The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Chris Colin. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Chris Colin. Chris is a writer and editor. He’s written about problematic billionaires, Japan’s renter friend industry, Obama’s Irish roots, long-term worry, endangered noodles, temp filmmakers, George Bush’s pool boy, and lots more. Welcome, Chris Colin.
Chris: Thank you. Nice to be here, Jim.
Jim: You can learn more about Chris’s work at chriscolin.com. And as always, that link and other relevant links will appear on our episode page at jimruttshow.com. Today, we’re going to start talking about an essay Chris wrote in The Atlantic back on June 29 called “That Dropped Call with Customer Service. It Was on Purpose.” Probably many of us have had similar experiences or at least suspected as much. So we’re going to start with Chris’s story, and then we’re going to branch out from there into a broader discussion about why the hell does this stuff happen. So Chris, give us a few minute version of your personal story.
Chris: My story began innocently enough. I’m driving down the street here in San Francisco where I live, and I’m going about 40 in my relatively new Ford. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the car just turns off. When that happens, your steering wheel locks up, your power brakes die. I had no control over this vehicle that was going pretty fast. I’m looking up ahead with panic at a curve in the road, and there’s a little embankment. It was about three seconds of terror. I actually started reaching for the handle of the door—I thought I might have to do some stunt driver stuff. Happily, the car just sort of came to a stop right before the bend in the road. Very anticlimactic.
That’s really where the story begins. I did what anyone would do: I took the car to a shop. When the shop couldn’t find the problem, I took it to the Ford dealership. They also couldn’t quite find it. They could see from their computer code that something big had happened, but they couldn’t replicate the problem. Took it to another Ford dealership—same deal.
I was still confident, wasn’t worried. This is a car that’s under warranty. Worst case scenario, I just pull the ripcord and get a new car with my warranty. I’ve never done that before, but I assumed it’s a simple process. When I finally reached the point where that needed to happen, I called Ford and explained what was going on. They said, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, but until they can replicate the problem at the shop, we can’t make good on the warranty.”
This is where things started to go in a strange direction. I began having to make phone call after phone call trying to get them to deal with this problem. I couldn’t get the mechanics to replicate the problem. I couldn’t get Ford headquarters to reckon with that issue. I just needed someone who could say, “Okay, here’s the solution.” I couldn’t get to that person. I couldn’t find them. Increasingly, I wasn’t sure they existed.
All the while, I’m spending hours and hours on hold or getting transferred, having to explain my story all over again, getting disconnected fairly regularly, writing emails with no reply. It was a very familiar experience. We all have this experience routinely, whether it’s with our car or insurance or trying to talk to your airline or get a refund on something. We all find ourselves in this little routine, this dance where we’re trying to get through to someone, spending far too long on the phone or writing emails. And we all reach this point where we say, “fuck it.” It’s $30—I’m just going to pay even though I know this bill is incorrect. We just give up. We hit a wall. It becomes too onerous to make all these ridiculous phone calls.
I couldn’t do that because this wasn’t a $90 ticket—this was a car. Over the next several months, I spent a huge part of my life not only trying to resolve this but paying attention, looking at it through the eyes of a journalist. Trying to understand what the hell is going on. Why has this happened so often? And what to make of that suspicion that I think we all have: is this happening on purpose? Am I getting disconnected on purpose? Are they giving me the runaround on purpose? Am I unable to get what I’m owed on purpose?
Part of the story was me finding sources who could pull back the curtain on that world on the other end of the call, and that was eye-opening. But another part was also examining why we all have this sense of “fuck it.” What does it mean for so many of us to experience that sense of defeat, that sense of powerlessness so regularly? I think that’s a meaningful thing that’s happening in our culture right now.
Jim: Yeah, absolutely right? As I was mentioning in the pregame, I am famously terrible about dealing with these kinds of stuff. Fortunately, my wife has a genius-level ability to remain calm and seduce the people and navigate all this stuff. My tendency is very quickly to start yelling about AR-15s and flamethrowers and such. That does not work well with the regimented inhuman machinery that we have in place with us today. And so for the deep horrible stuff, fortunately, I get my wife to handle it. But just, you know, trying to talk to the pharmacist because it doesn’t fit any of their menu categories, right?
