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Why are US consumers so angry? It's not just high prices
- edoceo 2mo agoBefore reading my guess is the shit quality of products. Edit: 1/2 right, it's also shit service.
- ggm 2mo agoOne of the lead paragraph issues, yes. You win the steak knives!
- stuart78 2mo agoPlease read the fine print before use. The steak knives are not to be used with animal products and poster will not be responsible in case of cracked blade.
- dd8601fn 2mo agoYou can curse at their dogshit customer service chatbot if you’re really upset about it, though.
- pineapplepizza6 2mo ago[dead]
- zzgo 2mo agoI bought steak knives last year. The handles all shattered when I ran them through the dish washer.
- Spooky23 2mo ago[dead]
- Filligree 2mo agoPlease don’t run them through the dish washer. Limited heat tolerance is common even for the really good ones.
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoMy dad has had the same set of steak knives for 25 years at least and has never washed them by hand even once I bet We stopped making good products at some point
- Filligree 2mo ago25 years isn’t that long, but it’s more about the material. If you have metal studs inside a plastic handle, then the metal expands in the dishwasher and cracks the plastic. If the handle is wooden… everyone knows wood won’t survive a dishwasher. If it’s metal, then yeah, that can work. That is, fortunately, easy to spot when you’re buying them… but the kitchen store in my city doesn’t have any knives that are all-metal and hold a decent edge. (Except some overpriced Japanese ones I skipped over on basis that the metal is so hard it would be easy to damage them by accident. And I don’t need to do the “cut paper in half by dropping it” trick.)
- ggm 2mo agoI wonder if those old school knife cleaners which flung silver sand all over them in some rotary manner have some utility? Bone handled EPNS cutlery was definitely not designed for the modern age. (never seen one in action, seen them in victorian era catalogues and stately home kitchen-museums)
- darth_avocado 2mo agoIn 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.
- hankbond 2mo agoGood point. Things cost more not just in unit cost but amortized over the item's lifetime (or I guess put differently, how much Refrigerator $ you spend over the course of your life).
- fsckboy 2mo ago>If something that costs $20 and shouldn’t break for 4 years, breaks in 2 weeks, you effectively paid a high price for a $2 product. not true if all the other knives on the market at that price have the same performance, in which case that's just "the price of such a knife." in order to have paid too much there needs to be cheaper options with the same or better performance.
- darth_avocado 2mo ago> in order to have paid too much there needs to be cheaper options “Paid too much” from a consumer standpoint doesn’t need to have viable cheaper options. It’s about consumer expectations and results. If eggs in the grocery store cost $20/dozen, and you as a producer are taking a loss at that price because your producer costs arw $2/egg, consumers will still say they are paying too much. Because the expectation is coming from a market where a dozen costs $5-8.
- fsckboy 2mo agobuyer's remorse is not "paid too much"
- stevenwoo 2mo agoI’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.
- qwerty_clicks 2mo agoA 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.
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- SoftTalker 2mo ago> 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.
- qwerty_clicks 2mo agoProcesses are hollow and some AI isn’t making my life any better. Goods are junk and there are few examples of common physical craftsmanship in the marketplace. MAGA just want a well made jacket but they are on a life line of Walmart wages and goods. I get it. Rage is appropriate yet misguided.
- SoftTalker 2mo agoRage is not approprate in most cases. It gets your blood pressure and adrenaline spiking, but doesn't do anything to fix the problem. It probably makes it worse because it clouds rational thought. Cheap goods have always been junk. Buy less, better stuff. Buy once, cry once.
- doctorwho42 2mo agoTruly the response of a person of means who has never lived a life of do-withouts.
- m4x 2mo agoWhat do you do when the expensive options are also junk? Relatively few manufacturers actually focus on quality today.
- giardini 2mo agoRegardless of price why buy junk?
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoThis 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.
- m4x 2mo agoThere 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.
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoMaybe - but not all the time. You might not notice when you get honest service for an honest price - or when a community service is awesome and free! Because the next time you're triggered it flushes all your happy memories away. And that is because you let it. There's probably a name for the bias.
- pessimizer 2mo agoWhat exactly do you think your comment is? Metagriping is not somehow superior. Stop complaining about other people complaining. At least they're complaining about systems and trying to think about how to regulate or change them. You're just complaining about your neighbors.
- cadamsdotcom 2mo agoPlease point to the part where I complained?
