Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices

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.

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.

“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 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.

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'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.

Up until the 1960s, there weren't that many things the US consumer felt they 'needed'. Heck, even in the 1980s, people considered a microwave, cable television, air conditioning (in most places), a second car, televisions throughout the home, etc., a luxury. There still aren't that many things the American consumer needs... they just perceive they do. In the past, consumers prioritized their wants better, probably because they had no choice. A whole lot fewer people had a whole bunch of credit and credit was rarely used for that sort of thing.

Of course the American consumer is dissatisfied. It thinks it is buying out things that aren't and never were for sale, like parts of a jigsaw puzzle called 'the american dream', earning a piece for every time it feels compelled to do somethink like plop down $1200 on a backyard grill. but there is no bigger picture. It's just stuff. Sometimes good stuff to have (god bless cool air in a heatwave). But stuff we didn't feel judged not to have before.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

"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.

This reliably elicits the response they claim to want to avoid -it feels designed to prime the caller for anger.

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.

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.

> [..] 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?

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

Here's a weird and mild anecdote. I have enjoyed using a combo duvet cover and covertlet, it works all year around, you can put the winter comforter in it, or it's heavy enough to use by itself. Used these for years, ordered from Amazon and BB&B. I spent a lot of time recently looking at the same thing. It was called Vue by Ellery Lifestyles. Eventually Google explained what happened - private equity gutted it in a classic tale of how private equity squeezes and destroys companies. Will spare you the boring but the gist:

(company is from 2010 or so)

"In 2017, Ellery Homestyles (the actual manufacturer of Vue) began aggressively restructuring and acquiring other bedding assets (like Extreme Linen) to scale up for massive digital and omnichannel retail.During this corporate scale-up, older multi-piece specialty sets like the 2-in-1 Barcelona coverlet were phased out to make room for high-volume, mass-market designs.Eventually, Ellery Homestyles' brands were absorbed into even larger manufacturing parents, like home textiles giant Keeco"

<.. headwinds >

"The final blow to the brand's original identity came when Keeco’s private equity strategies ran into severe financial headwinds. Keeco aggressively loaded up on debt to merge with a bankrupt competitor, Hollander Sleep Products, in 2022. When major customer Bed Bath & Beyond went under, Keeco was left holding massive debt.To handle this, their private equity backer, Centre Lane Partners, executed a classic PE maneuver in early 2025: a corporate carve-out.They split the company in two. They rebranded the core utility bedding business as Live Comfortably and threw the struggling fashion bedding/window division into a separate sister company called Simply Interior Homes.

By June 2026, the newly formed fashion division filed for bankruptcy, with court filings explicitly stating that the private equity carve-out left the fashion business severely underfunded and hollowed out. Private equity essentially treated the brand exactly how the playbook dictates: it funded its initial growth, rolled it into a massive $1 billion corporate conglomerate to eliminate manufacturing complexity, and finally carved the company apart when debt mounted. The high-end, 100% cotton Vue Barcelona set was a casualty of a system designed to favor mass-production efficiency over specialty textile design."

Your grandpa could afford a house and family, but he’d never have been able to afford something so wonderful and life changing! US consumers should stop complaining and realize that those starving children in Africa can’t afford such TVs and they should shut up and be happy with what we give them.

Impeding an organisation's right to scam customers is un-American and one step away from tyranny and communism.

edit: /s