And You Thought Verizon Was Bad

Working on a house-related project the last few months, I’ve come to a depressing conclusion: it’s virtually impossible to be a consumer these days, even when you’re willing to spend a substantial amount of money.

Some personal examples.

For the first time this spring I ordered several large items from Wayfair, the online home goods store, but only after confirming I’d be given advance notice of the time window for the delivery. I got advance notice all right. Of a TWELVE-HOUR window. Then, the company rep I was forced to call for further clarification told me not to worry, I’d eventually be given a narrower two-hour window. After 5 pm the night before the scheduled delivery!

As you might imagine, I was still worried. Even assuming the two-hour estimate was accurate (having gone through this process several times now, I can say with confidence it never is), who can work a job or live a life when you aren’t told the actual delivery schedule until the night before? And Wayfair’s solution if the two-hour window they offer with less than 24-hour notice is not convenient? You can always reschedule—and begin the game of Russian roulette again, possibly weeks later.

Even “brick and mortar” stores with historically good reputations have started to fall short. Like Room & Board, a store I previously loved. Although most of their workers are very nice, the dining room table I bought spent two weeks in pieces around my house because the delivery team got mad about a problem they created, and I had to wait for another team to be in the area to have the assembly job completed. Or Crate & Barrel, which needed at least a dozen calls or emails, two failed attempts, a third-party delivery service and eventually Fed Ex to deliver the cushions for the outdoor furniture they’d sold me.

None of this makes any sense, of course. For more than a century, “consumerism” — the theory that “an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable”— has been a cornerstone of the American capitalist system. As writer/historian Kerryn Higgs described in her article, “A Brief History of Consumer Culture,” as the economy evolved during the 20th century, capitalism “preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff.” But at the same time immense efforts were being made to persuade people to buy more things, manufacturers shifted to the concept of “planned obsolescence,” deliberately designing goods to have a limited life span. The combined effect of these two trends was that people not only wanted to keep purchasing new things, they had no other choice. But how can a consumption-oriented economy survive when (as I’ve written before)  “customer service” has essentially disappeared?

And it isn’t just physical products.

I recently called a cable company to set up service at a new address. Yes, I know, you’re shuddering already. The first phone call and even the installation process went relatively smoothly as these things go, so I was lulled into a sense of complacency. Then, weeks later, I tried to establish online access to pay the bill and discovered an incorrect phone number (my landline at a different address) still listed as a second mobile number on the account. Even though I’d already spent a significant amount of time trying to get a customer service agent to remove the landline. Even though I’d been assured he had.

You can predict what happened next.

I spent almost an hour on the phone talking to a second rep, who had to escalate the issue to another employee, who then escalated the problem to a third rep (or fourth, depending on how you’re counting), who ultimately told me the wrong number on the account didn’t matter because the company would never use it. I didn’t believe him but gave up anyway because by that point, I didn’t really care anymore.

Sometimes business practices are so bad, they sound made up. Like the medical bill we just received from a company that supplied the braces my son needed after two separate ankle sprains. The bill listed the balance remaining after our insurance company had paid its share. Fair enough. The only problem was I couldn’t remember my son spraining his ankle anytime recently. Because, of course, he hadn’t. The company is billing us for one brace provided in January 2024, as well as a second one from (I’m not making this up) June 2017.

Yep, someone going through the system identifying old bills decided the $12.25 they failed to bill in 2017 was worth chasing eight years later. It would be funny if it weren’t so dumb. It’s all so dumb. I have to think the firm or institution that finally cracks this customer service conundrum—not with fake surveys employees beg you to complete with high ratings so their pay doesn’t get docked—but with a real commitment to the manpower and service systems needed to run their venture properly will have a huge advantage in the market. We can only hope for that anyway.