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#more#consumer#consumers#don#rage#products#case#less#service#things
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Discussion (72 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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.
The first is justified. The second is understandable but a case of confusing it with the first. The last two also happen, and are not justified nor understandable.
Unfortunately there is currently an excess of the first case. I think people are arguing this is a problem. It probably causes the other 3 to happen more too.
It doesn't have to be either of these things to be intentional. Pretty much every large system is too complex to be calculated or personal in the way we would apply those terms to a human. However, you can still describe a system as having values and goals, still analyse it in terms of its incentives and the mechanisms it evolves to achieve them in its environment.
The incentives are continued YoY growth, the environment is a saturated market, and so the mechanisms are monopolistic and anti-consumer practices. "Go to the Xfinity retail store" doesn't prove anything except that you passed an effort gate, segmenting you away from someone working two jobs with young children at home. 1% of customers costing the company $10 is the same as 100% of customers costing them 10c, with the added benefit that your segment is more likely to hurt retention than the one with no time or energy for comparison-shopping.
Did a single person design and orchestrate this state of affairs? Unlikely, but the company as a whole is more than capable of blobbing its bureaucratic way towards more efficient digestion of your funds. Never underestimate dumb optimisation processes at scale. Given enough time, such processes have turned monkeys into Shakespeare.
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
These are simply weird declarations that you're making, and 20 years ago the world was not like this.
> It's a process scaled to deal with thousands or millions of people.
You're saying this as if there weren't thousands or millions of people 20 years ago.
> I go to the Xfinity retail store and talk to someone. I almost always leave satisfied.
I've never seen an Xfinity retail store in my life. I guess we have to wait until they close them all for you to stop patronizing people. Everybody here understands how businesses work, and we also understand why they cut services and quality. People are not confused or ignorant, they're angry that they don't have functioning governments, so these companies don't have to compete anymore.
Cheap goods have always been junk. Buy less, better stuff. Buy once, cry once.
"Simple mistakes" and "process breakdowns" were uncommon, notable, and dealt with quickly. Even the cheap stuff tended to last for quite some time, and was often repairable when it failed.
Enshittification is not only real, it is accelerating.
Everything is a 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").
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.
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.
This isn't a perfect solution and I know there are counter-examples, but I have been much more satisfied supporting small, local or owner-run shops.
The more customers they have the less they care about any individual customer.
The more products they have the less they care about any single product.
The more employees they have the less they care about each individual employee doing a good job. And there's no they any more, there's a big, soul-less profit glutton.
“It feels like a war on consumers,” said Sally Greenberg, the executive director of the National Consumers League, a 125-year-old consumer advocacy group. Households are being hit by “a tsunami of fees and hidden charges and tricks and traps”, she said.
American consumers face a paradox – they have more choices and higher expectations than ever before, thanks to innovations like delivery-on-demand and streaming services, said Peter Fader, a Wharton School marketing professor. “But not only does service just suck,” Fader said, consumers “are starting to realize that a lot of the cool data and technology is being used against them”.
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.
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.
> 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.
Edit: 1/2 right, it's also shit service.
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.
“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.
Impeding an organisation's right to scam customers is un-American and one step away from tyranny and communism.
edit: /s
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?
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.
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.