The Annoyance Economy: How Companies Profit $165 Billion by Making Customer Service Exhausting

The Rise of the Annoyance Economy

I recently received a letter from my health insurance company. They said they had sent me a $50 paper check and noticed I never cashed it. Had I not received it? I was excited. I had not received my check! How nice of them to make sure I'd get the money I was owed!

Then I read the bottom of the letter: If I wanted them to send a new check, I needed to fill out the enclosed form and then mail it back to them. Conducting the entire business via snail mail sounded like a lot of time and effort. It especially stung because there was no option to do this online, despite my insurance's extensive web portal — which happens to include a direct deposit function where you can pay bills you owe. While it is very easy to send thousands of dollars away from my bank account, I was the one who had to get an envelope, a stamp, and mail back a letter in hopes of maybe, potentially, getting mailed a $50 check I was owed at some point in the future.

My exasperation isn't just with the check. It seems like whenever I've needed something from a company, I've increasingly been met with a brain-melting back-and-forth with an AI chatbot, a web of customer service emails, or hotlines with seemingly infinite transfer and hold options.

Exhaustion may be the point. There's big money in making me — and you — feel worn down when trying to get something we're owed. In fact, a new report from the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank, finds the "annoyance economy" costs American families around $165 billion in lost time annually. And if you decide it's just not worth it, there's a real revenue boost for companies when you forget — or are annoyed out of — canceling a subscription.

"It's really part of the business model to make it difficult to unsubscribe, difficult to provide customer service if you need help. This is what makes these companies profitable," Chad Maisel, one of the report's authors, tells me.

Maisel views this as a universal issue. Every American has a story of a customer service or health insurance headache — and the problem is only worsening.

"It's so easy to make a purchase, to opt into a service, often with just a click of a button," Maisel says. "But when it comes time to getting help with modifying, with opting out, there are all these hoops and hurdles that get in your way, waste your time, and stop you from going from where you need to go."

It also points to a larger, more existential issue: We're living in a world where the basic services we need are now designed to constantly irritate us. That takes a real human toll. No wonder everyone is so angry all the time.

The Psychology of Annoyance

Dana Scholten, 30, doesn't think of herself as an angry person. But when she's talking to an AI customer service bot, "I just don't like the person I am," Scholten says. "I become angry, I become very frustrated, I become very impatient, and I don't want to be that way."

She'll yell at or cuss out AIs, often shouting "representative" or "talk to a human" until the bot hands her off. Sometimes the AIs will hang up on her — a valid response, she says — but sometimes they introduce another layer of AI to direct her to the right place. That makes her feel like she's being mocked. On a recent call to her health insurance provider to fill a prescription, Scholten tells me, she found herself going in circles with a bot that was trying — and failing — to wrap its automated mind around the labyrinth of American health insurance. After jumping through hoops and hurdles, Scholten finally reached a human, who split the bulk prescription she needed into three smaller parts to ensure she could get it.

"Let's hide behind AI, let's hide behind automation, and let's do the bare minimum."

Scholten is not alone in barking at the bots. The post-screaming shame may seem like a personal cost for letting down our better angels, but there's also a collective toll of all of us yelling at chatbots incessantly. Christine Hargrove, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Georgia and the assistant director of the university's Love and Money Center, tells me there are real psychological and health problems associated with the chronic stress that can stem from these interactions. The back-and-forth drastically increases the number of task switches our brains need to make, putting us on high alert. As Hargrove tells me, we're never actually as efficient at multitasking as we think we are. Instead, when we're on hold or waiting for dots in a chat, we're half-assing whatever we're doing in the background and unable to stay completely focused on the task at hand. The design of these customer service layers, too, can lead to high stress: the bot or an overloaded agent can reply at any moment, leaving us on hold in tense agony, hoping for a favor. It can also engender longer-term antisocial behavior, as we're tossed about by virtual forces beyond our control that have a very tangible impact on our lives.

"Engaging in any conversation with somebody where you feel like you're going in with one set of expectations and you know that the other person's goal is unrelated to yours, it can be really difficult to try to find that point of connection," Hargrove says. "It just leads to this increased feeling of futility and isolation, and you feel like you just don't have any options."

Michael Kara, a 52-year-old father of three in the Midwest, said that when he recognizes he is going to be put in an AI doom loop, he starts pressing random buttons or "barking at the phone like an old man." Kara has a unique understanding of what's happening on the other side of the phone: When he was younger, he did IT phone support. He remembers folks being unnecessarily nasty to him, and he tries not to do the same to other real human beings. But with the AI systems, he's learned that if you use, let's say, "colorful" enough language, it'll route you to a real human. Kara says he's especially felt the shift since the onset of the COVID pandemic, when it seemed like the social contract around customer service broke down.

"That seems to be gone," he says, "So let's hide behind AI, let's hide behind automation, and let's do the bare minimum."