- Hackbraten 2mo ago> There are so many beautiful parks. No. I don't want to go anywhere anymore. All the sidewalks are full of SUVs, blatantly blocking my way even though it's prohibited. Police is looking the other way. City council doesn't react to inquiries because (as stated in the protocol of one of the meetings) "complaints sent by citizens are anecdotal anyway, and they tend to be concerned with just the one street where they live." I try to avoid leaving the house as best as I can. Going outside has become pure rage fuel for me.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- aprilthird2021 2mo agoNone 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.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo agoThis 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.
- BrenBarn 2mo agoIt's more a case for why the US system of government is a failure.
- 1over137 2mo agoPerhaps it’s not the system, perhaps it’s the electorate.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo agoWhich 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.
- rawgabbit 2mo agoQuote> “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”.
- m-hodges 2mo agoEverything is a scam now. You can’t exchange money for products or services anymore. We just exchange money for scams.
- georgemcbay 2mo agoI can't speak for "US consumers" broadly, but this is 100% why I'm angry as a consumer. Everything is a fucking scam. And often also a subscription for something that doesn't warrant being a subscription, and signing up is one click, cancelling is a written letter or a 3 hour long phone call (because see again the part where "Everything is a fucking scam").
- anal_reactor 2mo agoIt'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.
- bruce511 2mo agoWhy 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.
- vatsachak 2mo agoThe Amazon app is unusable. I don't know what they are doing to it but today it wouldn't let me add more than 4 items. Also the design choices suck; I have always accidentally ordered to the wrong address because Amazon uses a "default address". A good rule of design; assume that the user doesn't think about things that they don't explicitly select. They also just advertise cheap crap and the app is so maximalist it feels more like a casino with all the lights and buttons. Can we get a competitor please?
- qwerty_clicks 2mo agoYeah just go to a local store and buy something. Feel some community and support community. It’s the life you’ve been missing and trying to buy with Amazon
- vatsachak 2mo agoI use Amazon for niche products. Unfortunately the US doesn't have many niche stores like Japan does
- pessimizer 2mo ago[dead]
- leonidasrup 2mo agoYou can not get an competitor, because US goverment is not enforcing the antitrust law. In an market economy the market can make efficient decisions about investment, production, and the distribution of goods and services to consumers, guided by price signals created through the forces of supply and demand. But the market can not prevent companies from forming an oligopoly or a single company winning the competition race and becoming an monopoly, only the goverment can. "In 1999 a coalition of 19 states and the federal Justice Department sued Microsoft. A highly publicized trial found that Microsoft had strong-armed many companies in an attempt to prevent competition from the Netscape browser. In 2000, the trial court ordered Microsoft split in two to punish it, and prevent it from future misbehavior; however the Court of Appeals reversed the decision and removed the judge from the case for improperly discussing the case with the media while it was still pending. With the case in front of a new judge, Microsoft and the government settled, with the government dropping the case in return for Microsoft agreeing to cease many of the practices the government challenged." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit...
- gib444 2mo agoAnd let's be clear: the free market will self correct eventually. There is absolutely no need for increased consumer legislation. Consumers can just go to another provider or retailer - and get a slightly different form of scammed. Letting the consumer choose their flavour of scam is the best possible system that can exist. Impeding an organisation's right to scam customers is un-American and one step away from tyranny and communism. edit: /s
- dirkt 2mo agoLet me supply an /s tag, just in case.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo agoThe sarcasm is the problem. In many markets the market is too consolidated and the consumer doesn't actually have an option that isn't a scam, but in those cases the solution shouldn't be to regulate the oligopolies while leaving them in place to buy off the regulators or weasel their way out of the rules with expensive lawyers, it should be to break them into smaller pieces so they actually have to compete with each other. In other markets there is competition, but in those markets the competition actually works. As soon as you have enough suppliers that at least one of them isn't scamming the customer, who is going to patronize the other ones by choice?
- gib444 2mo agoSarcasm is the problem? What an insane take. You'll need to explain that one for us lol. Perhaps you meant "their (sarcastic) implication that the only solution is regulation is the problem"? I would agree. I just chose one thing to use in my sarcastic comment and believe there are multiple solutions – I'm glad it's sparked a sub thread.
