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.
I happen to know a managing director at one of the largest private equity firms in the world. This person will occasionally reach out to me—we’re not local to each other—and ask for a delivery here of the products my one-person business makes. These are for amounts usually around $100.
So I was asked to do this recently. I took care of things and then a bill was requested. I explained there was none because the PE firm had overpaid two years ago by $175, thus this $75 order would not be invoiced.
The director’s response came across as being aghast. It wasn’t that I remembered the overpayment, but that an economic speck of dust like my business would do this, by which I mean, not take the money which would have no bearing on the PE firm. Thankfully, by refusing to send an invoice there was nothing to give the firm’s accounting department, and that tied the director’s hands enough to ensure I wouldn’t get paid.
My point isn’t to pat myself on the back. If I didn’t share this here no one else would know what happened. I’ve told this to support what @rkagerer has said above, that humane treatment of others and cooperation are critical to society. It’s easy to think in terms of scale when making these decisions—what’s $175 to a big PE firm (nothing) compared to its value to me (a little something)—but there’s more value accrued in the rate at which we make those humane and cooperative choices. The more often more of us do that then the more we trust each other, and trust is fundamental to accomplishing things and making progress together.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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”.
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.
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."
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
US consumers aren't angry, but the British newspaper The Guardian wants us to think they are. This post is really only repackaged British TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I happen to know a managing director at one of the largest private equity firms in the world. This person will occasionally reach out to me—we’re not local to each other—and ask for a delivery here of the products my one-person business makes. These are for amounts usually around $100.
So I was asked to do this recently. I took care of things and then a bill was requested. I explained there was none because the PE firm had overpaid two years ago by $175, thus this $75 order would not be invoiced.
The director’s response came across as being aghast. It wasn’t that I remembered the overpayment, but that an economic speck of dust like my business would do this, by which I mean, not take the money which would have no bearing on the PE firm. Thankfully, by refusing to send an invoice there was nothing to give the firm’s accounting department, and that tied the director’s hands enough to ensure I wouldn’t get paid.
My point isn’t to pat myself on the back. If I didn’t share this here no one else would know what happened. I’ve told this to support what @rkagerer has said above, that humane treatment of others and cooperation are critical to society. It’s easy to think in terms of scale when making these decisions—what’s $175 to a big PE firm (nothing) compared to its value to me (a little something)—but there’s more value accrued in the rate at which we make those humane and cooperative choices. The more often more of us do that then the more we trust each other, and trust is fundamental to accomplishing things and making progress together.
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.
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”.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
In the words of Martin Luther King, "rage against poor services is the language of unheard customer".
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?
Gruen transfer confusion.
You clearly have not seen the King of the Hill episode where Hank tries to tackle his anger
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
I am angry because I feel like I am being robbed by the current administration, and other than vote there is nothing I can do about it.
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...
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.
US consumers aren't angry, but the British newspaper The Guardian wants us to think they are. This post is really only repackaged British TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).
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.
Perhaps it’s not the system, perhaps it’s the electorate.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.