Chris: Right.
Jim: And they make it as difficult as possible. Every week, they add another step you have to go through. You press to talk to the pharmacy, and now they’ve added the extra level of trying to deflect you back to the website. You go, “fucking assholes, I just want to talk to a person, you miserable cocksuckers.” Right? And, you know, sometimes I will vent into the phone to see if that’ll do something. It used to—they used to detect angry people and put them through, but they don’t seem to do that anymore. Pressing zero four times doesn’t seem to work anymore. The red team trying to keep you as unsatisfied as possible just seems to be getting better and better at their job. So you then had an insight that, wait a minute, is it just human incompetence or is there malice involved here? Or if not quite malice, the next door to malice, which is, how much can I annoy people so that we have to spend as little as possible on servicing them? So why don’t you tell that next part of your story, what you discovered as you dug in from your own experience?
Chris: Yeah. Well, the real culprit, I don’t think it’s malice so much as capitalism. What I started to learn is I got very lucky. I found a guy named Amas Tanuma who became kind of my Deep Throat. He had spent two decades in the call center world. He started as someone who answered calls, he went on to manage these call centers and then to set them up for large companies. So he knew them inside and out, and he was willing to speak candidly in a way I had never really heard anyone do.
And I would say, “Amas, I talk to these people, and there’s always that sort of short burst of empathy—’I’m so sorry that happened to you’—and then it very quickly pivots into something, like you said, Jim, that feels a little inhuman. They’re remarkably inept when it comes to solving very basic problems or even seemingly understanding what I’m saying.” So I would say, “Amas, is it me, or do they sort of not really care about solving this?” And he just laughed, and he said, “Yes. You’re hearing it has been designed that way.”
When you hear someone who sounds inhuman, it’s because the humanity has been trained out of them. When you have someone who’s not solving the problem, it’s because it doesn’t serve the bottom line to solve the problem. And he would go on to show me some actual tricks they do, which I’ll tell you in a bit. But the upshot was that friction that’s introduced into these situations, of course, helps the company. It’s not that nobody gets the refund, nobody gets the rebate, or whatever they’re after. It’s that they’re trying to weed out as many as possible. So the longer the hold time, the more runaround you get, the fewer credits they have to pay out. That’s the term they use in the industry.
Whatever the credit may be, they are absolutely designing these systems to limit their payout. And so what happens is, you know, no one says, “Let’s do bad service.” What they say instead is, “We need to trim the budget by such and such amount,” and that number trickles its way down through the ranks down to the call center manager. And that person says, “Hey, we’re giving out too many credits. We’re losing 15 percent more than we can afford to lose.” They don’t say hang up on people. They just tell their workers what the situation is, and those workers have really stressful jobs. And they are monitored to a remarkable level. You know, bathroom breaks, they count the number of minutes. And, of course, they count how long every phone call is, and they count how many times something is escalated to a manager.
So these representatives have to take things into their own hands. So if their average handle time, which means how long they’re on a given call, starts to get too high and they don’t want to get dinged by their supervisor, one way to bring that average down is to hang up on someone early on in the call. If someone is becoming difficult, you can transfer them back into the queue. You know, there’s a lot of little tricks that they have, and it’s not because it’s malice. It’s because they’re trying to protect their jobs, and their jobs are really rough.
Jim: And you mentioned metrics. Back in my day, at my various companies where we had customer service at the professional level, we were at the other extreme. We hired recent college grads, often from very elite institutions—one of our better customer service reps had a medieval history degree from Yale. We used it as an entry-level job where if you did well at it for a couple of years, you’d get promoted to product manager or sales, something like that, and it worked well. But it was the absolute other extreme where we wanted gold-plated, wonderful customer service. We kept no metrics whatsoever other than periodic surveys of our customers to see if they were happy, and they were generally very happy. But those were expensive products, and we could afford to do so. We had decided that gold-plated customer service would be part of our brand, and I tried to do that in all the companies I built or worked for.
