Shut Up and Give Us Your Money!
When did satisfying customers become an inconvenience for the companies taking their money?
I have a confession to make.
I’m something of a snob when it comes to plain white T-shirts.
Not because I’m particularly fashionable. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m a pretty big guy who happens to sweat an extraordinary amount, and I’ve discovered that the average white T-shirt you find at a department store apparently has the structural integrity of a wet paper towel.
Seriously. I’ll buy a package of perfectly respectable-looking shirts, wear them for a couple of months, and before long they’ve stretched out, lost their shape, or become so thin that they’re practically transparent.
Wonderful. Time to buy another package.
Almost a decade ago, I got tired of this routine and started buying heavyweight T-shirts from a company called Gustin which offers substantial fabrics including Japanese textiles.
They’re more expensive than your average undershirt. But here’s the interesting part.
Most of mine have lasted at least five years.
No holes. No wrinkling. They wash beautifully, don’t retain unpleasant odors, and remain in remarkably good condition despite years of regular use.
I’m not suggesting I’ve discovered some miraculous new clothing technology. In fact, this is how shirts used to be made. This used to be the standard and now it’s the exception.
Which makes the whole situation rather ridiculous when you think about it.
I have to seek out specialty clothing manufacturers to find a plain white T-shirt that doesn’t fall apart after a few months.
A WHITE T-SHIRT.
We’re not talking about some extraordinarily complicated feat of engineering here. This is a garment that has existed for well over a century and somehow purchasing one that holds up to regular use has become a personal research project.
And it’s gotten me thinking about something considerably larger than my wardrobe.
Do companies even like their customers anymore?
I know, I know. Ridiculous question. Of course they do. Without customers, there wouldn’t be much of a business to begin with.
But I’m increasingly convinced that a disturbing number of companies have come to view their customers as something of a necessary evil.
They certainly want our money.
It’s everything that comes afterward that seems to be the problem.
Is expecting your money’s worth really that unreasonable?
I don’t think most people have particularly outrageous expectations of the companies they do business with.
We’re not demanding that every product last forever. We’re not expecting five-star service when we pay bargain-basement prices. And I don’t think most consumers are sitting around plotting ways to get something for nothing.
We understand the basic concept of getting what you pay for.
If I buy a cheap T-shirt, I don’t necessarily expect it to last as long as a more expensive, higher-quality alternative.
But I do expect it to function as a T-shirt.
And if I’m paying a premium for something, I’d like to think I’m receiving something beyond the privilege of paying a premium.
This seems like a reasonably straightforward relationship.
The customer gives the business money. The business provides something of value. Everybody benefits.
But somewhere along the way, it seems like we’ve developed an entire philosophy of business management around figuring out how little value a company can provide before customers stop buying its products.
The packaging gets smaller. The ingredients change. The materials become thinner. Features that were previously included now require additional purchases or subscriptions.
And we’re supposed to be grateful when the price doesn’t increase as well.
There’s even a name for part of this phenomenon: shrinkflation.
The Government Accountability Office has examined how manufacturers reduce product quantities without proportionately lowering prices.
Sometimes these decisions reflect legitimate increases in production costs. Businesses aren’t immune to inflation, and I don’t expect them to operate at a loss simply to make customers happy.
But I find myself wondering how often the conversation inside these companies revolves around preserving the value of their products versus calculating how much more they can squeeze out of them.
Because there’s only so much you can reduce the quality, quantity, or usefulness of something before you start undermining the very reason people purchased it in the first place.
And I’ve had an opportunity to watch that happen firsthand.
The curious case of LuLaRoe
Years ago, I worked with my friend Jamie and her business partner Holly when they were selling clothing for LuLaRoe.
If you were on Facebook around 2016 or 2017, you probably remember the company. It developed something of a cult following around its brightly patterned leggings, which were sold through a massive network of independent retailers.
And for a while, business was booming.
Jamie and Holly were among the company’s top sellers, as I remember it, and I got to see some of what made their business successful.
One thing that stands out is how puzzled they became by LuLaRoe’s direction.
Although the company offered other types of clothing, including skirts and dresses, its leggings had become the real attraction for their customers.
In particular, the leggings appealed to women who had difficulty finding comfortable, flattering options in larger sizes.
That was the selling point.
Here was a product meeting a need that wasn’t necessarily being addressed particularly well elsewhere.
And yet, the company seemed increasingly focused on expanding its assortment of clothing.
More dresses. More tops. More styles.
