What Do We Do With All This Consumer Rage?

When a Complaint Isn't Really A Complaint

This week’s episode of The Culture Study Podcast is one that we could only pull off with the help of a very smart weirdo (I mean that with utmost affection) like Tove Danovich — we connect alllllll the dots between the backyard chicken glamour campaign, MAHA, regulation resistance, and more. It’s a wild and satisfying ride; come join us.

And Paid Subscribers: yesterday’s What I’m Reading Thread is *kicking* (plus I recommend my most recent favorite read). Go overload your TBR list!

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It’s dahlia planting season right now in the Northern Hemisphere, which means the online dahlia groups, a real mix of hobby growers and small farm growers and everything in between, are overflowing with people posting pictures of their orders. Sometimes, it’s to praise a seller: look how beautiful these tubers are. Mostly, it’s to ask if they’re right to be upset about the size or state of the tuber.

Earlier this week, someone who was thinking about selling some tubers posted that all the comments in the group had made her incredibly wary: no matter what sort of service you provide, you’d piss off somebody. And they’d post about it. And things would devolve from there.

She’s not wrong: in the last few months, I’ve seen dozens of posts about too much packaging, not enough packaging, the type of packaging, arriving too early, arriving too late, sprouts being too big on tubers, tubers not already with longer sprouts, not enough instructions, tubers that were too large (and should’ve been trimmed to be smaller), tubers that were trimmed to be smaller, tubers that are too small (even though the variety only grows small tubers) — you get the picture. A lot of it comes from a place of general ignorance: they’re new to growing. But some of it is just a high level of sensitivity when it comes to “getting your money’s worth.”

In her post, the would-be seller noted that she’d recently seen someone complaining about tubers that arrived in individual bags labeled with the variety name, but didn’t have the name printed on the tuber itself. I admit: this kinda annoys me too! But I mutter briefly to myself, appreciate the quality of the tubers, and then write the name on the tuber.

Because I have bought a lot of dahlias (and sold a few) I also understand why some sellers skip this step: if you have a whole box of a variety, you feel less of a need to label each tuber. Or you might be running a one-person operation, and the only way you can actually get the tubers out the door is by saving time on things like marking each tuber. Regardless: it’s a perfect example of what the would-be seller dubbed “a complaint that’s not really a complaint.”

It’s an annoyance. Something you text to a friend, if it even rises to that level — or that you recognize as a personal preference, one that you can act on the following year, when you purchase from someone who does mark every tuber.

I’ll tell you what it isn’t: an abject failure on the part of the seller. But in groups like this one, personal preferences are often mistaken for strict industry standards. I see small-time hobby sellers of living, unpredictable, organic matter treated like corporations selling paper cups on Amazon. I see frustration with infrastructure (like, say, the postal system) channeled onto individuals with little to no control over it. And I see a profound absence of grace of any kind.

Most smaller sellers are a part of big, global Facebook groups — for dahlias, but also for other hobbies — out of necessity. They’re sources of knowledge and connection, but also a means of linking to your farm when someone asks “who’s selling this variety.” It’s the digital version of putting your sign on the highway coming into town. The reach of these groups has also encouraged people in super-rural areas and oversaturated ones to get into selling. Before, your market was limited to whoever came to the farmer’s market, the craft fair, or the antique reseller; now, that market has expanded well beyond state lines.

But the promotional potential of these online spaces also means exposing yourself to relentless and only moderately censored critique. You could opt out, and some successful growers have, or you could watch seller after seller get questioned for their practices. (Dahlia wonks, I’m not talking about KA drama here, just want to make that clear — that’s a whole different post).

You could call this “accountability” — and many people writing these posts think it that way. But I think it speaks to a larger flattening of the marketplace, facilitated by globalization and the simultaneous erasure of distance (between seller and consumer) and expansion of it (you know who you’re buying from, but you don’t know them). It’s a perfect recipe for ever-accelerating alienation — and its byproducts, rage and resentment.

