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.
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, consumers “are starting to realize that a lot of the cool data and technology is being used against them”.
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 thinktank 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 jerked around, you’re not gonna go to the [Parent Teachers Association] meeting, you’re not going to interact with your neighbor,” afterward, said Chad Maisel, 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 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.
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.
chart
This rollback of federal oversight isn’t just a Trump administration phenomenon, but since his re-election, “it has turned from a trot into a gallop”, Greenberg said.
Federal laws and agencies that consumers depended on to protect them have been substantially weakened in recent years. Supreme court rulings over the past decade have weakened consumer protection agencies, backed forced arbitration and made it harder for consumers to get restitution.
The Nader era
It’s a long way from the golden age of consumer protection in modern-day America in the 1960s and 1970s, when lawyer Ralph Nader’s investigation of the auto industry led to the first federal safety standards for motor vehicles, the Fair Credit Act and birthed a pro-consumer movement that upended the Federal Trade Commission.
That was followed by a “tremendously powerful conservative pushback” in the 1980s and 1990s that labeled consumer activists “busybodies” who raised prices and bureaucracy, while taking away consumer freedom, says Lawrence Glickman, a history professor at Cornell University and author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America. “Corporate power is enormous and pretty much unchecked in much of the political arena,” he said.
Despite the rise in consumer frustration, Glickman says, “there are these countercurrents which are stronger than ever – which is a deep suspicion that the government can do anything to help ordinary people and a deep suspicion that it makes any sense at all to try to regulate corporations.”
Ralph Nader appears before the Senate commerce subcommittee in March 1966. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
The history of consumer movements since has been “all downhill from Carter on down”, Nader, 92, said in an interview. “Corporate power supremacy is staggeringly greater than 1970,” he said, consumer groups were complacent and consumer power had never been weaker.
The outlook for consumers has “never been worse”, Nader added. “This is not the pessimism of an old man, this is the discernment of a very knowledgable person.”
Don’t look to Congress for a fix, at least in the near term, said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.
“Regulations and comments on regulations and lobbying to fix consumer law, that’s pretty much a useless premise at this moment in time,” said Rheingold.
Instead, a new wave of civil litigation could be coming. At law firms that represent consumers the “phones are ringing off the hook, because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility”, Rheingold said.
Journalism’s ‘death valley’
Another once-powerful consumer watchdog, the mainstream US media, has lost much of its bite since the consumer rights movement’s zenith in the 1970s, say historians, consumer advocates and journalists themselves.
“If we’re living in a news desert, consumer journalism is the Death Valley,” said Chris Elliott, a former journalist whose website the Elliott Report advocates for consumers battling big companies. (Example: “UPS kept my $400 after damaging my computer – can it do that?” Answer: no, it cannot. They refunded it after Elliott intervened.)
“You have some financial journalists who are covering the company’s earnings reports and ‘is it a good stock to invest in’ – but is the company actually taking care of its customers? Who cares?” Elliott said.
In 1970, at least 50 regional US newspapers had consumer rights reporters and hundreds carried syndicated columns on the topic, former Detroit Free Press reporter Trudy Lieberman recounts in a mournful history of the industry. They tackled fraud and misleading practices, using the bully pulpit of a big audience to browbeat companies.
Advertiser pushback, political opposition and the rise of a new trade group, the Business Roundtable, took the air out of the movement in the 1980s and 1990s, Lieberman says.
In recent years, the collapse of local journalism altogether has meant thousands more journalists have left the industry and multiple news outlets shut. Since 2000, close to 3,500 local newspapers have vanished, and the ones that remain are “profoundly different”, with limited coverage and changed ownership, a Northwestern University study found in late 2025.
“The reality is, at most small regional papers and some bigger ones, their staffs have been cut so far to the bone many of them don’t even have a business section any more,” much less a consumer reporter, said Jane Sasseen, executive director of the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the City University of New York and a veteran business editor.
A stack of newspapers ready for sorting and delivery at a mail sorting station in Colbert, Georgia. Photograph: Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Companies still face tough investigations from other watchdog media, including a crop of new non-profits.
Consumer Reports, which has been testing products for 90 years, recently pushed Instacart to abandon algorithmic grocery pricing, after an investigation with More Perfect Union and others. The investigative non-profit ProPublica examined exploitive drug pricing in life-saving medications and Public Health Watch pushed Houston to change its permitting policies. The Guardian series The Price We Pay has investigated corporate overcharging and sparked state action.
At the same time, a growing group of “citizen journalists” online are attracting millions of views as they share tips on slashing medical bills and cutting grocery costs, enlist their followers to test meat weights, explain where your eggs come from and make apps that show how a handful of companies control most big brands.
So far, it isn’t enough to offset a rising tide of company misconduct. “Because there are fewer [journalists] looking at this issue, companies are getting away with more,” said Jeffrey Timmermans, director of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University.
In coming weeks, Consumed will explore US consumers’ most common frustrations, look at how corporate America’s view of customers has changed and talk to the most powerful consumer advocates and consumer protection officials in the country about what’s next.
American consumers, we’d like to hear from you. Please tell us your frustrations here or email us at consumed@theguardian.com.