If we've all learned that the way to get through this stressful task-switching is to be unpleasant and escalate until we get our desired response, it also, unconsciously, trains people to think that the only way to have a successful interaction is to be a jerk. There's a third type of stress response beyond fight-or-flight, Hargrove says, called the fawn response. When it kicks in, we can act overly nice to try to de-escalate and resolve a situation — and, when the fawn mode doesn't elicit any response, as it often doesn't in automated interactions, it gets taken off the table psychologically. Sitting through these interactions time and again can contribute to a pervasive sense of cynicism and, in some cases, lead to a breakdown of self-regulation, Hargrove told me. We become more aggressive, and maybe not somebody folks want to hang out with.

"We shift into a mode that is no longer respectful because we don't want to waste our time. We might as well just get aggressive because that's the only thing that actually works," Hargrove says. "And that is not a recipe for a fulfilling life, or a respectful, civilized society."

As things break down, it can seem like everyone around you is on a hair trigger, and the world gets a little meaner.

"I am a human. I think my time is valuable. I do not want to be spending it talking to a robot," Scholten says. "I would hope that a company values me as a person enough to want to talk to me in person with one of their actual representatives and not just some AI that's been programmed to push the issue under the rug as quickly as possible."

A Larger Toll Than Just Annoyance

The psychological cost of the pain-in-the-ass economy can be hard to quantify, but it also costs us in the dollars-and-cents way. The Groundwork study measured the time Americans spend on calls, paperwork, and customer service, and compared it to the compensation the average person could earn in that same time. Americans spend around $21.6 billion worth of hours dealing with health insurance administration, per the analysis. Maisel, who co-authored the paper, told me he now chooses health insurance companies based on whether he feels he can talk to somebody should something come up. Americans collectively spend around $19.4 billion in hours waiting for medical services and $1.6 billion waiting for government services. Customer service quality rankings have fallen and stayed stagnant over the last few years, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. That might be because of just how much time we're investing in getting any sort of help. Groundwork's analysis of Census data on time use found that time spent on the phone with customer service has increased by 60% over the last two decades. Annoyances also increase bottom lines: research has found that firms' revenues are 14% to 200% higher when it's harder to cancel subscriptions.

Dr. Katherine Sislow, a dentist in Colorado, understands just how costly these annoyances can be. She chronicles her (often infuriating) calls with health insurance on TikTok and often finds herself in a position where she or her patients incur unnecessary costs. When the labyrinth of health insurance outright rejects a claim they should hypothetically cover, her patients might end up paying the bill, or her practice eats the costs.

"When all I'm trying to do is take care of my patients, and we hit this giant roadblock that I now have to get involved in, it's not only taking away my ability to care for the rest of my patients,' Sislow says. "It is just one more thing that I have to do to just justify why am I doing what I'm doing."

As is often the case in situations like this, those with fewer resources are the most shafted. I'm a "knowledge worker" whose job is to be professionally annoying — if a company wrongs me, I can find the time to fight back. English is my first language, and I also don't rely on benefits programs like Medicaid and EBT for my food or other basic needs. For those who do, annoyances can be built into the scaffolding of their lives.

Maeve Forti, a 27-year-old freelancer and actor, has a chronic illness. Managing her illness requires near-constant maintenance. If she didn't have more flexible working hours, she thinks her outcomes navigating health insurance could be far worse. It feels, to her, like a part-time job. She's used to receiving (incorrect) letters telling her she owes upward of $7,000 for procedures that should be covered by her insurance.

"I always think about people who don't have the ability to navigate it. If I didn't have the time to do what I've done, a lot of those bills could have gone to collection or resulted in a multitude of problems," Forti says. She's dabbled in working as a personal assistant, helping people to navigate and mitigate daily logistical annoyances. It's made her think about what it would be like to have the luxury of time, unburdened by these logistics. Right now, that's more of a pipe dream.

"That human connection made all the difference in the world because otherwise I would've just been crabby the whole time"

All of this comes at a moment when the US has reached unprecedented levels of grumpiness — perhaps, in no small part, due to the friction baked into all our customer service needs. The share of American adults who believe that "most people can be trusted" fell to 34% in 2024, a far cry from the 46% who said the same in 1972, according to Pew Research Center. More than half of adults surveyed by the Harris Poll in 2025 for the American Psychological Association reported feeling isolated from others at least some of the time.

While policymakers or increased federal oversight could curb the monetization of annoyance, that likely won't happen. The consumers I spoke to said that even just reaching another real person is a step up, cutting through that isolation and anger.

That was the same attitude Kara brought when he ended up on the phone with what he thought was an AI bot. Kara says he started unloading his woes and sarcastically asked if he was speaking to a robot or a human. Then, a swift comeback: The agent said he was a human with the same blood as him. Kara paused. The agent jokingly asked whether he would respond to his poke. Kara laughed, and then the conversation flowed easily — and much more humanly.

"At that point forward, we got a lot done because then he is like, 'I'm going to help you with this. We're going to take care of that. I'm sorry that this went wrong,'" Kara says. "He took care of it, but that human connection made all the difference in the world because otherwise I would've just been crabby the whole time."