- AnthonyMouse 2mo agoThe nature of sarcasm is to put up a straw man so weak that it falls over on its own rather than needing you to knock it down. The problem, of course, is that it's a straw man. In this case, nobody really thinks that a market where you have an oligopoly with few alternatives that are all scamming you is any good. But the problem there is the lack of competition rather than its presence, and the markets that actually have vigorous competition do pretty well.
- m1llie_ 2mo agoI 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.
- sbfriends 2mo agoAustralia'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.
- femto 2mo agoI'd encourage Australians not to muck around in this regard. Fair Trading gives explicit instructions: 1) Contact the organisation 2) Suggest a resolution 3) give them a reasonable time to respond (ie. not forever) 4) Be polite 5) Lodge a complaint with Fair Trading The more people that do this, the less sellers will try to do people over. https://www.nsw.gov.au/legal-and-justice/consumer-rights-and-protection/resolving-disputes/talk-it-over https://www.nsw.gov.au/legal-and-justice/consumer-rights-and...
- hermannj314 2mo agoI 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.
- cuu508 2mo agoI've realized this as well, the bigger the company the worse the experience. The more customers they have the less they care about any individual customer. The more products they have the less they care about any single product. The more employees they have the less they care about each individual employee doing a good job. And there's no they any more, there's a big, soul-less profit glutton.
- beej71 2mo agoYes, 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.
- M95D 2mo agoAnd where do you get reviews that are not farmed / AI?
- pineapplepizza6 2mo ago[dead]
- invalidptr 2mo agoThis 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.
- rkagerer 2mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- godelski 2mo agoEvery 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.
- dyauspitr 2mo agoI don’t think a high trust society is compatible with modernity. In my opinion, a high trust society comes from a relative naivety in most of the population that just sort of did what their grandparents did without thinking too much about it. In an “information” inundated populace, it becomes very hard to have a common culture which is the absolute basis for a high trust society. Maintaining a common culture isn’t easy either, it takes generations of shibboleth building, universal thought termination phrases and a brutal society-wide suppression of the “other”.
- expectsomuch 2mo agoAll 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoYes, 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.
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoCompletely off topic and no one will see this, but in 2017 I bought a new speedqueen washer and drier. No “new” features just does its job. God damn one of the best purchases I’ve made for a house. There is a market for “dumb products” that aren’t stupid.
- DaemonHN 2mo agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
- from_memory 2mo ago[flagged]
- giardini 2mo ago[flagged]
- chasil 2mo agoThis decade began with a pandemic. Its origins and impact can be debated, but it did enormous and lasting harm, unreasonably. The last presidential election disenfranchised a party (and with it half the country), suppressing turnout. Half of this country had no say in their nominee, by design. Then A.I. was predicted to end white collar employment. And now we are at war, with threats to security and economic stability that are unpredictable. Nobody wanted any of this. Such is the sentiment of our decade.
- giardini 2mo ago[flagged]
- blooalien 2mo agoEvery 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 childish ignorance on-par with "Okay, Boomer" but much worse due to the "cult-mind" aspect of it.
- dualvariable 2mo agoAlmost as good as when they call everyone else "NPCs" and claim they're all performatively "virtue signalling".
- blooalien 2mo ago> Almost as good as when they call everyone else "NPCs" and claim they're all performatively "virtue signalling". Yeah. The more of that sorta thing I see (and I see more of it daily these days) the more convinced I am that humanity is a "dead end" species. Here's hoping the cockroaches and tardigrades ("water bears") take better care of the planet than we did... :fingers crossed:
- giardini 2mo ago[flagged]
- blooalien 2mo agoI hate all you politics worshippers equally. You're the reason humanity has no future but extinction. Left, right, doesn't matter. You worship the cult leaders that only care about burning the Earth to the ground for money and power. Using the term "TDS" on people as you do remains a "useful tag" to easily identify you as a literal cultist. Grow another braincell to keep that other one company you cultist fucking clown. Fuck you very much.
- thomassmith65 2mo ago25 years ago, 'customer focus' was the buzz word. Gmail (and similar products) killed it. The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or giving much of a shit about them. "Why are you complaining? It's free!" Gmail envy makes it seem like you're some underachieving sucker if you bend over backwards to deliver a great customer experience. It probably would be possible to have a billion customers and make them happy, but the number of employees it would take would only make you rich, instead of unfathomably rich.
- aesthesia 2mo agoI'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.
- thomassmith65 2mo agoGmail 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.