Jamie and Holly couldn’t understand why the company seemed so intent on pushing other merchandise rather than focusing on the leggings their customers actually wanted.
Now, expanding a product line isn’t inherently a bad idea. Successful companies do it all the time.
But expansion becomes a problem when you’re so focused on selling more things that you stop paying attention to what people actually want to buy.
And LuLaRoe had another rather significant issue.
Its independent retailers had to purchase inventory from the company before they could sell it to customers, and they couldn’t necessarily choose the specific patterns they received.
Imagine running a clothing business where you’re buying merchandise that your customers might not even want.
What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, quite a bit.
Some sellers accumulated enormous quantities of inventory they couldn’t move. While successful retailers could generate substantial revenue, many others struggled to recover their investments.
In 2021, the Washington State Attorney General announced a $4.75 million settlement over allegations that LuLaRoe had made deceptive claims about its business opportunity.
The state’s investigation documented substantial financial losses among retailers, including sellers left with unsold inventory.
And then there was the clothing itself.
Customers began complaining about leggings developing holes after remarkably little use, sometimes the first time they put them on.
The complaints became so widespread that the company eventually introduced a refund program for defective merchandise.
In 2021, Amazon released a documentary called LuLaRich, examining the company’s explosive growth and subsequent controversies.
According to TIME’s reporting on the documentary, when retailers began expressing concerns about deteriorating quality and other problems, the company’s founders responded by telling sellers to stop whining.
Stop whining.
These were people who had invested their own money, spent countless hours promoting the company’s clothing, and were now having to explain to customers why those products weren’t meeting expectations.
And the response was essentially to stop complaining?
I mean, what the hell?
Jamie eventually stopped selling LuLaRoe, and looking back on the experience, I find it remarkable how quickly a company can lose sight of the qualities that made its products successful.
But the more I think about it, the more familiar that story sounds.
In fact, I’ve seen a similar phenomenon happen much closer to home.
When a company forgets why people liked it
My family used to own a home care business.
It was a relatively small operation, and like many small businesses, we didn’t have the resources of a much larger corporate organization.
What we did have was an understanding of our customers.
We knew that providing home care wasn’t simply a matter of scheduling an employee to show up at somebody’s house.
There were countless little things that mattered.
The personal attention. The willingness to accommodate requests. The recognition that you’re dealing with people and families who have entrusted you with something extraordinarily important.
Those details weren’t merely extras we provided because we had nothing better to do.
They were part of what made the business successful.
Eventually, the business was acquired by a larger company called Home Care Assistance.
And I watched something happen that I suspect is all too familiar to people who’ve experienced a corporate acquisition.
The new ownership had its own formula for how the business should operate.
Its own procedures. Its own expectations. Its own way of doing things.
Now, I’m sure there were reasonable explanations for many of those decisions. Larger organizations need consistency, and not every practice that works for a small company can be replicated across an entire corporate operation.
I understand that.
But what struck me was how little appreciation there seemed to be for the qualities that had made our particular business successful.
Those small personal touches began disappearing in favor of a more standardized, corporate approach.
And then something interesting happened.
Longtime customers began leaving.
Customers who had stayed with us because they appreciated the way we operated were no longer receiving the same experience.
And the new ownership seemed puzzled by it.
Why weren’t these customers sticking around?
Well, perhaps because the company they had chosen to do business with no longer existed in any meaningful sense beyond its name.
I’ve thought about that experience quite a bit over the years.
Here’s a company that purchased an existing, successful business, presumably because it saw value in what had been built.
But rather than taking the time to understand exactly where that value came from, it imposed its own way of operating.
And in doing so, it undermined some of the very things that made the acquisition attractive in the first place.
I don’t think anyone necessarily intended to drive customers away.
That’s what makes the situation so interesting.
You can have perfectly intelligent people making decisions they believe will improve a business while simultaneously destroying the qualities that made customers want to use it.
Which raises a question.
If you don’t understand why customers value your business, how can you possibly know which parts of it are safe to change?
Has the executive suite become another planet?
I wonder if one of the underlying problems is that, at a certain point in the corporate hierarchy, the people making decisions become so far removed from the everyday experiences of their customers that they lose perspective on what actually matters.
Consider somebody making millions of dollars annually who is responsible for setting the strategic direction of a company whose customers are primarily ordinary working people.
How often is that executive actually experiencing the product or service the way a customer does?
How frequently do they have to think about whether they can afford a particular purchase?
Do they understand the frustration of spending hard-earned money on something that doesn’t last?