But I did work for one later in my career that had a huge customer service organization that was famously terrible. I came in there as a turnaround CEO, and it never had metrics. I put some metrics on it and, oh my God, was it scary. But again, we had a relatively profitable product and we could afford it—it was mostly that they were incompetent at execution at large scale rather than that they were over-metricized.
Later, fortunately not in my own companies, I talked to people involved in businesses where it had become all about the metrics. The financial people had realized there are two dials they can turn. One is to minimize the dollar expenditure on customer service, which is one dimension—make you just go away and deal with your problem yourself. For instance, customer service for a product: my stereo isn’t quite working right, and how do I diagnose that remotely? They just want to annoy you enough that you go away and deal with it yourself.
The other side is what you call the credits, which is: do I have to reimburse you something? Do I have to pay you something? Or do I have to pay out something on your behalf? The famous example there is the health insurance industry. Those calls are big-stakes payouts. If they’ve denied you a claim and then you’re going through the process of getting that denial appealed, you’re talking about big dollars. So if they can annoy you to the point you don’t pursue the appeal, the credit side of the equation is large.
And here’s the perverse thing with these medium-scale issues—the two metrics are combined. Sometimes they’re willing to spend more time on the phone with you if it makes you go away and not pursue the claim. Other times they’re just trying to minimize the customer service time if it’s a post-sale customer service question. In your case, it was both a big claim business, but I think it’s important to realize that there are two separate dials. Sometimes they go together, sometimes they go in opposite directions where it’s worthwhile to spend customer service time to eventually make you go away or not provide you with satisfaction.
It’s quite perverse. And as you rightly point out, it’s not malice. These guys don’t sit down and say, “Ah, I’m evil like a Batman villain, I’m gonna mess over people’s experiences just because I can.” No, they do it because it pencils out. If I do X, I make more money at the bottom line, at least in the short term, than if I had done Y. So I thought that was quite interesting. So why don’t you get back to your story on what you learned?
Chris: Some of these tricks are active ones, like disconnecting a call or transferring it to the queue. Increasingly, we’re going to see something where you cannot make your way at all to a human. What a lot of these companies have decided is that going through the web is just the way they want the future to be. Some of my sources said that a bit of this is attributable to COVID. Everyone had to switch—companies had to switch to automated service in a lot of cases because you couldn’t go into the store or wherever it was to deal with whatever you had to deal with. People hated it, of course we hated it. But the takeaway from the companies was: but they tolerated it. So even after the pandemic has waned, a lot of that stuff is still in place. And in fact, it’s only going to get worse with AI.
Some of the tricks are more passive. It’s in the design, the architecture of the system. By not hiring enough call center workers, that keeps the hold times longer, and that weeds out a certain number of callers. Another thing that happens is more passive. Of course, a lot of these call centers are offshore or in other countries. Often the connection isn’t good because the companies choose to pay for a cheaper Internet connection for these calls. So your call gets disconnected that way, or you can’t quite hear them clearly. And again, that serves the bottom line.
There’s all these little ways, kind of conscious and unconscious, that we are getting hosed. And then there’s a bigger macro trend behind this, and it sort of gets back to what you were saying about your experiences, Jim. There was a time when customer service was the gold standard. Every company wanted to do amazing customer service. What has changed in the last ten years is a tilt toward growth. CEOs now are far more interested in getting profits because they’re answerable to the board rather than existing customers. And their tenure is shorter, so they’ve got to move faster. They’ve got to get those new customers sooner. And the existing customers and their satisfaction—in theory, they care about that. But in practice, that’s no longer their priority.
Jim: One of my pet peeves about late-stage financialized capitalism is that this focus on quarterly earnings is hugely bad. And as you point out, I went and looked at the numbers recently, the shorter tenure of CEOs is also bad. Current tenure for an S&P 500 CEO is 4.7 years, and that’s skewed by about 20 percent who have very long tenure. So a newly appointed CEO is about fifty-fifty to be gone in three years. The payoffs for moving your stock price in the short term can be very substantial. And I say this as a person who was a public company CEO and who was a C-level executive at a very large public company.