As consumers, the globalized marketplace (with a noted assist from venture capital) has taught us to expect and demand levels of seamless service at low prices. But the companies that provide seamless service at low prices often provide lower-quality products and service. Or, now that VC-backed enterprises like Uber and DoorDash have ceased to subsidize the on-demand lifestyle, they provide lower quality products or experiences at higher prices.

Fuck that, we say — fuck Amazon, fuck Uber, fuck Target, fuck Temu, fuck every company that promised to send me a really cool looking pair of earrings for $17 and then they turned my ears green!!! We’re gonna seek out smaller businesses with less exploitative labor practices promising more personal experiences!!! But then: we’re upset when the speed and price are not the same as when a company is operating at (massive and frequently exploitative) scale.

Predictably, customers of these small businesses start complaining about their experiences with the same fervor as they’d complain about a bad experience at Chipotle. Their only outlet: public forums, and often in the form of preferences voiced as complaints (or, as I like to think of it, people who are mad that an orange isn’t an apple). You can see how a lot of small business owners become resistant or hostile towards online customer feedback: what, exactly, do you want from me?

Everyone’s angry and no one’s listening, and it’s only going to get worse.

To elaborate, I’ll use an example from our island. We have one restaurant and it is a very good one. (Not this one, which very famously shuttered several years ago). At our restaurant, a serving of fish and chips is $21. You could get fish & chips at the place at the ferry terminal in town for $5 less, but it wouldn’t be made with Lummi Island Wild Salmon (supporting a local island business) and it wouldn’t be on, well, an island — where you’re paying for the goods to get here (which involves additional ferry charges) and the higher wages necessary to convince people to work the dinner shift five nights a week.

There’s a premium to pay, and I’m happy to pay it. I know the people running the restaurant. I know their musical tastes. I see them hauling food over in giant coolers. They know our dogs and our orders and they are just wonderful people doing a sick job of running a restaurant on a tiny island. Because I also ride the ferry, I know what they’re charged every time they drive on. I also understand that if things are running slow, it’s because they’re slammed during tourist season. Or that if they change something on the menu, it’s not because they wanted to personally offend me.

I know all of this because anyone who’s remotely interested in knowing it, knows it. Other people know it because at some point in their lives they worked at the restaurant, or their family ran it, or their brother worked there.

You don’t have to live on an island to feel this way about an establishment, whether it’s a coffee shop or a bowling alley or a dry cleaner. You just need to understand the means of production as something that humans do — not robots, but humans with lives and needs! — and the process itself as a sort of small miracle, always on the edge of falling apart entirely.

The more you understand how something works, how a pizza comes to be, the less alienated you are from the product — and the more empathy you have for the people making the pizza. That’s Marxism, of course, but it’s also just a way of understanding that unfettered capitalism makes it a lot easier for people to scream at strangers.

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Earlier this year, the writer P.E. Moskowitz made the case for quitting DoorDash and other delivery services as a means of forcing yourself outside your on-demand bubble. It’s good for your mental stability, but it’s also a straightforward way to become more intimate with (some) of the means of production.

When you order a bagel dropped off at your door, you never have to know who’s making the bagel, or watch them as they juggle toasting it and following your precise smear instructions with six other orders. You don’t recognize the same guy working the cash register, or how he always has the Mets game on. You don’t exchange light pleasantries or tell each other to have a nice day. You lose the humanity of the exchange, which makes it so much easier to get furious, furious, when something about the bagel is off.

When I talked to Derek Thompson earlier this year for my forthcoming community book, he told me that on nights when his wife was working and he was in charge of the baby, he’d often go to a local taco place to hang out, have a beer, and sit at the counter. The place had been built to house a ton of people, but was very rarely full. Not because it wasn’t popular — it was! But the people who used to come in had been replaced by DoorDash orders waiting on the bar.

