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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't blame people too much though. I'm pretty lucky to be in a place in my life where I can afford to comfortably resign in protest if I don't like what my bosses are doing. Not everyone is that fortunate, so I get it and I don't blame those people
My beef is with people who are never satisfied and maybe never can be satisfied. People who have enough money to retire literally today and still enjoy the rest of their lives... But instead they keep doing everything they can to make more and more money for basically no reason other than "I have a bigger number than you 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 business work, and they 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.
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.
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.
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.
The parks are a lot more beautiful in Paris and London than in the U.S. cities like New York or Philadelphia or whatever.
On the East Coast at least, parks are for loud people to play music, they're full of litter, dogs running around, and a general American distaste for peace and beauty and quiet contemplation. We Americans love function, profit and socializing more than we value beauty.
We Americans loathe quiet, contemplating, reading, and taking things in. It's a waste of time that could be spent doing something productive.
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.
> Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
I think this is pretty grossly overstating things. Yes, chat control is bad, but there's little doubt in my mind that EU regulations overall have been better for consumers than the situation in the US.
“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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
This doesn't apply to small residential contractors. I've had nothing but bad experiences hiring contractors. They rarely do the work themselves and instead hire subcontractors who don't understand the requirements and care very little about the outcome. I've had better experiences with companies who are large enough to care about their reputation, or contractors i know personally.
I wish I knew that one month ago. Hired a small local company to fix something in my house, great reviews in yelp/facebook/google, license+insurance. The guy came for the estimate and everything felt smooth. Two other guys came for the actual job, no company, no license, I couldn't even communicate with them until I opened voice translator. They did a terrible job and made the situation worse than before.
Starting a business, but that requires financial independence, right?
If not, what do you do in your 40's with no healthcare? Or the state marketplace healthcare that is basically 'catrastrophe only', with no out of network support, and still costs over 800 a month?
Do you rent, or do you own, and if you own, how about the property taxes.
Starting a business in 2026 is for the Made Men of tech, who've sold monstrous share amounts for millions, and can post messages on Hackernews with advice on how to escape the rat race.
> Starting a business, but that requires financial independence, right?
What are you even talking about. How many of your local restaurants, coffee shops, laundromats, roofing companies, landscape consultants, shoe repair shops etc do you think are owned by anyone with financial independence?
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 of the products my one-person business makes to someone in my area. 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.
A datapoints that point to the contrary:
- Singapore pre-1965 was a low trust, racist society. The tensions were so bad in 1964 there were racial riots.
- Today, after a lot of immigration, within 1-2 generations, Singapore became a high-trust society.
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. now let's look at 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that GDP doesn’t go up by itself and and the people who have enough to never work again need someone take care of them. Inequality that isn’t based on fair input does that. Hard work never guaranteed good life but it used to have some fair payouts to that, now hard work is pretty much exclusively for those who wont ve able to get a fair payout(i.e. no matter how hard the work is, owning a house being mathematically out of reach for so many people).
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 sad part is that Speed Queen, while absolutely worth it, costs 2-3x the price of the average pile of junk sold in [Home Depot, Lowes, etc]. Buy once, cry once and a legit example of the boots theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
To add to this, I think that spending more money these days helps a lot less.
Higher prices these days mean more features, but not necessarily higher quality.
Everything is a subscription, can only be controlled by their app, and is mass-produced in a factory in China, brought here and then sold with a story plus a huge markup.
A less connected example:
You want to buy a new couch. Budget: $2k. You get:
* bad construction, it'll creak
* badly joined, so the pieces will come loose
* barely springs under the cusions
* non-removeable cushions
* foam that collapses in 2 years
But even spending $6k isn't gonna mitigate all of those issues above. You're probably closer to $10k.
And then if you want a recliner, finding one with removeable cushions is nearly impossible. So far I found 1 brand that does it. ONE.
You lost us after "Canada." I have zero doubt things like furniture and clothing are going to be superior if made in Canada than the U.S. or China. I checked your link and there are no stores in the U.S. (or their zip code search doesn't work).
Natuzzi (an Italian brand) has its "Editions" line that's cheaper because it's made in China. From my experience, the quality is good.
Also, brands like CB2 and Crate & Barrel are American and popular in Canada - especially CB2 because of its good designs and quality at cheaper prices.