Fortunately, both of our companies refused to play the game. At Thomson, now Thomson Reuters, I was the first CTO there, and we were so ironclad obnoxious about it. We refused to issue quarterly earnings. We were incorporated in Canada where that was legal. In fact, we believed that the Thomson family had used some lobbying efforts to get that allowed under Canadian law. When I was CEO of Network Solutions, we had to do quarterly earnings, but I would basically say, “I’m not giving you any guidance. I’m not even going to emphasize earnings. I’m going to tell you about what we’re doing strategically to build this business.” And violated every rule of what the investor relations people told you you’re supposed to say on the quarterly call. Of course, scared the hell out of our company the first time I did it. But then guess what happened? Our stock price went up right after the call. Every single quarterly call I made, the stock price went up the day after the call.
It’s this strange multipolar trap where everybody thinks that they’re in this race to the bottom, and they’re acting as if they are, but it’s not clear to me that’s really true. But it might be true from the perspective of a CEO who only expects to stay in office for three years and see how much appreciation he can get in his stock options and his bonus payment during that time. I was lucky. I just never gave a damn about money, frankly. I don’t have fancy tastes, made money years ago that’s plenty for cheeseburgers. So I played the business game for other reasons—to see how many chips I could stack up. And if you play the game for that reason, actually your investors liked it as it turned out. I think in both cases, Thomson and Network Solutions, they demonstrated that as long as you told them what you were doing, there is a class of people—
Chris: That is refreshing and exotic to hear. That was very much not the kind of talk that I was encountering.
Jim: Yeah. That’s not the way it is for 97 percent of the companies. And then, unfortunately, the ethos has come around that it’s somehow immoral not to follow the dictates of the short-term numbers, which is like, forget that. Alright. So let’s go back to your story. And you discovered that there’s a name for this. There is a—
Chris: Who understands that’s the right way to build long-term value. That is refreshing and exotic to hear. That was very much not the kind of talk that I was encountering.
Jim: Yeah. That’s not the way it is for 97 percent of the companies. And then, unfortunately, the ethos has come around that it’s somehow immoral not to follow the dictates of the short-term numbers, which is like, fuck. Alright. So let’s go back to your story. And you discovered that there’s a name for this. There is a—
Chris: Name for this. It’s called sludge. As soon as I heard the word, of course, it made sense. It resonated. There is a lot of research. I had not known about this, but there’s a lot of research that’s happening more and more into both private sector and public sector sludge. It can have any number of forms. It can be administrative friction. It can be excessive legalese. It can be just extra bureaucracy that keeps you from getting something you’re owed, benefits you’re entitled to. People in this country leave millions and millions of dollars worth of benefits on the table because it’s just too hard to get them.
Another aspect of the story that was very plain to me was the people who are able to fight through the sludge are the people who have the resources and the time and the flexibility to do so. I was very lucky. I had a job where I could step away and answer the phone every time I had a Ford number calling me to give me some negligible update. I had the freedom to wait on hold a lot. I had the sort of training to know how to do those calls. It was in a language that I spoke fluently. There’s all kinds of advantages I had. And a lot of people, it was very clear to me, would reach the point even with a car—they’d just say, “fuck it. I’m just gonna start driving this dangerous car again.” Because that was always the push that I was getting. “Are you sure you don’t want to just keep driving it?” And I would say, “Really? Would you put your family in a car that does this?” And then they would be kind of appalled. “Well, no, certainly not.” But that was always the push. “Are you sure you don’t want to just pick it up and just start driving it?” Sludge hits people disproportionately. It’s the people who already have the resources to fight it who are able to push through it most often.
Jim: Yep. That was interesting. I did, after reading your article, jump in to see a little bit about what Thaler and Sunstein said about sludge in their book “Nudge.” They talked about sludge back in 2008. And I discovered that they’re actually talking about two different things. One is this bottom-line driven intentional friction, but they’re also talking about unintentional or at least negligently no attention paid to friction, for instance, in design of government entitlements. And not even necessarily entitlements—anything that has to do with dealing with the fucking government. They don’t realize that the way they design their processes are attacks on our attention, our time, and our blood pressure basically. And so the system just gradually—you go to the fucking DMV now and nobody priced into the design of the protocols how much of our time it wastes. And they ought to pay you $100 an hour for every minute you sit in the DMV office. Their shit would get together very fast. But because our citizenship time, let alone our aggravation and blood pressure, aren’t priced, this crap just builds up. And they talk about both forms as kind of separate but related phenomenon.