It’s just so much easier to order in — at least that’s what we tell ourselves. You don’t have to worry about getting a table, or getting the check, or figuring out what your kids will do. But even though we’ve done our best to eradicate it whenever possible, patience and tedium is part of being human and becoming an adult. And while (most) kids watch their parents practice patience and understanding with them, as children — how often do they get to watch the adults in their lives practice the same with other adults? Where and how is that modeled outside the home, particularly to people who are providing, them, or their family, with services?

Community decay is at the heart of so much of the bubbling anger on the edge of so many consumer interactions. Yes, we’re mad and frustrated about everything else — and a frustrating or disappointing consumer experience opens up a vent from which that rage explodes. But it’s much, much harder to direct that rage to someone you know, even in passing. Someone you’ll see again, someone who knows your kids or your friends, someone amongst the sea of someones who collectively hold you accountable to be a decent human in the world.

The inverse applies, too: when you know your customers, you’re more accountable to them. But massive global conglomerates have no reason to be accountable to anyone but their shareholders. Amazon is only nominally invested in kicking crap sellers off its platform. Target doesn’t care if you stopped shopping there. West Elm can and will ignore your complaints about their poorly made couches.

Be as angry as you want; your rage bounces off their profit-imperatives…..and lands on poorly-paid, often subcontracted customer service agents, return-desk employees, and the person just trying to make sure you don’t shoplift in the self-checkout. It also gets absorbed by those small businesses you otherwise ostensibly value. It’s like ordering a Domino’s Pizza, but then the Domino’s app is glitching so your order gets canceled. You have to call the local wood-fired pizza place down the street, but it’s already 7 pm on a Saturday and they’re slammed, so then it takes 90 minutes for your pizza to be ready and they don’t deliver and your kids won’t eat it because it’s “weird pizza” and it cost double, so you’re ripshit angry — at the place that made you the pizza, not at the cheap place that’s outsourced the taking of deliveries to an app.

It’s a bizarre, contradictory place to be. We’re addicted to cheap stuff and infuriated by the systems that produce it but resistant to reform. We’re hungry for local alternatives but disappointed that they are, well, what they are: not cheap, and not always quick, and not always precisely what we wanted. Like so many other good things, they’re unoptimizable and deeply human — which means they require the sort of flexibility and patience we have become unaccustomed to offering.

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When the would-be dahlia tuber seller posted to Facebook, the main theme of the responses was that a handful of people would always be mad, or unsatisfied, or angry in some way. You just have to figure out how to provide good quality at fair prices and enough people will come back year after year. That’s what it’s historically meant to run a good business, and so long as you’re operating at a small scale, it’s what it means to run one today, too.

The difference, of course, is that singular, loud, irrational, or just angry dissenting voices can do so much more reputational damage online than, like, that one lady who didn’t like the ice cream she got at your store one time in 1990. There are ways of countering these reviews (Airbnb owners responding with specifics of how an issue was handled; customers flooding a Yelp page with glowing testimonials), but my approach to the problem is to rely less on the online review, just generally. The people who leave them are almost always people who want to be mad, and will find something to be mad about, particularly when they can do it in a forum where they remain anonymous but their words live forever.

Instead, I’ve become increasingly reliant on human recommendations and in-person experiences. Where should I go? What should I try? If I hear about a new restaurant in my town, maybe I should just go there, and see if *I* like it, instead of reading Cranky Bill’s five paragraphs on Google Reviews, which, why am I reading Google Reviews??

I want to forge my own opinions while also disabusing myself of the notion that everything should be cheap, and special, and perfect. I want to reacquaint myself with what it’s like to be a human who sometimes needs or wants to buy things, instead of a consumer, convinced, as we’ve been told again and again, of our spectacular and hideous righteousness. I want to extend grace, and be extended it in return. ●

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For today’s discussion, I’d love to hear about how you’re grappling with flattened norms — or cultivating your tolerance for less than immaculate experiences. How are you extending grace? How have you, as an owner of your own small business, received it — or what do you wish more people would understand?

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