How Companies Profit by Annoying the Hell Out of You
Several months ago, I looked at my bank account and saw that it was awash in charges from newspapers and websites charging $5.99, $13.99, $7.99 at regular intervals for subscriptions I barely remembered signing up for. They added up to a lot of money wasted each month. When I tried to cancel them, each service had a different process, some of which involved navigating through several screens or calling customer service or chatting with automated systems—rather than just clicking a button, as I had done so easily in subscribing. I quickly became overwhelmed and annoyed, and instead chose the nuclear option: I canceled my debit card. That created its own set of tedious internet tasks, of course, but at the time it felt like the best option.
These kinds of experiences are so common and universal that Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., decided to weigh their true impact. They call it the “annoyance economy.” In a report released Monday, they show how junk fees, customer service calls, excessive insurance paperwork, spam calls and texts, and more cost Americans at least $165 billion in lost time and money every year. The same practices boost corporate revenue by 200 percent, the report found. Under President Joe Biden, the federal government tried to tackle the worst practices and make it easier for consumers to avoid junk fees, cancel services, deal with tax season, access government programs, and a number of other changes. Trump rolled all of that back, and here we are, still wasting money, still annoyed.
The impacts of the annoyance economy can be big or small, ranging from delaying needed medical care because of overwhelming paperwork to a few dollars lost due to unnoticed fees, but Groundwork’s Chad Maisel, who authored the paper with Stanford University economist Neale Mahoney, said almost everyone has experienced some aspect of it. “Everyone can talk about how difficult it was to navigate the health insurance system and just submit a claim or to get a procedure approved,” he said. “Everyone can relate to their phone pinging eight times in a day with random companies or politicians trying to get their money.”
Money isn’t the only cost these practices impose, either. “It has huge impacts on time, which is, for many people, like their most precious resource,” he said. “You get home after work, and you’ve got a couple hours with your kids, and you’ve got to navigate paperwork or wait on hold … that’s why I think this stuff is so resonant for people.”
Part of the goal of the report was to show that while some aspects of the annoyance economy can seem small, that total sum can be consequential. For families living paycheck to paycheck, the burden of excessive overdraft fees—which were capped by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before the cap was overturned by Congress last year—can add up and mean the difference between affording enough to eat or not. For others who fall through the cracks of the complex health care system, it can mean tens of thousands of dollars in unexpected medical bills. That makes their impacts important, and dealing with them is popular with voters. “People deserve to have policymakers and their elected leaders and their government take on these pain points that they’re facing in their lives,” Maisel said.
President Donald Trump reversed some of Biden’s efforts to protect consumers, rolling back junk fee protection and airline compensation rules for flight delays, and is unlikely to institute new, pro-consumer reforms. When dismantling the Biden reforms, the Trump administration made the usual conservative noises about how unnecessary regulatory complexity makes it harder for companies to help consumers borrow and spend, but the truth is big industries had lobbied against Biden’s new rules because they hurt their bottom line, and they won a friend in the White House when Trump was elected. The annoyance economy helps companies and their wealthy investors, and hurts regular people, and we know which side Trump is on.
Maisel pointed out that there are a lot of ways that states can step up and regulate insurance companies and banks right now, while the federal government remains hostile to reform. But maybe more importantly, there are ways that promising to tackle these kinds of seemingly small annoyances can help Democratic candidates running in elections later this year and in 2028, showing that Republicans don’t care about the affordability crisis and improving the economy for working people.
While something like banning junk fees might seem too small-bore to run on alone, the Groundwork report conveys the true size of the problem—and how big corporations benefit by wearing people down. “I think now more than ever, people realize that elected leaders and politicians need to be speaking very directly to people’s lived experiences,” Maisel said. “The issues that we’ve identified in this report are, I think, often under-discussed, under-targeted, but really poised to have an impact in terms of solving problems that people are facing that make … quality of life not as good as it could be.”