Life in the rage economy

0:00On Today Explained from Vox, we're going to talk about rage. The specific kind of rage you feel when you have to deal with customer service. There was one woman who had tried to get a prescription from CVS and had to travel somewhere and tried to get it transferred. She ultimately wound up just sort of having three different relatives try to pick it up in three different states. I've been talking to a lot of people who are having a hard time dealing with their parents' estates to the point where they do things like book a chunk of time every Friday to get on the phone and yell at people. I can't go to a party right now and bring up this subject without seven people being like, oh, my God, let me tell you about how this company screwed me over and that one screwed me over.

0:48We're going to ask if AI agents are going to make our rage economy better or worse. Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. According to Forbes, one in three pets will need emergency treatment this year. And every six seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Vet bills don't have to hit that hard. Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on Trustpilot. Get a free quote in minutes at FetchPet.com slash save. That's FetchPet.com slash save. Support for the show today comes from Bill.

1:43When it comes to managing money, forget the hype and look at results. Bill boasts a trillion dollars of secure payment transactions, one trillion dollars, and that powers their BillPay tools. Instead of just moving money, Bill is powering the financial operations of nearly a half million customers. Ready to talk with an expert? Visit Bill.com slash proven to get started and grab a $150 gift card as a thank you. Terms and conditions apply. See offer page for details. Thank you. So Heather Timmons, you cover consumers for The Guardian, and you told us all these stories of how people are getting very, very mad. How mad are we? Is anyone measuring it? There is a great survey called, helpfully enough, the Consumer Rage Survey,

2:41which has come out every two years. It dates back to the 1970s. This is a real survey called the Consumer Rage Survey, which has come out every two years. It dates back to the 1970s. This is a real survey called the Consumer Rage Survey. Actual real survey. And it tries to figure out sort of how you are feeling about being a consumer in America. And it found that at that point, almost 80% of Americans had had a service or product problem in 2025. And that's about double what it was in the 1970s. And more than two-thirds of those customers had felt rage over it. And about half of those people had raised their voice trying to solve it. There is nothing in this world that makes me more mad than talking to the robot when you're trying to get in touch with customer service.

3:21Why is everything shit today? I mean, everything we buy, it's just shit. It's garbage. Even the junk food you eat to make you feel better tastes like shit. Now you can't even have a case of the saddies and eat some chocolate because it tastes bad. I know this isn't that big of a deal, but I am so fucking pissed at these corporations sitting here saying that we have to go to a subscription service for something that has always been available. And then I'm going to transfer you to support. Who am I talking to now? The janitor? Who'd they put me on with? I was transferred to you. People are sort of simmeringly mad and they are dealing with an increased number of product and service problems. Like things are

4:02actually wrong. It's not just that, you know, we're all angry right now and everything's a mess. It's, you know, things are actually, you're actually getting worse service and buying worse products sometimes. And you've been writing about this for a while now. How exactly does the anger transition into rage? At what point do we break into rage, you think? And what is causing that? It's such an interesting thing, because I think it is a particularly American thing to think that you should get good customer service. And when I talk to people around the world who build customer service models and AI models, they say, you know, their American focus groups are the most, are the toughest and most fascinating because they expect to be treated well.

4:47You know, you sort of like, you have a focus group in France and everyone's like, oh, everything is shit and it'll always be shit, you know? And they're like, and the Americans will, and the Americans will say, no, but I, you know, I, we're so used to thinking of ourselves as the consumer as king. This massive consumer economy powers the U.S. economy, which powers the world economy. And we're so used to having choice. And the reality is like that, the choices, the fact that you are going to be treated well as a consumer, those things have sort of slipped away over the past couple of decades. Right now, we're in an era of extreme financialization. Airfare is at its highest level in more than a decade.

5:26Healthcare costs are among the top of the list for Americans' financial worries. This type of shit, it's so fucking aggravating and frustrating, and it just makes me like, what the fuck is wrong with America, dude? You know, anything that a company can squeeze out of you, and as much as it can get you to pay, it's going to do. Tell us how the consumer experience is getting worse. We're not just getting angrier. Things are actually getting worse. Is there like a direct relationship between the two phenomena? You know, we have seen a whole lot of private equity buyouts. Restaurant chain Denny's says it's been acquired by a group of investment firms in a deal worth around $620 million. 450 hospitals nationwide have been taken over by private equity.

