\n<\/p>\n
American consumers are angry. Nearly 80% of Americans had a service or product problem in 2025, and about two-thirds of those felt \u201crage\u201d about it, according to the \u201cNational Consumer Rage\u201d survey.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s favor. All of this comes against a background of soaring prices and rising inflation.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
In the coming weeks, the Guardian plans to examine some of the causes behind this rising epidemic of consumer frustration, the impact on Americans\u2019 lives, the watchdogs on the beat, and potential solutions. Tell us your personal tales of corporate frustration here, and we\u2019ll explore this problem together.<\/p>\n
Lisa, a 60-year-old marketing executive who lives in Washington DC, recently battled three big corporations over just two days. She didn\u2019t want to give her last name for fear of retaliation from the companies involved.<\/p>\n
First, her longtime vet, now part of a national chain, overcharged her $500 for her dog\u2019s teeth cleaning and didn\u2019t issue a promised refund. Then, her big box supermarket promoted a coupon on its app that wasn\u2019t applied at the checkout, costing her $30 and a trip back to the store. Finally, her health insurance company rejected her son\u2019s $1,100 dental bill that she had been told would be 50% covered, despite protracted haggling.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like Whac-A-Mole,\u201d the mother of two said. \u201cYou finish one and up pops another one.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels like a war on consumers,\u201d said Sally Greenberg, the executive director of the National Consumers League, a 125-year-old consumer advocacy group. Households are being hit by \u201ca tsunami of fees and hidden charges and tricks and traps\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n
American consumers face a paradox \u2013 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. \u201cBut not only does service just suck,\u201d Fader said, consumers \u201care starting to realize that a lot of the cool data and technology is being used against them\u201d.<\/p>\n
<\/span> Photograph: Brandon Bell\/Getty Images<\/p>\n These experiences are not just frustrating. US households are losing $165bn a year on the \u201cannoyance economy\u201d or \u201cwhat we pay in time, fees and irritation to navigate our daily lives\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019ve just spent an hour waiting on hold with an airline, or your cable company, or you\u2019re feeling like you\u2019ve been jerked around, you\u2019re not gonna go to the [Parent Teachers Association] meeting, you\u2019re not going to interact with your neighbor,\u201d afterward, said Chad Maisel, who co-authored the Annoyance Economy report. \u201cIt\u2019s a very toxic cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s WP Carey School of Business. \u201cYou 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Americans don\u2019t endorse murder, Broetzmann said, but the reaction was a manifestation of a widespread sense of frustration and powerlessness. There\u2019s a \u201cdangerous mix of brittle systems, high stakes and very low trust,\u201d between US consumers and companies right now, he added. \u201cThe lesson for companies is not that they should brace for violence; it\u2019s that they have to take everyday customer pain seriously long before it reaches this point.\u201d<\/p>\n That toxic cycle is now being sped up by a Trump administration that is defanging government watchdogs, <\/strong>consumer rights advocates say.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdirected customers to dead-end cancellation hotline, withheld refunds, and knowingly tarnished credit reports with false data,\u201d the order by the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) found.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/span>Russell Vought on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 15 April. <\/span> Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein\/Reuters<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat does that say to companies? It says \u2018go ahead, rip off, lie, cheat and if you do there will be no consequences,\u201d said Greenberg.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Facebook and Instagram for spreading online scams. \u201cWe have an aggressive agenda and we are active and try to go where we see significant harm,\u201d Mufarrige said in an interview.<\/p>\n States are also stepping up. California\u2019s 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\u2019s new government and a bipartisan bill hope to revive the \u201cclick to cancel\u201d rule that bans cumbersome subscription cancellations.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n chart<\/p>\n This rollback of federal oversight isn\u2019t just a Trump administration phenomenon, but since his re-election, \u201cit has turned from a trot into a gallop\u201d, Greenberg said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a long way from the golden age of consumer protection in modern-day America in the 1960s and 1970s, when lawyer Ralph Nader\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That was followed by a \u201ctremendously powerful conservative pushback\u201d in the 1980s and 1990s that labeled consumer activists \u201cbusybodies\u201d 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. \u201cCorporate power is enormous and pretty much unchecked in much of the political arena,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Despite the rise in consumer frustration, Glickman says, \u201cthere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Ralph Nader appears before the Senate commerce subcommittee in March 1966. <\/span> Photograph: Bettmann\/Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n The history of consumer movements since has been \u201call downhill from Carter on down\u201d, Nader, 92, said in an interview. \u201cCorporate power supremacy is staggeringly greater than 1970,\u201d he said, consumer groups were complacent and consumer power had never been weaker.<\/p>\n The outlook for consumers has \u201cnever been worse\u201d, Nader added. \u201cThis is not the pessimism of an old man, this is the discernment of a very knowledgable person.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cRegulations and comments on regulations and lobbying to fix consumer law, that\u2019s pretty much a useless premise at this moment in time,\u201d said Rheingold.<\/p>\n Instead, a new wave of civil litigation could be coming. At law firms that represent consumers the \u201cphones are ringing off the hook, because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility\u201d, Rheingold said.<\/p>\n Another once-powerful consumer watchdog, the mainstream US media, has lost much of its bite since the consumer rights movement\u2019s zenith in the 1970s, say historians, consumer advocates and journalists themselves.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we\u2019re living in a news desert, consumer journalism is the Death Valley,\u201d said Chris Elliott, a former journalist whose website the Elliott Report advocates for consumers battling big companies. (Example: \u201cUPS kept my $400 after damaging my computer \u2013 can it do that?\u201d Answer: no, it cannot. They refunded it after Elliott intervened.)<\/p>\n \u201cYou have some financial journalists who are covering the company\u2019s earnings reports and \u2018is it a good stock to invest in\u2019 \u2013 but is the company actually taking care of its customers? Who cares?\u201d Elliott said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cprofoundly different\u201d, with limited coverage and changed ownership, a Northwestern University study found in late 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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\u2019t even have a business section any more,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n <\/span>A stack of newspapers ready for sorting and delivery at a mail sorting station in Colbert, Georgia.<\/span> Photograph: Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post via Getty Images<\/p>\n Companies still face tough investigations from other watchdog media, including a crop of new non-profits.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n At the same time, a growing group of \u201ccitizen journalists\u201d 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.<\/p>\n So far, it isn\u2019t enough to offset a rising tide of company misconduct. \u201cBecause there are fewer [journalists] looking at this issue, companies are getting away with more,\u201d said Jeffrey Timmermans, director of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University.<\/p>\n In coming weeks, Consumed will explore US consumers\u2019 most common frustrations, look at how corporate America\u2019s view of customers has changed and talk to the most powerful consumer advocates and consumer protection officials in the country about what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n American consumers, we\u2019d like to hear from you. Please tell us your frustrations here or email us at consumed@theguardian.com.<\/p>\nA federal retreat<\/h2>\n
The Nader era<\/h2>\n
Journalism\u2019s \u2018death valley\u2019<\/h2>\n