A licensed attorney in Indiana spent weeks trying to get his Samsung oven repaired, failed completely, bought a second stove just to cook Thanksgiving dinner, and still has the broken one sitting in his garage. An Arizona woman needed three states, two weeks without medication, and fifty extra dollars just to get one bottle of pills. A California woman had a baby stroller flown in by a friend because FedEx and the manufacturer couldn't figure out logistics. This is American consumer life in 2026, and The Guardian asked hundreds of people to describe it.
The Bots Are Winning, and They Are Terrible
About one in ten of the responses The Guardian received singled out automated chatbots as the defining horror of modern customer service. Not annoying, not frustrating. Horrifying. A communications professor from a university near Boston put it this cleanly: "It's the bots. Daily battle with stupid, useless, brain-dead bots on the phone, trying to reach a human being to learn or explore or resolve some damn thing. Infuriating, exhausting, debilitating, depressing, enraging. Ugh."
The complaint isn't that chatbots feel impersonal. The complaint is that they don't work. According to The Guardian's reporting, readers describe them as doom loops, dead ends, and insurmountable obstacles to resolving anything more complicated than checking a balance or changing a mailing address. Things, it bears mentioning, that customers were already doing online without any help from a bot.
Companies have spent years telling us that AI would improve the customer experience. What they meant, apparently, was that it would improve their own experience of not having to pay humans to answer the phone. The improvement ends there.
When Everything Fails at Once
The Guardian's survey found that what's really breaking people isn't one company screwing up once. It's multiple companies screwing up in sequence, creating cascading disasters that eat days and cost hundreds of dollars to fix.
Carol Murdock, a former healthcare executive in Nashville, spent an entire day trying to reach an actual human at AT&T to dispute a fraudulent $629 charge for a phone line she doesn't own. Her read on the strategy: "I think this is their entire goal. Exasperate consumers until they give up." AT&T did not respond to The Guardian's request for comment, which, honestly, tracks.
Melanie Cooley, an Arizona educator, watched her local CVS announce at the last minute that it couldn't fill her daily prescription for six weeks. She tracked down a pharmacy in another state, arranged a shipment to Indianapolis where she was traveling, and watched it arrive late to the wrong mailbox. Three weeks, three states, friends, family, fifty extra dollars, and she was still off her medication for two weeks. CVS told The Guardian its teams "make every effort to ensure patients have access to the medications they need." You cannot make this stuff up.
Josh Dayberry's Oven, or: What It Costs to Be Stubborn
The Indiana attorney and his broken Samsung oven deserve their own paragraph just for the sheer operatic quality of the failure. As The Guardian reports, Josh Dayberry's oven stopped working shortly after purchase. He spent hours on hold. Hours getting transferred. Hours waiting for a repair technician who simply never came. He bought a cheaper range specifically so his family could eat Thanksgiving dinner.
The Samsung is still in his garage. He's made another round of multi-hour phone calls since. "I have plenty of resources and am also a licensed attorney. I can be quite stubborn," he told The Guardian. "For me to not be able to resolve the issue was in my mind quite remarkable." Samsung did not reply to requests for comment.
Read that again slowly. A licensed attorney with significant resources, plenty of time, and the professional stubbornness that gets people through law school could not get a broken oven repaired or replaced. What exactly is the average person supposed to do?
The Older You Are, the Worse This Gets
The Guardian's reporting notes that a disproportionate number of respondents were in their 60s and 70s, many of them describing the dread of heading into retirement while also having to fight every corporation they interact with for basic service.
Carroll Strauss, 77, a California attorney, wrote about two HP printers that don't work, a pile of unwanted subscriptions she can't shake, and the Department of Veterans Affairs being impossible to reach by phone. "I have never felt so hopeless in my life," she said. A 77-year-old attorney who fought her way through decades of professional life feels hopeless because she can't get a printer to work and can't get her doctor on the phone. This is the system functioning exactly as designed.
When People Start Questioning the Whole Thing
The Guardian's piece buries what might actually be the most significant finding near the end. In a country famously built on optimism, market faith, and the bedrock belief that competition produces quality, some readers are openly questioning whether any of it works.
A 35-year-old Pennsylvania software engineer wrote: "There is no compelling reason to want to stay in this country any more. The products that we buy are garbage and don't last or need an app to use the product. You have to spend countless time researching, arguing with customer service reps and working around invasive features." Everything is a "cash grab or a scam," he added.
Bill from Massachusetts put it more bluntly, tying the customer service collapse directly to its cause: "All because companies value slashing payroll to boost returns for stockholders." And Jesse Bufford of Los Angeles offered American politicians a piece of free campaign advice: "If someone ran for the presidency on the single issue of protecting consumers from predation, and didn't fall for the Republican-Democrat culture war stuff, they'd be elected." He's probably not wrong, which is why nobody will do it.
The Dingo Take
Here's what all of these stories have in common: the companies involved made a deliberate calculation that it was cheaper to make resolution difficult than to provide competent service. The chatbots aren't a mistake or a work-in-progress. The phone trees that lead nowhere aren't a bug. They are the product. The goal is to make you give up, absorb the loss, and move on, because enough people will do exactly that to make the savings worthwhile. AT&T isn't confused about why Carol Murdock is calling. They just don't want to talk to her.
And the response from Washington, from the political class that spends every election cycle claiming to fight for working people? A deafening, bipartisan silence. The Trump administration has spent its time in office gutting consumer protection agencies, firing the people at the FTC and CFPB whose entire job was to make companies like AT&T answer for exactly this kind of behavior. The Democrats, for their part, have mostly offered vibes. Consumer protection used to be a winning political issue. Someone like Ralph Nader built a career on it. Now it's apparently too boring to compete with the culture war content machine.
Meanwhile, a 77-year-old veteran's attorney sits with two broken printers and can't get the VA on the phone. A guy in Indiana has a $1,000 oven slowly rusting in his garage. A woman in Arizona is paying extra to get medication to herself across three states. These aren't edge cases. Hundreds of people wrote in to one newspaper in one month to say some version of the same thing. The system is broken, everyone knows it, the companies designed it this way, and nobody in power is particularly interested in fixing it.
