs and steelworks but they would have to be collectives of dozens of (competing) smaller companies. Efficiency may take a hit especially in the verticals but would it be be outweighed by greater market dynamism as no one company can dominate a sector and crush out competition and innovation?
Maybe provide a tapered relief for worker salaries and/or capital outlay to encourage employing people and building things rather that hoarding cash in financial structures.
Obviously this is impossible to do as the global system stands, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
> I wonder what the world would look like if you just prohibited any single organisation or controlling group over a certain size. Say you couldn't have a company over 100 million in value.
What you want is a maximum market share percentage, and for it to be something like 20%, with the market definition never including products that aren't actual substitutes for each other, e.g. the market is never "brake pads", it's "brake pads for Honda Civic", but that could still have a dozen independent suppliers or more.
> Efficiency may take a hit especially in the verticals
It's not obvious that this is even a thing at that scale. Economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) have diminishing returns once the fixed cost contribution per unit is already small, whereas diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, entity size exceeding Dunbar number, office politics, etc.) gets worse with size, and the latter comes to dominate long before anything reaches the scale of a global monopoly.
> Maybe provide a tapered relief for worker salaries and/or capital outlay to encourage employing people and building things rather that hoarding cash in financial structures.
Let worker salaries always be deducted in the year they're paid out instead of the existing nonsense where R&D money which is already spent can't immediately be deducted.
> Obviously this is impossible to do as the global system stands, but I find it an interesting thought experiment.
Why is it impossible to do? The US or EU alone or any large enough coalition of other countries together could make the rule apply to anyone who wants to sell into that market, because they have an economy large enough that either the incumbents would comply or having excluded them for not complying, the market size would be enough to sustain new domestic suppliers.
Sarcasm is the problem? What an insane take. You'll need to explain that one for us lol.
Perhaps you meant "their (sarcastic) implication that the only solution is regulation is the problem"? I would agree. I just chose one thing to use in my sarcastic comment and believe there are multiple solutions – I'm glad it's sparked a sub thread.
The nature of sarcasm is to put up a straw man so weak that it falls over on its own rather than needing you to knock it down. The problem, of course, is that it's a straw man.
In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good. But the problem there is the lack of competition rather than its presence, and the markets that actually have vigorous competition do pretty well.
I really do have to admire your determination to make sarcasm the real problem on this topic. Take my upvote!
> In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good
Voters have supported politicians that have implicitly or explicitly supported conditions to enable oligopolies: reduced r or no competition/market authorities, weak M&A oversight, increased subsidies, regulatory capture, etc
A thousand examples of efficiency and ease has me standing in a broken self checkout buying some fake-ocean scented deodorant I probably done need but was perfectly marketed to make me feel inept without it, in a plastic container that was bigger last year but now costs $9 and the scanner thinks I didn't put it in the bag yet and I’m just so sad to fight or resist after an 9 hour work day that ill end up going home and eat frozen food and watching a bad remake of an old blockbuster. Of course consumers should be angry. The lies and greed are gutting society while rewarding white color mid level VPs at PG and Kroger. What a future to be excited about.