Do they ever have to navigate their own company’s customer service system?
Or is their entire understanding of the customer filtered through marketing reports, revenue projections, and PowerPoint presentations?
I’m not suggesting wealthy people are incapable of understanding the needs of ordinary consumers. Plenty of successful business leaders clearly do.
But I do wonder how easy it becomes to lose perspective when you’re no longer living with the same constraints as the people buying your products.
And sometimes that disconnect becomes rather embarrassingly public.
In November 2025, an executive at Campbell’s made headlines after a recording surfaced in which he disparaged the company’s products and the people buying them.
Martin Bally, a vice president in the company’s IT department, was recorded describing its food as being for “poor people,” among other offensive remarks.
Campbell’s subsequently condemned the comments and fired Bally. The company also disputed his statements about its ingredients.
And to be fair, I don’t think it’s reasonable to condemn an entire organization based on the comments of a single executive.
But good Lord.
Imagine being a senior executive at a company that sells affordable food and apparently having contempt for the people who buy affordable food.
What exactly did you think the business was supposed to be doing?
Another particularly revealing example came from Lululemon in 2013.
After customers complained about the quality and sheerness of the company’s yoga pants, founder Chip Wilson suggested that some women’s bodies simply weren’t suited to the clothing.
Think about that for a moment.
Customers are complaining that a premium product isn’t holding up to their expectations, and the company’s founder publicly suggests that the problem might be the customers’ bodies.
What a remarkable response.
It’s difficult to imagine a better illustration of how badly the relationship between a business and its customers can become distorted.
You sell people a product. They tell you there’s a problem with it. And instead of addressing their concerns, you suggest that perhaps they’re the problem.
Which brings me to one of the more amusing examples of this disconnect.
McDonald’s.
When did fast food stop being a good deal?
Earlier this year, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of himself trying the company’s new Big Arch burger.
If you haven’t seen it, I encourage you to watch it.
It’s a fascinating little piece of corporate communication.
Kempczinski sits down with the burger, describes its ingredients, takes an almost comically small bite, and repeatedly refers to the sandwich as a “product.”
A product.
Sir, it’s a hamburger.
You’re not presenting a new enterprise software platform to shareholders. You’re eating lunch.
Now, this isn’t proof that Kempczinski dislikes McDonald’s food or its customers. He’s a corporate executive, and that terminology is probably second nature to somebody who spends his days discussing revenue, operations, and business strategy.
But I think there’s a reason people found the video so amusing.
He sounded so thoroughly immersed in corporate language that something as simple as eating a hamburger appeared almost foreign to him.
And it got me thinking about another question.
What exactly is McDonald’s supposed to be offering its customers anymore?
For decades, the value proposition was pretty straightforward.
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McDonald’s wasn’t necessarily trying to serve the world’s greatest hamburger.
It was fast. It was convenient. It was relatively inexpensive.
You could stop by, grab a meal, and be on your way without spending much money.
That was the appeal.
But over the years, prices have increased considerably, to the point that some McDonald’s meals now approach what you might pay at a casual sit-down restaurant.
According to restaurant-industry pricing data published in June 2025, a medium Big Mac meal averaged $9.72 nationally, while Chili’s offered its Big Smasher as part of a $10.99 meal deal.
In California, the reported difference between those options was literally a penny.
One cent.
Now, prices vary by location, and McDonald’s has responded to affordability concerns by introducing additional value offerings.
So I’m not suggesting every McDonald’s meal costs as much as a sit-down restaurant.
But the fact that the comparison is even reasonable should tell us something.
If I’m paying approximately the same amount for a fast-food meal as I could pay at a casual restaurant, what exactly am I getting in exchange?
Convenience? Sure, although that advantage diminishes when you’re sitting in a drive-through line for fifteen minutes.
Quality? I don’t think many people would argue that McDonald’s consistently provides the highest-quality hamburgers available.
Price? Well, that’s precisely the problem we’re discussing.
So what’s left?
Brand recognition? Nostalgia? The fact that there’s a McDonald’s every few miles?
Somewhere in a corporate office, executives may be discussing how to increase revenue per transaction, optimize restaurant operations, and improve profit margins.
Meanwhile, the actual customer is sitting in their car wondering why a burger, fries, and a drink cost almost as much as lunch at a restaurant where somebody brings the food to their table.
I’m not suggesting McDonald’s doesn’t face legitimate cost pressures. Food, labor, and operating expenses have all increased, and restaurants aren’t immune to those realities.