Chris: Yeah. Indeed. You know, you talk about attention, time, and blood pressure. There’s another element here, which is our faith in our institutions. I think that all is also taxed by sludge, and I think you could argue that what we’ve seen politically over the last few years is in part a reflection of us losing faith in our ability to just accomplish basic things that we need as citizens or as consumers. That opens the door for an Elon Musk type to come in with Doge and say, “You know, it’s all broken. Well, let me just get in there and just sort of do whatever I’ll do because we can all agree it’s broken.” So he kind of exploits that frustration, that sense of “fuck it” to ultimately hollow out these institutions, and it’s just gonna make things worse. Well, at least if—
Chris: Yeah. Indeed. You know, you talk about attention, time, and blood pressure. There’s another element here, which was our faith in our institutions. I think that all is also taxed by sludge, and I think you could argue that what we’ve seen politically over the last few years is in part a reflection of us losing faith in our ability to just accomplish basic things that we need as citizens or as consumers. That opens the door for, you know, an Elon Musk type to come in with Doge and say, “It’s all broken. Well, let me just get in there and just sort of do whatever I’ll do because we can all agree it’s broken.” So he kind of exploits that frustration, that sense of “fuck it” to ultimately hollow out these institutions, and it’s just gonna make things worse.
Jim: If you do it the way he wanted to do it, it would make things worse. But I think that the diagnosis is actually correct, that nobody has paid attention to excellence and execution in government services ever as far as I can tell. As everything becomes more bureaucratic, you know, the rule of bureaucracy is it wants to reinforce itself, so it builds processes that require more people. So I could be promoted to a higher level manager—I got seven weenies instead of two, I get to go up to the next GS grade, et cetera. And in the business world, we find if you don’t do a comprehensive top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top operational review every five to seven years, shit just accumulates because of all kinds of reasons: human nature, inertia, the law, bureaucratic self-reinforcement, et cetera. And best I can tell that has never been done to the government in a comprehensive way since the modern government was established in 1933. The Gore initiative under Clinton did some. It helped some, but it’s a huge job, and it’s certainly not done by sending twenty-five-year-olds in with a meat axe and just chopping shit at random. It would be a multiyear process that would require the best and the brightest to very carefully analyze processes from the top down, the bottom up, and involve Congress in it because it would probably mean some amendments to some laws, et cetera. It’s a serious job. It’s a serious, huge undertaking, but of great value and certainly not what the Dogeites were trying to do. But the principle was correct.
Chris: Yeah. I will say that Biden did try to take a bite out of it in his administration. By the end of his time, he had reports coming out that acknowledged the time tax that bureaucracy was taking on people. So they were starting to chip away at it. It’s huge—I mean, the amount of bureaucracy, I can’t remember the numbers, but I’m sure you’ve seen them. It’s like billions of hours it would take to get through all of it if you add up all the bureaucracy that Americans face. It’s an almost insurmountable job, but there are people who are working on it. There are folks who are talking about doing sludge audits, starting by just building awareness of sludge. So the idea that this was just kind of accidental is increasingly hard to believe, especially—I’m thinking now of the big beautiful bill. When they crafted that bill, they were very aware that one of its downstream effects would be that it would filter out even more folks who are entitled to benefits because they stuffed it with so much bureaucracy and red tape, you know, little things like making people fill out a form twice a year instead of once. Little roadblocks here and there add up, and the research has been clear about this, so they know what they’re doing.