6:11My sub was not a sub above. And the Jersey Mike's employee who was hooking up the sandwich goes, yeah, bro, it's because, you know, it ain't the same sub anymore. And that, you know, there's a direct correlation to how unhappy consumers are and companies that have been taken over by private equity. And that's, you know, in part because the model is really put a lot of debt on the company, take it over, sell their real estate, make them pay, you know, rental fees, and then squeeze the cost as much as you possibly can. And so you start to feel that in things like, you know, whatever your favorite fast food chain is, whatever your favorite retail brand is. Sometimes some of those things go bankrupt,

6:52like Jo-Ann's and Toys R Us. I mean, those are real things that are happening, but there's also just, we're just sort of in an era of financialization, even things that are not private equity taken, you know, private equity owned. I was talking to Ben of Ben and Jerry's, who's been trying to buy his ice cream brand back. It was bought by Unilever and then now spun off into Magnum. But, you know, he has this sort of analogy where he says, you know, for many corporations, what you do is you sort of, you keep slicing a little bit off the loaf of bologna, trying to cut costs here, cut costs there. And then at the very end, you're like, do you even, what have you got left? Do you have bologna anymore? And you're talking about private equity and optimization perhaps,

7:32but there's this experience that like anyone I'm sure listening to this can relate to where you get on the call with the customer service representative. Maybe at first you're talking to a robot and you're on the phone tree and you're pushing buttons, and then you're finally, after maybe 30 minutes, you finally get to talk to a human, and then that human transfers you to another human, and you have to tell that human your story again, and that human transfers you to another human, and you have to tell that person your story again, and that's maybe if you're lucky that you're getting a bunch of humans. You can get off that call feeling a little bit like this whole system is designed to enrage you. Is there any truth to that feeling? It's not that it's designed to enrage you. It's

8:14just designed to get as much money from you as possible and spend as little money on you as possible. You know, when I talk to people that are building customer service and AI systems right now, like their ultimate goal is you never talk to a person. You know, if they if they are doing things right, you never, ever talk to a person. And some of for some of them, you know, and not some of them, the sort of frustration is built in on purpose because they want you to give up. Because if you go, oh, God, that eight dollar subscription free, I didn't renew that, you know, or T-Mobile's got an extra twelve dollars on there, but I didn't actually ask for that, whatever. It's going to take you so long to get that taken off that you're going to decide

8:56my time is not worth that money and then they get to keep the money. And that's not like an accidental thing. It's like a it's it's you know, that's that is intentional. Yeah, I wonder how much people are getting creative right now. I read this one article in The Atlantic by a guy named Chris Collin titled That Drop Call with Customer Service. It was on purpose in which he sort of documents this horrible experience he had trying to figure out why his Ford just like shut down in the middle of like a curvy road and almost killed him. And by the end of it, he's talking about, you know, positive ways to sort of deal with the, you know, mind numbing experience that is calling a bunch of customer service agents. And he said that he and his friends started doing admin nights every Tuesday where

9:45they'd have, they'd all go over to one friend's house and like, you know, turn it into a social activity that like Tuesday nights is when we're going to deal with all of our life admin. And, you know, we'll do it with friends, with snacks, with drinks, whatever. Have you seen a lot of that? Is that one way we're adapting to our, I don't know, contemporary misery? There's a huge desire to find some sort of a solution that isn't just like, everything sucks and it's getting worse and we're all beaten down. So I do see people- It's funny because I actually feel like more people have just accepted that everything's terrible and that's all it is. Chris feels like the exception because he's like, what if we made this a social activity? Which feels like, what? But then you read about it. It's like, oh, that's so smart.

10:28Somewhere there's like an Instagram meme, too, about the last chapter in every economic book that's written right now that's like happening on the state and city level. You know, the Mondani consumer protection folks are trying to do really interesting stuff. They are with their, you know, click to cancel rule where there should be one button where you can cancel your subscription. California has just started a new consumer czar position. It's headed by Rohit Chopra from the FTC. You know, there used to be, during our last big period of inflation in the 70s and also right around World War II, thousands of federal officials who went around and checked prices to make sure that people weren't ripping people off and price gouging for things that people need, like tires and coffee or whatever. There are ways that we have dealt with these kind of problems before that could be adopted again.

