Busy, distracted, anxious, many of us have remained oblivious to the escalating level of work that we do as customers. A 2025 U.K. report found not only that 78% of respondents report frustration when dealing with customer service systems, but also that on average “we spend between 28 and 41 minutes every week dealing with them in lengthy battles.” Like the frog in slowly boiling water, by the time this regime had fully taken hold, it seemed too late to escape.
Even the most basic elements of the commercial retail environment are now being transmuted into sites of customer work as when, for example, shops decline to post their hours of operation, proffering instead a QR code that the customer must scan with a cellphone to obtain the needed information. Using QR codes can be hazardous — through “quishing” in which phone users’ private information is extracted by malicious actors — and yet they enjoy an increasingly incontestable primacy.
A vast array of predatory anti-consumer policies and practices are flourishing, and often the clashes over them take place in shops, banks and other commercial sites staffed by workers with low agency and low accountability. Understaffing, undertraining and the removal of decision-making authority stoke customer frustration and disappointment. Such features arise from cost-cutting measures imposed by companies that shift work onto customers and reclassify once-standard features as “extras.” Airlines, for example, deprive passengers of dignity and comfort and then attempt to sell these back to us as elements of a “premium” experience.
Certain buzzwords betray not only the expectation of consumer work but also its arduousness. This is evident when the tediously overused term “journey” is applied to a consumer’s role in seeking services such as a mortgage. In Ireland, for example, all major banks now frame their mortgage loan products using the phrase “mortgage journey,” deploying a term evocative of therapy-speak and self-improvement presumably in a manner that is meant to be reassuring but in fact implies just how much time and prudential exertion await the mortgage-seeking customer. The term has become a perversely useful tell.
The directive rhetoric of corporations, banks, medical providers and other corporate entities belies the effort to make customer work appear voluntary. This language strives to sustain the pretense of consumer agency and choice — phrases such as “thank you for your interest” and “we’re delighted that you’ve chosen (X)” now often operate as signals of a restricted choice field. Similarly, it is common in the scripting of consumer service to override consumer protest on the pretext that the customer is choosing — thus, the service employee responds to a complaint by saying “Would you like me to” or “Do you want” to perpetuate the illusion that the customer has more agency than the system has actually allowed them.
The landscape of “customer service” today has all but eliminated on-site staff with decision-making power and has normalized elaborate, time-consuming dispute-resolution practices that put the onus on the customer. Complaint procedures themselves, now often restricted to digital channels, have been transformed into another kind of customer labor as online complaint forms are rejected unless, as in the case of airline matters, for example, all booking codes, reservation numbers, frequent flier numbers, etc. are looked up and entered.
In this way the airlines wield technology to repel inquiry. Technology is also increasingly deployed in the government equivalent of customer service to shut down democratic discourse, as when in 2024 the administration of New York Mayor Eric Adams introduced a compulsory six-page Google document to be completed by any elected official wishing to communicate with city agency staff members.
A high degree of cultural silence is maintained about how much time customers spend being stymied in their pursuit of service, and this may be due in part to the fact that to relay such frustrations is to make oneself both torturously relatable and extremely boring. Who wants to hear the story of the time you wasted while trying to guess what information was wanted in a drop-down menu without any source of clarification?
Customer frustration may often be heightened by the widespread practice of outsourcing, which shelters firms from accountability, providing them deniability in cases of deficient service provision. The abandonment of functional customer service is a fundamental problem in current business culture, which typically construes good service as labor- and resource-intensive and the benefits of providing it as unmeasurable.
In his popular newsletter the Pragmatic Engineer, software engineer Gergely Orosz writes: “Customer complaints handling at scale is broken in most tech companies.” Orosz’s account underscores the widely shared sense among customers that we are test subjects for digital capitalism. A notable feature of digital “convenience technologies” is that they create new expenses — and, for someone somewhere, new profits. As use of cash has faded, for example, merchants have raised their prices to compensate for credit card company interchange (or “swipe”) fees.
In the realm of customer service, something that is presented as a convenience may or may not be, but one can be sure that it constitutes a profit source to those heralding it.
Diane Negra is the author of the forthcoming “I’m Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service,” from which this excerpt is adapted.
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