Jim: Yeah. They were grossly immoral. There are alleged cuts in Medicaid. They didn’t actually cut Medicaid at all. They didn’t change any of the payouts or the entitlement. I guess it did make one additional thing to the entitlement. The main thing they did, as you say, is to add a whole bunch of obnoxious time-consuming bureaucratic steps in the process. And they basically modeled that that would cause a certain number of people who would otherwise be entitled to medical insurance to not pick it up. What an immoral fucking thing to do.
Chris: Yep. You can see it every step of the way. You see it all over. I mean, with the flooding in Texas, representatives at call centers for FEMA were fired, and so there were fewer people to answer the phones to help survivors get entitlements that were owed to them. You know, people would ask me after that, “How is that on purpose? How does that—you know, it’s not a profit situation like with the company. Who does that serve?” And, you know, I think, in my opinion, that serves the right’s orthodoxy. If you convince people that government is broken, that big government is inefficient and unable to solve your problems, then you’re more likely to vote for people like Donald Trump. So every time a citizen encounters broken government, doesn’t get a call answered, you know, there is an argument that that just helps win over more Republicans in this current state.
Jim: They are very, as you say, disillusioned people. You know, they did a big cutback in the number of people on the customer service line for the IRS, for instance. Talk about combining two hideous things, bureaucracy and taxes, right? Not good. Not good at all. The amount of money they save is trivial, but I suspect you’re probably right. This is more just to give taxes an even worse name than they have today, as part of this essentially anti-government agenda. So you also laid out some other things—I liked your what did you call it? The administration bullshit night or something. Tell us some things of your ideas on how we can cope with this and how we might deal with this sludge everywhere.
Chris: Yeah. Well, first of all, talking about it is step one, acknowledging it. And I say that because, as I descend further and further into my Ford saga, I realize that I’m not talking about it during this period. It’s so boring and banal and mundane that I can’t bear to hear myself tell my wife or my friends about the latest stupid phone call I had to endure.
I started to realize that we all do this. We spend that hour dealing with the insurance people or whatever in a kind of fugue state. It’s so deadening to us that I think we kind of go unconscious, and we just want to pretend that didn’t happen.
I remember one night I was at a party, and I just couldn’t help myself. I had to talk about how infuriating the latest round of phone calls was with Ford. And someone said, “Well, I have a similar thing with this airline.” And then someone else heard us talking and came over, and they started telling their stories. Pretty soon, there was a big cluster of people all sharing their sludge stories. It was like a dam had burst, and everyone had been holding these stories in because they’re embarrassed by how sort of small and silly and niggling they are. But once we started talking about it, we realized, God, this is kind of a bigger issue than anyone really acknowledges. It’s not big enough that someone can run for office on having shorter hold times, but it’s enough that it’s driving us all a little crazy.
So my first solution is that we start talking about it, and we get frank about how much time we are spending and how it’s all getting worse. I think we all recognize that it’s gotten worse over the last few years. I can tell you some tricks that are occasionally successful, like writing letters to the CEO. If you do an end run around the call center, of course, it doesn’t always work. But if you can manage to get a letter into the hands of whoever puts letters on the CEO’s desk that morning—the CEO doesn’t want to be embarrassed by this. The CEO wants to solve problems. So I have heard from a number of people that that does work if you are persistent about it.
Meanwhile, I came up with something that helps sort of on the psychic end. Several years ago, long before the Ford thing started happening to me, and before I knew there was a word for sludge, I was very aware of how much time this was taking and the psychic toll it was taking in our lives. More and more, I found that friends were busy when otherwise we might have gone out for a beer. They had to stay home and fill out this form or that form or deal with disputing a charge or dealing with a rejected claim. There was so much just administration of our own lives that had started to accumulate.
And I said, okay, I got an idea. I sent out an email to a bunch of friends and neighbors. And on a Tuesday night, about a dozen people came over with bags of bills and their laptops and all the stuff they needed to start chipping away at sludge, plus a couple six-packs. And we made an evening of it, and we call it admin night. And once every few weeks, we have one, sometimes more often. Basically, it’s a way of dealing with this stuff together. I think we all realized it was isolating us. It was boring to deal with. It was depressing. And if we could make it into kind of a little bit of a party, then that was cool. So we sit around the table and we shoot the shit for ten minutes, and then we just plug away at whatever mundane, boring, horrible task we have to deal with. We do that for half an hour, and then we chat a little more and open a bottle of wine. And it does two things: it gets things off of our to-do list, but it also sort of daylights this category of time suck that has become such a part of modern life.
