05/06/2026
American consumers are angry. Nearly 80% of Americans had a service or product problem in 2025, and about two-thirds of those felt “rage” about it, according to the “National Consumer Rage” survey.
Many consumers feel they are constantly fighting against an onslaught of overcharges, customer service hassles, shoddy products and billing mistakes that always seem to go in the company’s favor. All of this comes against a background of soaring prices and rising inflation.
There’s a stew of factors at work behind the rise in consumer rage: company consolidation, regulatory rollbacks, years of court decisions that limit consumer power, tech-enabled cost cuts, private equity takeovers, Covid-era business model changes, a moribund media and the rise of AI customer service, to name a few. But there is hope, too.
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In the coming weeks, the Guardian plans to examine some of the causes behind this rising epidemic of consumer frustration, the impact on Americans’ lives, the watchdogs on the beat, and potential solutions. Tell us your personal tales of corporate frustration here, and we’ll explore this problem together.
The annoyance economy
Lisa, a 60-year-old marketing executive who lives in Washington DC, recently battled three big corporations over just two days. She didn’t want to give her last name for fear of retaliation from the companies involved.
First, her longtime vet, now part of a national chain, overcharged her $500 for her dog’s teeth cleaning and didn’t issue a promised refund. Then, her big box supermarket promoted a coupon on its app that wasn’t applied at the checkout, costing her $30 and a trip back to the store. Finally, her health insurance company rejected her son’s $1,100 dental bill that she had been told would be 50% covered, despite protracted haggling.
“It’s like Whac-A-Mole,” the mother of two said. “You finish one and up pops another one.”
“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, but consumers are also starting to realize that a lot of the cool data and technology is being used against them”.
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Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
These experiences are not just frustrating. US households are losing $165bn a year on the “annoyance economy” or “what we pay in time, fees and irritation to navigate our daily lives”, the Groundwork Collaborative, a think tank that focuses on concentrations of private power, estimated in February. It is having an impact on the daily quality of life, in a country already reeling from political chaos and divisions, and a rising gap between the haves and have-nots.
“If you’ve just spent an hour waiting on hold with an airline, or your cable company, or you’re feeling like you’ve been je**ed around, you’re not gonna go to the [Parent Teachers Association] meeting; you’re not going to interact with your neighbor,” Chad Maisel said afterward, who co-authored the Annoyance Economy report. “It’s a very toxic cycle.”
Public reaction after the killing of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson spotlighted the dismal state of customer-company relations in America, said Scott Broetzmann, president and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting (CCMC), which conducts the consumer rage survey with Arizona State University’s WP Carey School of Business. “You saw people who were rightly horrified for his family, but you also saw a very mainstream outpouring of hostility at health insurers, and in some corners [accused killer Luigi] Mangione being treated like a folk hero.”
Americans don’t endorse murder, Broetzmann said, but the reaction was a manifestation of a widespread sense of frustration and powerlessness. There’s a “dangerous mix of brittle systems, high stakes and very low trust,” between US consumers and companies right now, he added. “The lesson for companies is not that they should brace for violence; it’s that they have to take everyday customer pain seriously long before it reaches this point.”
A federal retreat
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 a dead-end cancellation hotline, withheld refunds, and knowingly tarnished credit reports with false data,” the order by the Consumer Financial 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.
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Russell Vought on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 15 April. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
By October 2025, Vought had dismissed or rolled back 42 agreements with companies the agency said had ripped off consumers, Protect Borrowers, a group of former CFPB officials, calculated.
“What does that say to companies? It says ‘go ahead, rip off, lie, cheat, and if you do, there will be no consequences,” said Greenberg.
One exception, consumer advocates say, is the Federal Trade Commission, which under the consumer protection chief, Chris Mufarrige, has chastised auto dealers, forced Instacart to pay $60m over practices that raised grocery prices and called out Meta’s Facebook and Instagram for spreading online scams. “We have an aggressive agenda, and we are active and try to go where we see significant harm,” Mufarrige said in an interview.
States are also stepping up. California’s attorney general has a case against Amazon that alleges the giant retailer is coercing other companies to raise prices. Amazon denies the charges. New York City’s new government and a bipartisan bill hope to revive the “click to cancel” rule that bans cumbersome subscription cancellations.
However, overall, federal agencies that protect consumers have seen their budgets slashed, veteran officials fired, and bedrock policies that allowed them to enforce laws against companies rescinded.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/us-consumer-rage-prices-economy?utm_source=chatgpt.com
