On November 28, 2025 this article was published in the Wall Street Journal: American Consumers are Madder Than Ever. The article had the following tagline:
It has never been easier to buy stuff. But dealing with product and service problems has never felt so difficult, consumers say.
The article was about the National Consumer Rage Survey which reported the highest percentage of customers experiencing a product or service problems in their latest survey.
Seventy-seven percent of customers reported experiencing a product or service problem in the previous 12 months, according to the latest National Customer Rage Survey, conducted in February.
That was a new high, surpassing 74% in 2023, when the study was last conducted, and 66% during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Only 32% told researchers they had experienced a problem in 1976, when a similar version of the study was first conducted.
Businesses claim to take product and service quality seriously. My general perception is that we have improved in quality as many companies are now measuring defects per million items versus defects per hundred items back when the National Customer Rage Survey began in 1974. So, why are 77% of the people reporting they have experienced product or service problems in the past year?
There might be a few ways to explain this. First, we buy a lot more products than ever before. Second, many of the products we buy, including electronics, cars, and white goods are more complicated than ever. They seem more expensive and don’t seem to last as long. I look at the life expectancy of our HVAC systems, water heaters, and washing machines. I thought the idea of planned obsolescence was long gone until I began to understand that getting 10-12 years out of these products is often the most one can expect. Gone are the days of the Maytag repairman being the loneliest man on the planet. Actually, gone are the days of repairmen. It is often cheaper to replace items than to repair them. These are my observations. They are a bit more than anecdotal but certainly not definitive.
In my own case, I have a school issued Dell laptop and, at home, my own iMac desktop computer. I bought the iMac when I started teaching at North Park full-time. It has lasted 11 years nary a problem except that the keyboard and mouse pad go through batteries way faster than I expected. In that same time period, I am on my fourth laptop. The first three simply died. I have to replace my iMac because the processor is so old that it can no longer support operating system, browser, and software upgrades and thus starting to slow down and do glitchy things.
Complexity is certainly and issue. The products I have spoken of are sophisticated engineering marvels designed to be very power efficient and thus requiring more parts that are more expensive and operating, sometimes, at the upper extremes of the performance curves.
Another part of the problem with quality these days is the drive to keep prices down. Taking more and more cost out of products and services can only go so far before the next level of shaving off more cost is at the expense of quality or reliability. Combine this cost cutting with product complexity, and voila you get an uptick in defects and less reliability i.e. products with shorter lifespans.
The same can apply to service. Businesses are coaxing if not forcing most customers to interact online when needing services as well. Talking to human beings is harder than it should be causing frustration if the online systems are not really intuitive. Case in point, ordering on Amazon so fluid and easy and we don’t recognize until we try to interface with almost any other online shopping or service portal.
In thinking about this, I am not surprised by the findings in the Wall Street Journal article.
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