Jim: Yeah, the idea of the admin party—I guess it’s better than nothing. But you also mentioned in your essay something in passing, and I’d like to heighten this because this is my personal approach. You mentioned that you got your payoff for the car eventually because of who you were. The hassles you went through would have dissuaded 95 percent of people, but because of your capabilities, your understanding, and the nature of your work, you were able to deal with this until you got paid off.
But then you made a note that you did not buy a Ford. The next car was something else. To my mind, this is where if we could somehow solve the famous collective action problem and surface our bad experiences and then change who we do business with—and say why—if we could do that at scale somehow, that would get people’s attention even if they are locked in this quarterly earnings rat race. If they see five or 10 percent defection of their customer base, that’ll get people’s attention.
Now, people who are monopolists, that’s difficult. The other famous example being your cable company back in the days when nobody gave a damn about cable. We killed our cable five or six years ago. I think we killed satellite like seven years ago and cable five years ago. So forget them. And part of the reason was because they were evil monopolists who gave the worst possible service.
But in other areas where there is competition, I’ll give you one example, I’m going to call them out. For thirty-five years, I ran most of my credit card transactions through American Express. They used to have great customer service. Everything was very reliable. But about five years ago, you could just tell they weren’t hiring the quality of people. They were putting them into a more regimented, template system. I had two horrific mistakes that ended up causing me difficulty.
As much as I had always loved American Express and had recommended it to other people, I think I probably annoyed them by refusing to upgrade from the basic green card. For the longest time, they would say, “Oh, Mr. Rutt, you qualify for the gold card, the platinum card, the black card, whatever you want.” I’d say, “Nope. If you give them to me for free, I’ll take them. I ain’t paying a penny for them.” They’d say, “Oh, can’t do that.” I did have a free green card, so I just kept it.
But I noticeably watched the quality go downhill until finally, after the third bad customer service experience, I said forget it. I went and shopped around a little bit and asked what card has good customer service, good points, and I could get for free. I found Wells Fargo. Normally, I was a little scared about Wells Fargo—they have some issues. But I switched from American Express to Wells Fargo Visa, and now I run 95 percent of my business through that card. American Express only gets a few legacy Substack subscriptions and a few other things. Those folks have lost a lot of money on me, and I’m here proudly to say it and say, if you’ve had a bad experience with Amex, switch. Capital One would have been my second choice.
In categories where it’s relatively easy to switch—and credit cards are really easy to switch—they love to give you credit cards, just switch and tell your friends. I used to be a big advocate of American Express. I now say forget those guys. My wife gets embarrassed when I do this. She says, “Most people aren’t as obnoxious as you are.” I say, “Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Ninety-nine percent of the population is less obnoxious than I am.” Just imagine if everybody was as obnoxious as I was.
It’s even moral. Think about Kant’s categorical imperative to get really nerdy. For those who don’t know about Kant, the famous philosopher, he said a first-order measure of the ethicalness of a behavior is what would happen if everybody did it. Shooting your neighbor obviously fails Kant’s categorical imperative because if we all shot our neighbor, that would not be good. But if every one of us spoke up about rotten customer service we had and explicitly denounced the people that we’d reached the end of the line with and had switched to somebody else—and said who we switched to and why—if every single person did that, this game of economic optimizing via sludge would very quickly get broken up.
Chris: Jim, I’m so glad you brought that up because that is absolutely true. One of the depressing things I learned in my reporting is that as frustrated as we are, we are really bad at doing anything about it in terms of organizing, in terms of punishing the companies that treat us this way. There are some really staggering stats out there about airlines—there’s an airline that is widely hated, and the people who report how much they dislike it keep coming back almost as much as the people who like it. And that’s true in a number of industries. As one of my sources said, all you have to do is dangle a 20 percent coupon, and they’ll come running back.