But the business still has to provide a compelling reason for customers to choose it.
You can’t simply assume that the value proposition that made your company successful decades ago remains intact after the circumstances have changed.
At some point, somebody has to ask whether the customers are still getting what they came for.
And I wonder how often the people making those decisions are asking that question.
Everybody wants my money.
There’s another aspect of this whole relationship between businesses and their customers that has become particularly difficult for me to ignore lately.
I’ve been out of full-time work for more than five months.
And if you’ve ever experienced an extended period of unemployment, you probably understand just how exhausting it can be.
You spend an extraordinary amount of time looking for opportunities, submitting applications, interviewing, and trying to maintain some sense of optimism while watching your financial situation become progressively more uncomfortable.
You also become considerably more conscious of where every dollar goes.
Purchases that previously required little thought become decisions you have to weigh carefully.
Do I really need this? Can I justify spending money on that? Should I wait until I’m working again?
It’s not a particularly enjoyable way to live.
And something I’ve noticed during this period is just how absurdly commercialized our everyday communications have become.
I don’t have a particularly active social life when it comes to texting or emailing friends. I’m not receiving dozens of personal messages every day.
So, when I check my email or phone, what do I see?
Companies.
Companies everywhere.
Buy this! Check out our latest collection! Here’s twenty percent off! Your favorite items are waiting! Don’t miss this limited-time offer!
Every. Single. Day.
My inbox has essentially become an endless collection of businesses trying to convince me to spend money.
Which is particularly amusing considering I haven’t had a full-time job in five months.
Believe me, I’d love to buy some things.
I’d also love to have the money to buy them.
Now, I’m not suggesting that these companies are aware of my employment situation and deliberately tormenting me with promotional emails.
I know perfectly well how digital marketing works. I’ve spent much of my professional career working in marketing and web content.
I understand mailing lists, automated campaigns, customer segmentation, conversion rates, and all the other mechanisms companies use to encourage purchases.
And I’m not opposed to marketing. Quite the opposite. When done well, it helps people discover products and services they genuinely want or need.
But there’s something about being on the receiving end of this constant barrage when you’re struggling financially that makes the whole experience feel rather absurd.
Every notification becomes another request for money.
Another sale. Another promotion. Another opportunity to consume something.
And it doesn’t matter that I haven’t purchased anything in months or that my priorities have shifted dramatically.
The messages keep coming.
Buy. Buy. Buy.
It’s as though the relationship between a business and its customers has been reduced to a never-ending series of opportunities to extract another transaction.
And I think that’s what bothers me more than the advertisements themselves.
There’s so much effort devoted to getting our attention when companies want something from us.
Our phones. Our email inboxes. Our social media feeds. Every conceivable opportunity to remind us that there’s something else we could be purchasing.
But what happens when we want something from them?
Well, that’s an entirely different story.
Congratulations! You’re now your own customer service representative.
Have you noticed how extraordinarily easy it is to subscribe to something?
Enter your information, click a button, and congratulations! You’re now a valued customer.
Want to cancel?
Well, let’s not be hasty.
Are you absolutely sure? Have you considered our discounted plan? Would you like to pause your membership? Have you visited our help center?
No?
Well, we’ve still got six more screens for you to navigate.
In September 2025, Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it enrolled millions of consumers in Prime subscriptions without their consent and made cancellations unnecessarily difficult.
The settlement required significant changes to how customers sign up for and cancel Prime.
Consider the absurdity of needing federal intervention to make it easier for people to stop paying for something they no longer want.
This example particularly bothers me because I’ve spent a significant portion of my professional career working on websites.
Companies devote enormous resources to improving the user experience.
We examine analytics. We identify friction in the customer journey. We simplify forms, improve navigation, and make information easier to find.
We spend countless hours trying to make websites more intuitive.
Unless, apparently, the customer wants to stop giving us money.
Then suddenly the friction becomes an important part of the retention strategy.
And this is where the contrast with all those promotional messages becomes particularly interesting.
A company can send me five emails in a single week encouraging me to buy something, but if I actually need assistance with a product I’ve already purchased, I might have to navigate an automated phone system, search through a help center, or explain the same problem to three different representatives.
They’ve mastered the art of contacting me when they want something.
Getting in touch with them when I want something?
That’s apparently a technological challenge humanity has yet to overcome.
When the numbers stop telling the whole story
I think one of the underlying problems is that businesses have become extraordinarily good at measuring certain things while being remarkably bad at understanding others.