11:30And maybe one more note on the hopeful side of things is that, I don't know, soon if we realize Mark Zuckerberg's wildest dreams, we can have an AI agent like Muse do all this work for us? You know, like the fantasy of a personal AI agent talking to a company's AI agent and fixing my problem is so lovely. Like, I love that idea, except for the fact that, you know, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that I would give my bank details to an AI agent right now or, you know, or my health details or anything else. I just, you know, and I'm not alone in that. and banks are telling you not to do that. Right now, you know, there are some people that have proposed new rules that, and one of them is that your AI agent should be,

12:16should have some fiduciary duty to you. Like we don't really have any, any specific thing that says if you're using Muse and you want it to find you the best couch or whatever it is, that it is going to steer you to the thing that is best for you and lowest price and not to something that maybe, you know, Meta's got a financial relationship with. And that's one, you know, that is another area that's kind of got to be cleared up there. Like, is your AI agent really working for you? You know, they've been area that's kind of got to be cleared up there. Like, is your AI agent really working for you? You know, they've been sold as like your agent, but says who? You know, is there a fiduciary duty kind of thing around there?

13:03Heather Timmons writes about consumer rights and corporate power for The Guardian, and she actually wants you to contact her with your stories about ranging out at customer service. She asked us to give you her email. So if you send it to me at consumed at theguardian.com, I would love to see it. Today Explained is from ShipStation. If you shop online, you know that Black Friday and Cyber Monday can get wild with everyone racing to snag the best deals. And if you're a retailer, you know that every order means something needs to be packed, labeled, shipped, and delivered on time. During peak season, those orders can pile up fast. That's where ShipStation comes in. It's built to help businesses handle the holiday rush, making it easier to manage orders and streamline shipping when things get busy.

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16:42improving your health, managing your home, building a business, or helping you make or save. Today Explained. My name's Charlie Worzel, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of its podcast, Galaxy Brain. Charlie, we just spoke about how the economy and how customer service works is making everyone rage out. Are AI agents, which you just recently wrote about for The Atlantic, going to make it better or worse, you think? I think in the meantime, in the early time, it's going to make it probably a lot worse, right? I mean, what we are essentially even just seeing right now is that these agents are inundating the internet with skills of persistence, right? These are relentless things that are tasked to do, you know,

17:30the onerous activities we don't want to do. And they're already flooding call centers. Yes, I can hold. I've got all the time in the world. They're flooding restaurant reservations. Friday evening, a table for five by the window. Yes, I'll hold. flooding restaurant reservations. They're flooding, you know, plumbers and people who just run small businesses with requests and queries. And they're not people, right? So they call people up on the phone, and it's an automated voice, right? So I think it's going to make a lot of people feel, honestly, pretty awful. Like the world has all of a sudden become very inhuman, or there are these inhuman burdens being put on the humans who don't have agents yet to work on their behalf. And that imbalance,

18:25I think, is going to make a lot of people pretty mad. You wrote for The Atlantic that we are not ready for our coming AI agent future. How are we not ready for this? If it reaches like a critical mass, the argument is that we aren't ready for it because the economy is built off of, and kind of in a lot of ways thrives off of inefficiency. Off of the fact that people aren't paying perfect attention to everything, right? People aren't moving their money from savings account to savings account every day because they're, you know, getting the margins on a slightly better interest rate or something like that. This entire subscription economy is based off of inefficiency, right? You don't cancel the thing you don't use for a long period of time or just like it lays dormant for a while. But what these AI agents offer in their most idealized fashion is that they pay perfect

19:31attention to everything all the time. They're hyper vigilant and able to act on your behalf in inhuman ways. And if a large portion of the population is using these to do their banking, to do their e-commerce, and at the same time you have these large organizations like banks, like health care companies, like platforms like Amazon and Walmart, you're going to see just, I think, incredible amounts of chaos. This is not, the economy would in that way start to behave more like the stock market, right, where prices fluctuate on the order of, you know, milliseconds and things like that. And as we know from, you know, watching the stock market over decades, like that's a wild ride. I don't know if we want, if we want diapers to behave like securities.

20:30One of the more speculative but also illustrative ideas here five million people are using the same agent to do all of their banking and they all identify at the same time that there is a high yield savings account that everyone should should be in. Right. So they move money on Moss, you know, millions of agents pulling money out of one account to the next. And then those banks are struggling because they've just lost all of these deposits at once. But it's, you know, theoretically possible that something like that could happen all of the time. Is this a two way street? Are the companies also adopting agents into every part of their processes and and I don't know, consumer relations? Yes. It's slower, I think, on that end.

