That Dropped Call With Customer Service It Was on Purpose.⁠↗

Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.

Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen.

The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.

Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”

Contact centers became an industry of their own and, with the rise of offshoring in the ’90s, lurched into a new level of productivity—at least from a corporate perspective. Sure, wait times lengthened, pleasantries grew stilted, and sometimes the new accents were hard to understand. But inefficiency had been conquered, or outsourced to the customer, anyway.

Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them.

The goal is to put as much friction between you and whatever the expensive thing is. So the frontline person is given as limited information and authority as possible. And it’s punitive if they connect you to someone who could actually help.

Choices higher up the chain also add helpful friction, Tenumah said: Not hiring enough agents leads to longer wait times, which in turn weeds out a percentage of callers. Choosing cheaper telecom carriers leads to poor connection with offshore contact centers; many of the calls disconnect on their own.

“The brilliance of the system is that they don’t have to say it out loud,” Tenumah said. “It’s built into the incentive structure.”

That structure, he said, can be traced to a shift in how companies operate. There was a time when the happiness of existing customers was a sacred metric. CEOs saw the long arc of loyalty as essential to a company’s success. That arc has snapped. Everyone still claims to value customer service, but as the average CEO tenure has shortened, executives have become more focused on delivering quick returns to shareholders and investors. This means prioritizing growth over the satisfaction of customers already on board.

A Nebraska man spent two years trying to change the apparently computer-generated name given to his daughter, Unakite Thirteen Hotel, after a bureaucratic error involving her birth certificate. She also hadn’t received a Social Security number—without which she couldn’t receive Medicaid and other services.

One of sludge’s most insidious effects is our ever-diminishing trust in institutions, Herd told me. Once that skepticism sets in, it’s not hard for someone like Elon Musk to gut the government under the guise of efficiency.

“Admin Night” isn’t a party. It isn’t laborious taking-care-of-business. It’s both! At the appointed hour, friends come over with beer and a folder of disputed charges, expiring miles, summer-camp paperwork. Five minutes of chitchat, half an hour of quiet admin, rinse, repeat. At the end of each gathering, everyone names a minor bureaucratic victory and the group lets out a supportive cheer.