You can easily quantify the money saved by reducing staffing.
You can calculate how much additional revenue you’ll generate by increasing a subscription price.
You can determine precisely how much money you’ll save by reducing the amount of material used to manufacture a product.
Those figures fit very neatly into a spreadsheet.
But how do you measure the goodwill lost when customers realize the product they’ve purchased for years has become noticeably worse?
How do you quantify the frustration of somebody who spends forty-five minutes trying to resolve a problem that previously required a five-minute phone call?
And how do you account for longtime customers who quietly disappear because your company no longer provides the experience that originally attracted them?
Those things are much harder to measure.
I saw some of this dynamic play out with my family’s business.
A more standardized operation may have looked attractive from a corporate management perspective.
But the personal attention that helped us retain customers didn’t necessarily fit neatly into that formula.
And once those qualities were diminished, the consequences became apparent.
Unfortunately, the people who make these decisions aren’t always the ones who have to deal with those consequences.
The customer service representative didn’t decide to reduce staffing.
The person working the register didn’t set the prices.
And Jamie and Holly certainly weren’t responsible for manufacturing defective leggings.
But guess who gets to deal with the unhappy customers?
It’s a rather remarkable arrangement when you think about it.
Corporate leadership makes a decision that saves money, employees deal with the resulting frustration, and customers receive an inferior experience.
Operating expenses are down!
Everybody wins.
Well, somebody does.
Maybe try remembering what customers actually want
I’m not suggesting we return to some imaginary golden age when every company treated its customers wonderfully.
Businesses have been producing lousy products, mistreating customers, and prioritizing profits for as long as businesses have existed.
And there are still plenty of excellent companies that take pride in what they produce.
I know that because I’ve managed to find some of them.
My Gustin shirts are a perfect example.
I’ve spent more money upfront, certainly, but I’ve also gotten years of use out of clothing that hasn’t deteriorated into something resembling cheesecloth.
I haven’t had to replace them every few months, and I’ve never found myself frustrated that they didn’t live up to their intended purpose.
That’s value.
And I don’t begrudge the company a single dollar for providing it.
Which brings me back to something I think gets lost in all these discussions about corporate greed and consumer expectations.
Most people just want to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.
That’s it.
They’re not demanding that companies sacrifice profitability. They’re not expecting everything to be free. They’re not asking businesses to perform miracles.
If you charge more for something because it’s made better, plenty of people will understand that.
If you’re selling an inexpensive product, people will generally adjust their expectations accordingly.
And if something goes wrong, most reasonable customers simply want the company to acknowledge the problem and make an effort to resolve it.
None of this strikes me as particularly unreasonable.
But I wonder whether we’ve started confusing profitability with value creation.
Ideally, a business makes money because it provides something people want.
A quality product. A useful service. A pleasant experience. Something that makes the customer’s life a little easier.
Instead, it sometimes feels like providing those things has become an inconvenient obligation that must be minimized to maximize the money coming in.
What if we make the fabric a little thinner?
What if we reduce the amount of food in the package?
What if we eliminate some of those services customers have come to expect?
What if we make canceling a subscription just inconvenient enough that some people won’t bother?
Individually, perhaps those decisions make financial sense.
But at what point do you have to acknowledge that the cumulative effect is a business that has become progressively worse at providing the very thing it’s supposed to sell?
And what does it say about our priorities when a company can regard that as progress?
I think about the executives who seem so disconnected from the everyday experiences of their customers. I think about LuLaRoe’s sellers struggling with deteriorating merchandise, and the longtime customers of my family’s business who watched the service they appreciated disappear.
And lately, I think about my own situation.
The constant stream of promotional messages encouraging me to spend money I don’t have, while the experience of being a customer seems to become progressively more expensive, less convenient, and less rewarding.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a company wanting to sell me something.
But I do think there’s something wrong with a business that devotes seemingly unlimited resources to acquiring customers while treating the responsibility of actually satisfying them as an inconvenience.
There was a popular meme from Futurama featuring Fry excitedly thrusting a fistful of cash forward and demanding:
“Shut up and take my money!”
It’s a pretty funny expression of what happens when somebody sees something they desperately want to buy.
But increasingly, it feels like some corporations have reversed the relationship.
They’re no longer particularly concerned with convincing us that what they’re selling is worth our money.
Instead, the message seems to be:
“Shut up and give us your money!”
And please, whatever you do, don’t complain about what you get in return.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to put on one of my five-year-old white T-shirts.
Apparently, those are luxury items now.
