Ever have one those days when you just want to put your head in your hands and scream, ‘Why does everything have to be so difficult these days?’.
Welcome to the Annoyance Economy - and it’s big business, so get used to it because it ain’t going away any time soon.
The fuel for the Annoyance Economy are those everyday interactions that should be simple, but which turn out to be fraught with process, procedure, nit-picking, form filling, and all sorts of other things designed to eat into your life to little or no effect other than to annoy.
And the main perpetrators of this Annoyance Economy are almost universally service providers across multiple walks of life, organizations or bodies whose goal in life is to make it harder for customers to actually accomplish anything that is in their interests, but not the self-interest of the company in question.
My own battle with the ghastly process-ridden Metro Bank is a case in point, where daring to want to do something outrageous, like spend my own money, is a capital offense, punishable by hours of pointless attempts to talk someone on the phone into doing their job, or trying to wrestle past the most obstructive and unhelpful AI system known to humankind.
Just this week I attempted to make contact with the UK Royal Mail to report a delivery failure. How difficult is it to email a complaint to Royal Mail? Really, really, really difficult, a procedure involving navigating many screens all asking if you really need to be doing this and can’t you just accept our canned answers? Then when you do persevere and finally make it to some form of contact information, there’s no way to email the firm that I could see. But the time I’d got that far I was essentially blinded by frustration, so who knows?
Worth
What we do know is that the Annoyance Economy costs a lot, an estimated $165 billion in lost time and dollars annually for the average American consumer, according to The Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank with a mission statement to “build an economy that works for all”
In its research report - Taking on the Annoyance Economy - the group breaks down that total cost into annoyance categories:
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Junk fees: $90 billion a year
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Phone scams: $25.4 billion
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Calls with health insurance administrators: $21.6 billion
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Waiting for medical services: $19.4 billion
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Robocalls: $8 billion
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Waiting 'in line' for government services: $1.6 billion
But however you slice and dice it, the bottom line is that it sucks, it frustrates and annoys consumers.
Why?
But given that we do all hate the Annoyance Economy, why does it persist? Well, because, as noted above, it suits the supposed service providers down to the ground that it does. For example, how easy is it to subscribe to a service? Simple, huh? How easy is it to unsubscribe to a service? Ah....The Groundwork Collaborative cites one study that found that cancellation more difficult can boost corporate revenues by 14% to over 200%, depending on the product.
Corporate vested interests are always going to lobby against making life easier for the customer, whatever the press release says. In the US, the airline industry spent millions of dollars fighting proposals to entitle passengers to cash refunds if their flights were significantly late, before Trump 2.0 scrapped the idea last year. Score one for Big Air, hard luck beleaguered travellers!
Given that the Annoyance Economy is so annoying, you’d think it would be a vote winner for politicians to be seen as consumer champions battling to tear down the triggers for buyer frustration, but in reality legislators prefer being seen to take on really big issues, such is the glacial progress of legislative reform in the US.
But this could be an error on their part, according to a second study by Data for Progress, a multi-disciplinary group of data experts that “measures - and moves - public opinion by equipping the progressive movement with the insights it needs to win”.
More than two-thirds (68%) of respondents polled in a 2025 study of US likely voters from all parties said they want Congress to prioritize annoyance business practices, such as spam calls, excessive paperwork, and poor customer service systems. There is a divide between Republicans and Democrats, 65% and 74% respectively, but both camps still favor action by policy makers in order to improve quality of life.
The Groundwork Collaborative argues:
Most of these policies can be accomplished using existing authorities, meaning that progress is possible with or without federal legislation. At a time when most Americans think that their government doesn’t care about them, an all-hands-on-deck effort to tackle the Annoyance Economy would show voters that their elected representatives “get it” — that their daily frustrations are being heard and taken seriously. And it would offer something too often missing in politics today: visible improvements to people’s lives.