21:30But what I like to think of this as is as an arms race. A lot of retailers, especially Amazon, has blocked a number of these agents from accessing their platform because even though Amazon can make good money off of these sales, they don't yet want these companies to have access to their back end infrastructure. Right. There's a lot of like corporate secrets like inventory and who's buying what and who's selling what. These agents can act as really good intelligence gatherers if they're granted access to these platforms. And what you will see eventually is that the retailers are going to have demands, right? Yes, you guys can let the agents on the platform, but you can't undercut our prices in this way, right? It will just be something that you have to trust that your

22:27AI agent company is making a deal, you know, in your best interest. And I think that that's really interesting because you could end up having this future where everything feels really good as a consumer because it's frictionless, right? My agent's going to do all this stuff for me while I sleep or, you know, while I'm hanging out with my family or whatnot. And in reality, what's going to happen is you're not really, you're just having someone do something for you, but nothing else has really changed, right? You're not getting a better deal. It's not that much more helpful to you because these companies have taken care of themselves first. But that is the promise. That is what Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg are trying to sell us.

23:13Agents, assistants, companions, whatever you want to call them, that are doing stuff in the background all of the time. And that, I think, will really transform what people can do and how we work and kind of maybe to some extent how we just sort of like live our lives. A lot of it for me, you know, when I'm using my Muse agent, I just, you know, I kind of want it to help me be like a better father and, you know, a better husband and show up better for my friends. Do you think it's a pipe dream or do you think there is some reality one day when we as a society will say this AI agent consumer facing world of ours is better than the one we had 100 years ago, where when you had a problem, you went to a store and talked to a human being or called one on the phone, and they empathetically helped you through it. Something that I think is really funny is, you know,

24:06Meta with Muse has really sort of dominated the conversation of these AI assistants. And this is the company that wanted to connect with the world, right? That us being together is this universal good. It is strengthening the bonds of humanity. Our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. But this is a tool that is fundamentally antisocial. You don't have to interact with those people you don't want, right? I'm not trying to romanticize, you know, running really annoying errands when you're busy and your kids are sick and, you know, you've got work deadlines and things. But there's also the experience of interacting with people on a day-to-day basis that I think is foundational to our humanity. And we need to think about and grapple with.

25:06And the other part of this is, what are we freeing this time up for? Is a real question. I'm always wondering that myself, because that's what they keep promising. You're going to have so much time to do what? To then just like spend more time scrolling your platform? To spend more time scrolling your platforms, spend more time working. There is a lack of thought about what a human is for if we fully embrace automation in all these different ways, right? It's one thing to say, I wish it was easier to buy paper towels on Amazon. It's another to say... It's pretty easy. Yeah, I know, right? I know. I don't do it that often, but I'm pretty sure it's really easy. It is. I think it's good to have those interactions. And it's okay to sand down

26:00some of them. But I think this feature suggests like, what if you never had to do anything you didn't want to do? And I don't know if they've thought that through. Charlie Warzel wrote, AI agents are here, nobody's ready, with his colleague Matteo Wong at The Atlantic. Ariana Spuru produced today's show with the help of her colleagues, Jolie Myers, Abhishek Artsy, Gabriel Dunatov, Bridger Dunagan, Heidi Mawagdi, Kelly Wessinger, Miles Bryan, Denise Guerra, Peter Balan on Rosen, Amina Alsati, Patrick Boyd, Miranda Kennedy, and Noel King. Breakmaster Cylinder wishes you a happy Halloween. I'm Sean Ramos for Room Today. Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network,

26:57podcasts.voxmedia.com. And you can listen to our show ad-free by signing up at vox.com slash members. As soon as autumn rolls around and you swap your iced lattes for pumpkin spice, that's your signal to start thinking about the holidays, the decor, the gifts, the shopping lists, but more importantly, the holiday treats. Cheesecakes, cookies. Is there anything better? And when the recipe calls for cream cheese, there's only one option. Philadelphia, the original cream cheese. Made with fresh milk and real cream. This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really Philly good. Find your favorite holiday recipe at creamcheese.com. As soon as autumn rolls around and you swap your iced lattes for pumpkin spice,

28:21that's your signal to start thinking about the holidays, the decor, the gifts, the shopping lists, but more importantly, the holiday treats. Cheesecakes, cookies, is there anything better? And when the recipe calls for cream cheese, there's only one option. Philadelphia, the original cream cheese made with fresh milk and real cream. This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really Philly good. Find your favorite holiday recipe at creamcheese.com.