I never said Canadian-made furniture is inherently superior. My point was simply that the blanket statement that you can't buy a decent couch for around $2k isn't universally true. I bought one in that price range that's solid wood and well-built. It even has removable cushions.
I always wondered how my coworkers in tech (imply to) spent so much money (even without kids) and then I hear things like "you can't buy a car for less than 50k these days" or read these posts. Then you test drive a 20k used car and the only thing that is more than 10% worse about it about it is how quickly your ego goes 0 to 60 :) A good couch costs around 1k and I'm pretty sure based on extensive experience the $200 IKEA couches are quite decent.
How often do you need to replace foam? Our 10 years + 2 moves old couch (that cost iirc $700-800 then) is basically good as new. I guess we don't have kids or dogs, the worst thing that happened to it is a gerbil briefly finding a way into the hollows :)
Removable cushions in a couch are pretty rare.
As a counter example, both of my couches still have perfect cushions. One bought for C$800 15 years ago and another for C$1500 5 years ago.
No one ever cared, at least in the U.S. about 'food rent healthcare transport'. In the U.S. we don't combine those ideas together. Unless you're a student or a politician, almost no one talks like that.
You and I know it's connected in a sense.
But is it meaningfully connected? It plays into a story about corporate hegemony, money influencing politicians through lobbying, the power of health care conglomerates and large corporations.
But it doesn't have any teeth to the average person, who's talking about inflation, or they're talking about gas, or they're talking about taxes, or they're talking about health care bills. I never hear a unified narrative. Should I be? Is it helpful? Socialist narratives have a bad reputation, and our current socialist politicians talk a LOT about what happens overseas, or immigration, or matters of race and gender. I am talking about the U.S. socialists, here.
> No one ever cared, at least in the U.S. about 'food rent healthcare transport'. In the U.S. we don't combine those ideas together. Unless you're a student or a politician, almost no one talks like that.
GP said "essential things like food, rent, and transport, let alone healthcare".
I think you're right that we rarely phrase it like 'food rent healthcare transport', but "average people" certainly talk about spending so much on essentials that there's nothing left for fun, or being unable to afford the essentials.
I read comments like this, they’re all written in broad language I assume to people already nodding in agreement.
The world today is not perfect: the smartphone and social media have rapidly and I think negatively changed society, empowering fringey issues, elevatiing the angriest personalities and inflaming passions. But materially, apart from housing and healthcare (which is hardly the greatest present concern of most people short of middle age), *we live in an age of wonders*.
To your complaint about bot reviews and product quality, it has never been easier to return unsatisfactory products through Amazon. And thanks to its massive market power, the seller eats a lot of the cost of that return. As for longevity, I just don’t see it. I buy a lot of cheap little Chinese tools and supplies from AliExpress (which does not have Amazon’s generous return policy), and I’ve never been disappointed.
Healthcare is expensive because it doesn’t scale, and Americans use a lot of it and demand that it be the absolute best. 92% of Americans have health insurance, ~55% through work.
I’m sure you’re aware of these facts, but boring realities would diffuse the angry attention you enjoy. Well, enjoy it!
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.
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.
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).
Every single time someone mentions "TDS" all I can think is how much you sound like a literal cult member worshiping "Dear Leader". If you're incapable of independent thought using your own "God-given brain", that's not a thing to be proud of. It's a level of ignorance on-par with "Okay, Boomer."
blooalien says "Every single time someone mentions "TDS" all I can think is how much you sound like a literal cult member worshiping "Dear Leader".
And your post brings to mind how you sound like a literal leftist cult member worshiping brainless ideology and hate, i.e., spewing even more TDS.
As for the term "TDS": although a trigger for your cranial meltdown (such as it is), it remains a useful tag for a common behavior in liberals in everyday conversation.
Furthermore here you show that TDS exists and that it impairs your thought process. Perhaps you should let go of the hate, exercise what little intellect remains engaged and plow through and attempt to digest others' statements, rather than insulting their mere words. After all, we have to read yours too.*
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.
Gmail is a good example of being a Very Good Company, waiting a few years when everyone is hooked on the products the company made, and then turning in the one we know today where Do No Evil was long scrubbed as a motto.
> [..] 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?
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.
