EP 313 Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks

Jim talks with Chris Colin about his recent Atlantic article "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose." They discuss customer service hell & Chris's personal story with Ford, the concept of sludge, intentional friction in customer service systems, call center operations & tactics, high-quality customer service approaches, the impact of short-term CEO tenures on service quality, the Biden administration's attempts to address bureaucratic time tax, political implications of poor government services, administrative burden, coping mechanisms, consumer action possibilities, the psychological toll of dealing with poor service, Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification," responses to Chris's article, and much more. Episode Transcript Chris Colin's website "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose," by Chris Colin in The Atlantic (June 29, 2025) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Chris Colin has written about problematic billionaires, contentious river law, Barack Obama’s Irish roots, COVID memorialization efforts, Japanese rent-a-friends, endangered pasta and more for the New York Times, the Atlantic, NewYorker.com, Pop-Up Magazine, 99% Invisible, Outside and Wired. His work has been featured in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and he created José Andrés's podcast. In 2020 he launched Six Feet of Separation, a free pandemic newspaper by and for kids — “a virtual newspaper for our troubled times,” Dan Rather called it.