Memorandum
- From
- Connor Quincy via Fast Company
- Date
- Filed
- Business·5 min to read
- Re
Bad customer service pushes shoppers to social media complaints, researchers find
ReBad customer service pushes shoppers to social media complaints, researchers find
A CVS customer's unrequested subscription sign-up illustrates a broader decline in customer service, with rising complaint volumes and research suggesting that public posts are increasingly the only lever customers have.
A routine trip to a CVS store ended with an unrequested enrollment in the chain's ExtraCare Plus membership program, and a customer who could not cancel through the website or phone line turned to X. The experience, described in a Fast Company commentary, reflects a wider pattern in which companies treat customer service as a cost to minimize, leaving people to escalate in public.
The author says a store employee signed them up for the $5-per-month subscription on a service tablet without asking permission. Attempts to cancel on the company website failed, and a call to the customer service line reached an automated system that tried to persuade the caller to keep the membership before promising to cancel the charge and send confirmation. As of the writing, no confirmation had arrived. After posting a complaint on X, the author received a reply within minutes asking for direct-message contact details, followed by further messages saying the matter was being looked into.
The episode, the author argues, teaches a lesson that customers are learning across industries: private attempts to resolve problems can go nowhere, while public complaints draw a response. The company's feed on X, the author notes, consists largely of apologies for service mishaps. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned in 2023 about chatbot “doom loops” in which customers cycle through scripted replies with no route to a human agent.
Industry data cited in the piece points to a sustained decline. Forrester's Customer Experience Index for the United States fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025, reaching a new low, with a quarter of tracked brands getting significantly worse and only 7 percent improving. The study cites worse employee experience, a fading focus on customers and disappointing implementations of artificial intelligence among the causes.
A National Customer Rage Study run by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting and Arizona State University found that 77 percent of U.S. consumers had a major product or service problem in the past year, more than double the rate recorded in 1976. The typical problem cost people about a full day of their time. Digital channels have overtaken the phone as the main way people complain, and one in four complainants took their most serious problem to social media. The researchers estimate that poor complaint handling puts more than $596 billion in future revenue at risk.
The piece also draws on research by economists Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb and Mara Lederman, who analyzed millions of tweets directed at U.S. airlines. Using the economist Albert Hirschman's framework of exit and voice, they found that the same drop in on-time performance generated roughly 50 percent more online complaints when an airline dominated a passenger's local market, and that airlines were more likely to respond when competition was limited. The author concludes that a feed full of apologies may be evidence of a captive customer base rather than good service.
The commentary links the incident to the commercial incentives behind subscription sales. Recurring revenue is attractive to retailers, the author writes, and frontline staff tend to act on whatever they are measured on, although the author says they do not know whether the employee at the register faced enrollment targets. The piece also notes that CVS recently agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it illegally shared sensitive customer data with a third party.
The author cites past cases to illustrate where aggressive sales practices can lead. At Wells Fargo, cross-selling targets produced some 3.5 million unauthorized accounts between 2009 and 2016, followed by a $3 billion settlement with the Justice Department and a Federal Reserve cap that restricted the bank's growth for seven years. Total penalties have exceeded $11 billion, and the Fed formally ended its enforcement action only in March 2026. Amazon agreed last year to pay $2.5 billion to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it enrolled consumers in Prime without consent and made cancellation difficult.
The CVS matter remains at an early stage. A law firm has announced an investigation into whether ExtraCare Plus complies with California's automatic-renewal law, and a proposed class action filed in September alleges that the company kept sending marketing texts to a customer who had replied STOP. These are allegations rather than findings, and the commentary presents them as signals of possible further scrutiny rather than established wrongdoing.
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