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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.

Everything is a scam now. You can’t exchange money for products or services anymore. We just exchange money for scams.

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but mostly the high prices

Before reading my guess is the shit quality of products.

Edit: 1/2 right, it's also shit service.

> 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.

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

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.