Most of us have accepted a certain level of frustration as simply part of modern life. We sit on hold waiting for customer service, click through multiple screens trying to cancel a subscription, get bounced between departments, navigate endless phone trees, delete spam texts, screen robocalls, and spend far too much time resolving issues that should never have been complicated in the first place. We grumble about it, shake our heads, and move on because we’ve come to expect it. Maybe that’s the problem.
A recent New York Times article highlighted research estimating that these everyday frustrations, what some are now calling the “Annoyance Economy”, cost American families approximately $165 billion a year in wasted time and money. That’s a staggering number, but what struck me wasn’t simply the financial cost. It was the realization that what is really being taken from us isn’t just money, it’s time. And time is our most valuable commodity. Unlike money, we can’t earn more of it, save it for later, or get it back once it’s gone. Every hour spent navigating a broken process, waiting on hold, fighting hidden fees, or trying to reach an actual human being is an hour we’ll never recover. It’s time that could have been spent with family, with friends, pursuing something meaningful, building relationships, or simply enjoying life.
To be fair, not every frustrating customer experience is the result of bad intentions. Some friction comes from outdated systems, poorly designed processes, organizational silos, or regulations that haven’t kept pace with technology. But intent doesn’t change impact. The customer experiences the frustration the same way, regardless of whether it was created accidentally or deliberately. What makes the Annoyance Economy particularly troubling is that some of these obstacles appear to be more than accidental. The research cited in the article found that companies making it more difficult for customers to cancel subscriptions can increase revenue significantly. From a quarterly earnings perspective, that may look like success. From a relationship perspective, I’m not so sure.
It raises a question that every business should be asking… Just because something increases short-term revenue, does that make it a good long-term strategy?
For years, I’ve talked about RETURN ON RELATIONSHIP and the idea that trust is one of the most valuable assets any individual, brand, or business can build. Trust grows when people believe you respect them, value them, and genuinely care about the experience you’re creating for them. Every interaction either strengthens that trust or weakens it. Every customer experience either makes a deposit into the relationship or creates a withdrawal from it.
The Annoyance Economy often works in the opposite direction. Every hidden fee, every unnecessary click, every confusing process, every delayed response, and every obstacle placed between a customer and what they are trying to accomplish sends a message. Maybe not an explicit one, but a message nonetheless. It tells people that their time is less valuable than your revenue. It tells them that making things easier for your organization matters more than making things easier for them. It tells them that keeping them trapped is more important than serving them well. Companies may view these tactics as small optimizations, a few more retained subscriptions, a slightly lower cancellation rate, a little more revenue, but customers don’t experience them as metrics. They experience them as frustration, as disrespect, and eventually as a reason to look elsewhere.
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that loyalty and captivity are not the same thing. Too many organizations mistake customer inertia for customer loyalty. People may stay because it’s difficult to leave, because the process is frustrating, or because the barriers to exit have been intentionally raised. But that’s not loyalty. Loyalty is earned when people want to stay, not when you’ve made it difficult for them to leave. Unfortunately, many organizations spend enormous resources trying to build loyalty through branding, advertising, customer acquisition, and retention campaigns while simultaneously undermining it through the very experiences customers remember most. Eventually the math catches up because trust, like any relationship asset, compounds over time in both directions.
What makes this conversation even more relevant today is the growing role of AI in customer experience. AI has tremendous potential to eliminate friction, simplify processes, and help people solve problems faster. It can free people from tedious tasks and give them back something increasingly precious… their time. But it can also be used to scale frustration. We’ve all encountered chatbots that seem designed to prevent access to a human being rather than help us reach one. We’ve all experienced automated systems that appear responsive while actually delaying resolution. The reality is that using technology to create friction isn’t new. When I worked at 1-800-Flowers in the late 1990s, customer service agents were often trained to initially say “no” because many customers would simply accept the answer and end the call. The customer had to push past the “no” to get to the “yes.” The technology may have changed, but the temptation remains the same: create just enough friction that some people give up. If AI simply enables organizations to scale annoyance more efficiently, then we’ve missed one of the greatest opportunities technology offers. Technology should remove barriers, create time, and make interactions simpler, faster, and more human… not less.
Perhaps that’s why the Annoyance Economy and RETURN ON RELATIONSHIP feel like opposite philosophies. One asks, “How much inconvenience will people tolerate before they give up?” The other asks, “How much value can we create for people before they tell others about us?” One treats customer frustration as a revenue opportunity. The other treats customer trust as an asset worth protecting and growing. The businesses that ultimately earn lasting loyalty won’t be the ones that become experts at trapping customers. They’ll be the ones that respect people’s time, attention, and intelligence. They’ll be the ones that make it easy to do business with them, easy to get help, and yes, even easy to leave because they are confident that treating people well is still one of the most effective retention strategies ever created.
The Annoyance Economy may generate short-term profits, but trust creates long-term value.
And in a world where technology is supposed to be making life easier, perhaps it’s time we stopped measuring success by how effectively companies can capture our attention, trap our subscriptions, or consume our time, and started measuring it by how well they help us get those things back.
In the end, the organizations that win won’t be the ones that figured out how to profit from people’s frustration… they’ll be the ones that earned the right to people’s trust.