You know, it’s not always possible because, as you said, the competition is diminishing. When you have Amazon that’s responsible for half of all retail in this country, when you have airlines that are cutting their routes, sometimes you have to support a company you don’t want to support, but a lot of times you don’t. And if we were to get a little more organized and a little more deliberate about pushing back on these companies, I think it would absolutely have an impact.
Jim: Yeah. I wonder if there’s an opportunity to organize something—a citizens action coalition to punish companies that are, at least and this is where we have to go from anecdote to data, the worst offenders in each category. If you just let it be known, we’re going to calculate who are the bad players in this category, and we’re going to recommend against doing business with the bottom two. We could produce a race to the top rather than the current race to the bottom.
We could put the word out: “Okay, Airline A and Airline B, they’re on the shit list.” And everybody that’s a member of the Citizens Collective Action Alliance has agreed that whenever possible, we’re not going to do business with these people. And from our $20 a year membership fee, we’re going to be running some ads saying that Citizens Coalition recommends you don’t use Airline A and B, and here’s a link to why, and here’s the data. Something like this could work if people cared. But so many people, just as you say, they just don’t care or they just think it is part of the ecosystem.
Horrible thing I say occasionally, but there’s some truth to it, is that after two weeks, Auschwitz probably felt like home. I hate to say such things, but humans are very capable of starting to accept the unacceptable after a relatively short period of time. And if we could change that mindset with even five or ten percent of the populace, these companies might have to pay attention to us.
Chris: Yeah. Well, I agree. I think people, as frustrated as we are, have sort of gotten inured to it, and we accept it as the norm. We’re also just too busy to get organized in many cases and to mount these campaigns. That’s partly why I was interested in this story to begin with—what does it mean when we are all feeling depleted and powerless and enervated? What happens when this many people feel this way on a routine basis? So, yeah, I think it’s not just an interesting consumer moment. It’s an interesting moment as citizens and as members of a society. What happens when we are made to feel this way on a regular basis?
Jim: And you talk about the psychological toll. I see it in people. As I say, I’m immune to it. I get fucking pissed off every goddamn time and rant and rave. Good. Everybody should do that. I don’t take action as often as I should. But I think this conversation may be encouraging me to be even more discerning. Right? We have three grocery stores in this town I live in. One of them is annoyingly corporate—it’s the largest grocery chain in America. The other two are better, and I mostly give my business to the other two, so I should give all my business to the other two. I should tell my friends to do the same, and here’s why.
The other guy who’s written a fair bit about this, who’s been on my show a couple times—we did not talk about this topic—but it’s really good, is Cory Doctorow. He has his concept of enshittification of everything. And the interesting thing about that formulation is he does split the two kinds of sludge. Enshittification, he means the intentional enshittification for the purpose of driving profit as opposed to the more or less unintentional shittification of the Department of Motor Vehicles. And hey, maybe you and he can get together and start this Citizens Alliance. I’ll have you both back on the show. We can talk about it. I’ll get you on Joe Rogan. I got some connections into Joe Rogan’s world. Have you guys hold hands and say we’re gonna do this? Can’t promise, but I will try.
Chris: To get you on Joe. Well, I do think there’s a movement here that’s waiting to be started. Last thing—what kind of response have you got to your essay? The response has been overwhelming, to be honest. I think for the same reasons that, you know, people at that party that I was talking about were sort of unburdening themselves. I think a lot of us haven’t had this fully acknowledged as a phenomenon yet. And I think there was a lot—I’ve just gotten hundreds and hundreds of letters from folks saying, “I had my suspicions that this was happening. I suspected that this was on purpose. I suspected we’re dealing with this more than ever. I suspected that we’re all being kind of driven a little crazy and made to feel powerless, but it hadn’t sufficiently been called out yet.” So I think that’s why it hit such a nerve.
Jim: Well, that’s good to hear. So thank you very much, Chris Colin, for coming on The Jim Rutt Show. We talked about your essay in The Atlantic titled “That Dropped Call With Customer Service. It Was on Purpose.” Thanks again.
Chris: Thanks, Jim. Great to talk to you.
Jim: Yeah. This was fun.