- thomassmith65 2mo agoToo late to edit my comment. I'm embarrassed to say, I just realized the big problem with my original comment, and it is hackneyed: the end-users probably weren't the customers. I doubt Google was cavalier about its relationships with advertisers back then.
- devsda 2mo ago
- lyu07282 2mo ago> The History Of The Customer Rage Study > [..] the seminal 1976 White House Study that provided a host of provocative and first-ever insights about American customer care and its potential for profit-making. [..] corporate America is not getting the bang for its buck spent on customer complaint handling that is indeed possible. Billions of dollars in potential revenue continue to be lost [..] The guardian never disappoints framing this whole series around the study of some og consulting business. Who needs conservative media when this is the leftmost mainstream outlet imaginable?
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoAll 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?
- nicman23 2mo agobut mostly the high prices
- monksy 2mo agoI mean that's super easy. Go to a restaurant. Oh you better tip 20-30-50% (Because thats how they hide the bill, and put the lowest value on there). Bad service? YOU MONSTER YOU TIPPED 15% (15% is standard, and on top of higher prices- that is more money.. service+restaurant owners basically forced a 5%+ pay raise for no value). On top of that.. oh no menus.. get your own device so you can order from us. Walk into a grocer.. no cashier so you can avoid the stupid self checkouts, oh wait now they want you to comply to scan to get out. Don't do that you'll get some employee trying to lecture you about "required behavior". (That was in the Freiberg (Germany) grocer) Not doing that. (Also apparently thats in the Edeka in the Munich airport as well) Go to Walmart, they brought back receipt checkers at times. And they get pissy when you tell them to go pound sand. Overall, security guards at these places have such an ego and power trip that affects the average honest customer. Removing checkout staff for self checkout machines that grade and judge you on your cashier role. Yet you don't get paid. Let's not forget that Walgreens over exagerated the loss.. and then ramped up their money recovery systems to lock up items + raise the prices. Then they admitted they were crappy.
- danaris 2mo ago15% 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%.
- devsda 2mo agoThe 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.
- nunez 2mo agoMaybe the increasingly common trend of companies making it impossible to contact human beings when help is needed has something to do with that.
- mancerayder 2mo agoGood afternoon nunez! How can we help you today. You can say things like "Question about Order" "Talk to Salesperson" "Billing inquiry" ... I'm sorry. I didn't quite catch yet. Good afternoon Nunez...
- nunez 2mo agoLiterally had this happen to me not three days ago. You get hung up on if you try to use the Operator trick.
- imartin2k 2mo agoI 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.
- beej71 2mo agoAs an cynical American, I view all publicly-traded companies as purely extractional at their core. Any positive customer experience is either coincidental or forced.
- xboxnolifes 2mo agoI 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.
- jayelem 2mo ago“Abuse will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to terminate the call.” This reliably elicits the response they claim to want to avoid -it feels designed to prime the caller for anger.
- joquarky 2mo agoProbably Goodhart's Law in action. E.g., "keep the calls as short as possible".
- rsanek 2mo ago> There’s a stew of factors at work behind the rise in consumer rage [including] the rise of AI customer service. I'm not really sure the problem is AI here. I've had plenty of bad experiences with human customer service agents that were poorly-trained and hard to understand. An AI can be implemented in a shitty way, where it's at best a regurgitation of the help docs. Or, it can be implemented well, where it can autonomously take action without any human involved. I have had a couple of experiences with the latter. Once you do, you realize that you actually don't need to talk to a person per se -- you just want your problem solved efficiently. That can be done with a human or an AI; it isn't really the most significant bit to be filtering on IMO.
- mancerayder 2mo agoHow much is private equity to blame? At first I was tired of the bogeyman, but it's starting to show patterns. Working in tech, I've seen from colleagues the shannanigans played - they come in the form of taking out debt of one company, dooming it, to fund something else, they also come in the form of weird chargeback commitments with big vendors we all know - IBM, Google, especially Microsoft, Oracle, etc. 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."
- cliglot 2mo agoProbably because they’re too stupid to see all the wonderful things that have now. You can buy a massive flat screen TV for under $400 at Walmart! Computers are so cheap that everyone can be a gambling/porn addict now. Who cares about high beef prices, just eat the livers you peasant. It’s not like you’re going to starve. 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.
- jambalaya8 2mo agoBecause they consume so much more? 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.