The Customer Service Revolt: How Bad Support Is Building …

My recent experience with CVS is a case in point. I went in for some basics and was checked out by a human being. He asked for my phone number, turned the service tablet toward himself and, without asking my permission, signed me up for an “upgrade” to their membership program. When I got home, I got a congratulatory message!

I tried to cancel on their website. No luck. Then I called their customer service line and got a robot (of course) and a long-winded attempt to persuade me to keep the $5-per-month subscription to their ExtraCare Plus program. The robot finally said they would cancel the charge and send me a confirmation. No such message has come in, at least as of this writing.

In exasperation, I posted the ing on X:

Whoa @cvspharmacy – your checkout person signed me up for a subscription to the ExtraCare program without asking me whether I wanted to join. Not a good business practice!

Within just a few minutes, I got a message from them on X asking me to DM my contact information. I’ve received another couple of messages telling me that they are looking into the matter.

Here’s where the internal policies about customer service veer into the world of strategy. If you look at their X feed, all you see are apologies for service mishaps. This is the lesson customers are being taught: if you try to have a relationship with a company, you get nowhere. But if you broadcast your discontent to the world, the company responds.

Service as a cost to be minimized

My little drama is a symptom of something much bigger. Companies are treating customer service as a cost center to be squeezed rather than a relationship to be invested in. Back in 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was already warning about chatbot “doom loops”, in which customers circle endlessly through scripted responses with no way to reach a person.

The consequences show up in the data. Forrester’s Customer Experience Index for the U.S. fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025, hitting a new low. A quarter of the brands Forrester tracked got significantly worse; only 7% improved. Among the culprits the study cites: worse employee experience, a fading focus on customers, and disappointing implementations of AI.

The latest National Customer Rage Study, run by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting and Arizona State University, found that 77% of U.S. consumers had a major product or service problem in the past year, more than double the rate 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 bad complaint handling puts more than $596 billion in future revenue at risk.

The perverse economics of the public complaint

Why does a company that can’t answer its own phone line respond to a within minutes? Because a private complaint is invisible, and a public one isn’t. Every post is an advertisement for your incompetence, so companies staff a social team to put out the fire. The core operation that caused the fire goes unfixed.

The economist Albert Hirschman described two responses to declining quality: exit (you leave) and voice (you complain). Exit is the market’s natural discipline. But when exit isn’t realistic, voice is all that’s left, and it gets louder. Researchers Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb and Mara Lederman tested this using millions of s to U.S. airlines. The same drop in on-time performance generated roughly 50% more online complaints when the airline dominated the passenger’s local market, and airlines were more ly to respond when competition was limited.

Read that again. Companies with market power get more public complaints and engage more with them, because voice is the only lever customers have left. A feed full of apologies is most ly evidence of a captive customer base.

Who benefits from an unrequested signup?

I don’t know whether the man at my register was under pressure to hit an enrollment target. But I do know that recurring subscription revenue is enormously attractive to a retailer whose front-of-store business is struggling, and that frontline employees respond to whatever they are measured on.  We also know that CVS has gotten into hot water for profiting from doing other things customers didn’t authorize – just recently settling a lawsuit alleging that the company illegally d sensitive customer data with a third party for $20.5 million.

We know how this movie can end. At Wells Fargo, relentless cross-selling targets produced some 3.5 million unauthorized accounts between 2009 and 2016, a $3 billion settlement with the Justice Department, and an unprecedented Federal Reserve cap that froze the bank’s growth for seven years. Total penalties have topped $11 billion, and the Fed only formally ended its enforcement action in March 2026, a full decade after the scandal broke.

Amazon offers a more recent warning. Last year it agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle FTC charges that it enrolled consumers in Prime without their consent and made cancellation difficult. Internal documents surfaced in the case showed employees describing the practice of driving subscriptions as “a bit of a shady world”.

CVS may want to pay attention. Just this month, a law firm announced it is investigating whether ExtraCare Plus complies with California’s automatic-renewal law, and a proposed class action filed in September alleges CVS kept sending ExtraCare marketing texts to someone who had replied STOP. These are allegations, not findings. But they are the kind of early signals that tend to precede much bigger trouble.

Why do companies get away with it?

The short answer is near-monopoly conditions. Retail pharmacy has consolidated dramatically. Rite Aid closed all of its stores by fall 2025. Walgreens is shuttering roughly 1,200 locations over three years, and CVS closed about 900 stores between 2022 and 2024 and 270 more in 2025. By one count, there are roughly 2,000 fewer pharmacy locations than there were a short time ago. CVS itself notes that it remains the largest retail pharmacy in the country, with more than 9,000 locations.

In many neighborhoods, the alternative to a bad experience at CVS is another CVS. When customers can’t credibly threaten to leave, it becomes rational, in the narrowest spreadsheet sense, to let service decay. The cost savings show up this quarter. The lost goodwill doesn’t show up anywhere, until it does.

The reckoning is coming

Some executives may take comfort in the fact that the FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule was vacated by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025 on procedural grounds. That comfort is misplaced. More than half the states now have laws that limit automatic renewal, many as strict as or stricter than the federal rule. And as the Amazon case shows, federal enforcers of both parties are still perfectly willing to go after deceptive enrollments.

This is the pattern I see again and again: when an industry systematically ignores its customers, frustration accumulates quietly, and then it finds a political outlet. Regulation is what happens when companies behave badly enough. Every unanswered call and every coerced signup is a small deposit in an account that eventually gets drawn on by legislators, attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers.

What leaders should do instead

Treat your social feed as an early warning system. Inflection points announce themselves at the edges long before they show up in the center. If your social team spends its day apologizing, that is not a communications issue. It is your operation telling you something, and the people in the corner office should be listening.

Make the private channel as good as the public one. If a gets a response in minutes and a phone call gets a robot, you are training customers to shame you in public. Measure resolution, not response. “We’re looking into it” is not the same as “it’s fixed.”

Audit your frontline incentives. The customer, not the clerk, should be the one tapping “yes.”

Make leaving as easy as joining. In many states this is already the law. Everywhere else, it is simply the decent thing to do, and a loyalty program that customers can’t escape isn’t a loyalty program. It’s a trap.

Count the real costs. Loyalty erosion is a lagging indicator. By the time it shows up in comparable-store sales, the damage is done. In a world where competitive advantages are increasingly transient, the goodwill of customers who would happily come back is one of the few durable assets a company has. It makes no sense to spend it to a few call-center salaries.

Back to my $5

As I write this, I still haven’t received the cancellation confirmation I was promised. CVS has spent more effort talking to me on X than it took for its own system to sign me up for something I never asked for. A complaint department that only works in public isn’t customer service. It’s reputation management. And customers can tell the difference.