Unfortunately, that's a debate you need to be having with the collective restaurant owners of the nation. Until and unless they start paying living wages, there will be a "standard", however unofficial, that tips of some level are expected for every server who's not actively terrible.
The picture you paint of there being a "vocal minority advocating for tipping...that receive higher tips," at the expense of those who want good wages, suggests that you have very little contact with the type of people who work these jobs. Absolutely, all of them would love good wages. But that's not something they have the power to push for (because labor power in the US is abysmally low, and frequently vilified as if corporations were the entities the country—nay, the entire world—is set up to serve, rather than human beings).
So rather than snidely grumbling about how greedy these people are who want tips, instead of good wages, maybe put that energy toward telling your representatives you want a higher minimum wage? ...Or are you also one of those who thinks that minimum wages are counterproductive and will necessarily be inflated away (despite the fact that many locales, in and out of the US, already have higher minimum wages, and are thriving for it)?
The only people who think tipping is a good system is business owners who use it as an excuse to not pay living wages. Tips are a highly variable subsidy to workers so the owner's can maintain a higher profit margin
It gets easier if you stop worrying so much about what these strangers think. Tip 15%, let the receipt checker roll their eyes when you walk past, let them judge you on your self-checkout speed, etc. Who cares?
Oh I agree with you. However, the stress does add up, and the businesses escalate to get worse.
I.e. costco introduces self checkout, don't use it, then they start putting people to pester you to use it/try to check your card before you get to where you need (because non-members use self checkout), then they introduce door checking of membership.. all of this is over their desire to reduce staff in the store and force self checkout.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 58.0 ms ] threadEdit: 1/2 right, it's also shit service.
"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 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.
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
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.
I don't blame people too much though. I'm pretty lucky to be in a place in my life where I can afford to comfortably resign in protest if I don't like what my bosses are doing. Not everyone is that fortunate, so I get it and I don't blame those people
My beef is with people who are never satisfied and maybe never can be satisfied. People who have enough money to retire literally today and still enjoy the rest of their lives... But instead they keep doing everything they can to make more and more money for basically no reason other than "I have a bigger number than you do"
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 business work, and they 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.
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.
"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.
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.
And that is because you let it.
There's probably a name for the bias.
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.
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.
On the East Coast at least, parks are for loud people to play music, they're full of litter, dogs running around, and a general American distaste for peace and beauty and quiet contemplation. We Americans love function, profit and socializing more than we value beauty.
We Americans loathe quiet, contemplating, reading, and taking things in. It's a waste of time that could be spent doing something productive.
> 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.
Maybe the problem is attempting to regulate at that scale to begin with.
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.
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.
I think this is pretty grossly overstating things. Yes, chat control is bad, but there's little doubt in my mind that EU regulations overall have been better for consumers than the situation in the US.
“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”.
Everything is a fucking scam (and often also a subscription for something that doesn't warrant being a subscription).
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.
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?
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...
Don’t shop on the internet. Shop in the real world.
From small business to big shopping centers, online resellers,...
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.
I should probably just switch to them
Impeding an organisation's right to scam customers is un-American and one step away from tyranny and communism.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If not, what do you do in your 40's with no healthcare? Or the state marketplace healthcare that is basically 'catrastrophe only', with no out of network support, and still costs over 800 a month?
Do you rent, or do you own, and if you own, how about the property taxes.
Starting a business in 2026 is for the Made Men of tech, who've sold monstrous share amounts for millions, and can post messages on Hackernews with advice on how to escape the rat race.
What are you even talking about. How many of your local restaurants, coffee shops, laundromats, roofing companies, landscape consultants, shoe repair shops etc do you think are owned by anyone with financial independence?
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.
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.
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.
Similar stories in South Korea and Taiwan.
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.
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 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.
Fascinating! Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, that GDP doesn’t go up by itself and and the people who have enough to never work again need someone take care of them. Inequality that isn’t based on fair input does that. Hard work never guaranteed good life but it used to have some fair payouts to that, now hard work is pretty much exclusively for those who wont ve able to get a fair payout(i.e. no matter how hard the work is, owning a house being mathematically out of reach for so many people).
God damn one of the best purchases I’ve made for a house. There is a market for “dumb products” that aren’t stupid.
Higher prices these days mean more features, but not necessarily higher quality.