The big issues
For over half of US voters (58%) in the Data for Progress study, health insurance paperwork is a particularly frustrating bane of their lives. It’s a pretty even bi-partisan split on this issue - Republicans 59%. Democrats 61% - but paperwork is sometimes lost in all the other issues relating to US healthcare reform, suggests the Groundwork Collaborative report:
The issues with the US healthcare system don’t stop at coverage and costs, and policymakers are missing important opportunities to take on a handful of egregious and particularly annoying practices. For one, insurance companies should make it easy for patients to fill out and submit claims and other forms online. Faxing is a technology for the era of boy bands and AOL Instant Messenger, yet insurance companies still often require patients to submit paperwork by fax or snail mail.
Spam calls are another modern day phenomenon that drive us all batty, part of the wider junk mail industry that seems to grow and grow every year. An overwhelming 85% of all likely voters find spam calls and text messages very or somewhat frustrating, according to the Data For Progress stats.
While the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has expanded consumer rights when it comes to tackling unwanted communications in the region, in the US the situation is more of a Wild West frontier with vested interests resisting any change. As per the Groundwork Collaboration:
Under current law, entering your phone number on one website can trigger a cascade of calls and texts from companies you’ve never heard of, often without your informed consent. Congress should close the so-called “lead generator loophole,” which allows third-party marketers to collect your contact information and sell it to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of businesses, Under the Biden administration, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to close this loophole, but companies benefiting from the current law sued and won in court.
Fixing it
In fact, action could be taken to diminish the impact of the Annoyance Economy if the political inclination were there:
Congress can fix this by requiring companies to obtain clear, one-to-one permission before making contact — so that you only hear from the company you explicitly permitted to contact you...But we need not wait for Congress to start making progress. The President should issue an Executive Order (EO) directing or encouraging agencies to leverage all available resources and authorities to end robocalls and spam texts once and for all.
But despite there being more than 1,000 EOs issued over the past two decades, none has tackled junk marketing, robocalls or spam texts. And the current administration in Washington seems in fact to have made matters worse, according to research from the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) and the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC). This alleges that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), headed up by Trump 2.0 appointees, of reversing or mislaying consumer compensation for dodgy financial practices to the tune of $360 million.
Incoming President Donald Trump fired CFPB director Rohit Chopra and installed an acting director, Russell Vought, who ordered the agency to halt its work and shut its doors. Then along came Elon Musk, in his on/off Presidential BFF role as head of the short-lived DOGE cost-cutting drive, who proposed killing it off completely, tweeting, ‘CFPB RIP’ alongside a gravestone emoji.
Trump 2.0 has now put Jonathan McKernan, a former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation board member, in place as permanent head of the CFFB, but it’s still unclear what its role is likely to be in the future. The CFA/SBPC study notes that the agency appears to have abandoned its usual quarterly transparency reports into the progress of enforcement actions against offenders, making it near impossible to track progress towards a resolution - or abandonment - of a claim.
Long live the Annoyance Economy!
My take
In Larry David’s brilliant Curb Your Enthusiasm, there was a phrase used by every obstructive waiter, shop assistant, utility provider, receptionist etc that our hero ran into that chilled the blood - ‘We have a process, sir’. That’s code for, ‘We are going to do everything we possibly can not to make your life easy, but to do things the way we want, in our interests, and there’s nothing you can do about it!’.
I am Larry David.
So are you all.
Remember that the next time a CEO stands up at a conference and boasts about his or her firm’s focus on CX and how crucial it is that their entire organization pivots around their consumers/subscribers.
In 36 years of covering the enterprise tech sector, one maxim told to me early on has remained true to this day. With no disrespect to the functionality and capabilities of the various CRM offerings out there in the market, but all the money in the world spent on such tech is poured down the drain if your corporate DNA is hardwired around the idea that the customer, far from being always right, is in fact a flaming nuisance! No amount of Salesforce/Siebel/Delete-As-Applicable is going to help fix that mentality.
The Annoyance Economy is here to stay, I fear.