Everything is a subscription, can only be controlled by their app, and is mass-produced in a factory in China, brought here and then sold with a story plus a huge markup.
A less connected example:
You want to buy a new couch. Budget: $2k. You get:
But even spending $6k isn't gonna mitigate all of those issues above. You're probably closer to $10k.And then if you want a recliner, finding one with removeable cushions is nearly impossible. So far I found 1 brand that does it. ONE.
https://www.urbanbarn.com/en/product/sibley-sofa-chaise-SIBL...
Also, brands like CB2 and Crate & Barrel are American and popular in Canada - especially CB2 because of its good designs and quality at cheaper prices.
But for the couch, is it unreasonable to want a couch in which I can replace the foam? For not wanting a throw away product?
You and I know it's connected in a sense.
But is it meaningfully connected? It plays into a story about corporate hegemony, money influencing politicians through lobbying, the power of health care conglomerates and large corporations.
But it doesn't have any teeth to the average person, who's talking about inflation, or they're talking about gas, or they're talking about taxes, or they're talking about health care bills. I never hear a unified narrative. Should I be? Is it helpful? Socialist narratives have a bad reputation, and our current socialist politicians talk a LOT about what happens overseas, or immigration, or matters of race and gender. I am talking about the U.S. socialists, here.
GP said "essential things like food, rent, and transport, let alone healthcare".
I think you're right that we rarely phrase it like 'food rent healthcare transport', but "average people" certainly talk about spending so much on essentials that there's nothing left for fun, or being unable to afford the essentials.
The world today is not perfect: the smartphone and social media have rapidly and I think negatively changed society, empowering fringey issues, elevatiing the angriest personalities and inflaming passions. But materially, apart from housing and healthcare (which is hardly the greatest present concern of most people short of middle age), *we live in an age of wonders*.
To your complaint about bot reviews and product quality, it has never been easier to return unsatisfactory products through Amazon. And thanks to its massive market power, the seller eats a lot of the cost of that return. As for longevity, I just don’t see it. I buy a lot of cheap little Chinese tools and supplies from AliExpress (which does not have Amazon’s generous return policy), and I’ve never been disappointed.
Healthcare is expensive because it doesn’t scale, and Americans use a lot of it and demand that it be the absolute best. 92% of Americans have health insurance, ~55% through work.
I’m sure you’re aware of these facts, but boring realities would diffuse the angry attention you enjoy. Well, enjoy it!
This entire thread should be flagged out of existence - a waste of user time.
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.
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.
And your post brings to mind how you sound like a literal leftist cult member worshiping brainless ideology and hate, i.e., spewing even more TDS.
As for the term "TDS": although a trigger for your cranial meltdown (such as it is), it remains a useful tag for a common behavior in liberals in everyday conversation.
Furthermore here you show that TDS exists and that it impairs your thought process. Perhaps you should let go of the hate, exercise what little intellect remains engaged and plow through and attempt to digest others' statements, rather than insulting their mere words. After all, we have to read yours too.*
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [..] 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?
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.
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%.
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.
The picture you paint of there being a "vocal minority advocating for tipping...that receive higher tips," at the expense of those who want good wages, suggests that you have very little contact with the type of people who work these jobs. Absolutely, all of them would love good wages. But that's not something they have the power to push for (because labor power in the US is abysmally low, and frequently vilified as if corporations were the entities the country—nay, the entire world—is set up to serve, rather than human beings).
So rather than snidely grumbling about how greedy these people are who want tips, instead of good wages, maybe put that energy toward telling your representatives you want a higher minimum wage? ...Or are you also one of those who thinks that minimum wages are counterproductive and will necessarily be inflated away (despite the fact that many locales, in and out of the US, already have higher minimum wages, and are thriving for it)?
I.e. costco introduces self checkout, don't use it, then they start putting people to pester you to use it/try to check your card before you get to where you need (because non-members use self checkout), then they introduce door checking of membership.. all of this is over their desire to reduce staff in the store and force self checkout.
"Question about Order"
"Talk to Salesperson"
"Billing inquiry"
...
I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch yet. Good afternoon Nunez...
This reliably elicits the response they claim to want to avoid -it feels designed to prime the caller for anger.
E.g., "keep the calls as short as possible".