When did buying something become such an irritating experience?
I recently went shopping for a new dishwasher. Nothing crazy, no big tech features required. Just a regular ass dishwasher. Should be simple, right?
What I got was an experience designed to irritate every part of my spirit.
The grey color costs $600 more than the white. Seriously?!?
Oh, they were just getting started. That load feature requires an upgrade. Delivery is a fee. Installation is a fee. Removing the old dishwasher is a fee. The parts required to install the dishwasher I JUST BROUGHT are, somehow, also a fee.
It just feels like everyone is trying to screw you over everywhere you go.
Everything costs more. Products feel cheaper. Customer service has been replaced by chatbots trained to only give you 3 options and none of them are the one you actually need. Features that once came standard are now premium. Companies charge subscriptions for things we used to own. Products break sooner, support gets harder to reach, and every interaction feels like one more opportunity for a company to reach into your pocket.
This sucks! And we all hate it.
In 2025, Forrester found that customer experience ratings fell for 25% of U.S. brands, while only 7% improved. PwC found that 90% of executives believed consumers highly trusted their companies. Only 30% of consumers agreed. That sentiment makes sense.
Customers are becoming increasingly frustrated, and things not only don’t appear to be getting better, they are getting worse. What is happening here?
We’ll for one thing, we as consumers, aren’t giving these companies the finger and bouncing. We’re just dealing with the abuse.
And surprise, surprise, it turns out technology is a major reason why we’re continuing to deal with these companies even though they suck. Technology has made leaving less likely by making our behavior easier to study, shape, and predict.
That has changed business.
For a long time, the basic business bargain was simple.
A company made something useful. Customers bought it and if the quality stayed high and the experience remained good, people came back.
If the company raised prices too far, made the product worse, or treated customers poorly, people went somewhere else. Lost sales created pressure to improve.
The focus had to be on the customer because the threat of losing them was far too great.
Technology has weakened that threat.
Companies now have sophisticated ways to keep people returning even when the product is not improving. Rewards programs, apps, personalized promotions, saved payment information, recurring subscriptions, status levels, expiring points, notifications, switching costs, and algorithmic recommendations all make behavior easier to predict.
If a company can reasonably predict your purchase behavior they don’t have to improve the product, they only have to optimize for your behavior.
The old feedback loop rewarded product improvement. The new one rewards behavior management.
And loyalty programs have become the best way to exploit your behavior patterns. Loyalty programs rarely reward how long you’ve stuck around or how much trust you’ve placed in a brand. They rewards continued transactions.
Spend money and earn points. Come back to use the points. Spend a little more to reach the next reward. Open the app before the offer expires. Make an unplanned purchase so the value you already accumulated does not disappear.
This is masked as appreciation. It is closer to behavioral training with a festive little confetti animation at the end.
A truly loyal customer keeps coming back because the company keeps earning it, while a predictable customer keeps coming back because the company has figured out exactly which button to press.
You’re not being rewarded for your loyalty here. The company is being rewarded for how well it’s learned to read you.
Companies have just upped the ante on the game.
Companies have always used promotions.
McDonald’s Monopoly game was designed to encourage more visits. So were punch cards, sweepstakes, limited-time menu items, and buy-ten-get-one-free offers.
But those promotions eventually ended. The app does not.
There is always another offer, another points threshold, another notification, another expiration date, another personalized discount, and another chance to unlock something after just one more purchase.
The game has become permanent. That permanence changes the relationship.
A temporary promotion gives a customer a reason to make an extra visit. A permanent digital rewards system can study each visit, measure the response, and adjust the next incentive.
It combines familiar behavioral mechanisms. Progress gives you something to complete. Expiring rewards make leaving feel like losing money. Limited-time offers create urgency. Changing promotions make the next reward uncertain. Personalization helps the company determine which offer is most likely to work on you. Saved orders and payment information remove the small pauses that might otherwise give you time to reconsider.
None of this guarantees a purchase, but it does improve the odds.
At scale, slightly better odds are worth billions. They are building systems that make customer behavior easier to anticipate.
When you look at one transaction at a time, the McDonald’s rewards app seems generous. You buy food, earn points, eventually get something free. Free fries are still free fries, no complaints there.
But McDonald’s isn’t tracking one transaction. It’s tracking the pattern of behavior. Did this offer get you in the door when you weren’t planning to go, did you add a second item just to hit the threshold, did you choose McDonald’s over the place next door purely because you already had points sitting there, did the app collecting your payment info make the next purchase just a little more frictionless.
By the end of 2025, McDonald’s had close to 210 million active loyalty members across 70 markets, generating nearly $37 billion in loyalty sales, with a public goal of hitting 250 million members and $45 billion by 2027. Those numbers have nothing to do with customer appreciation. Those are growth targets.
You look at the receipt and think I saved three dollars. The company looks at the same interaction and thinks we just generated four more visits this quarter.
A customer may receive a genuine discount and still spend more overall.
Saving five dollars on one order does not matter much if the offer caused three orders you otherwise would not have made. The app shows the savings from the transaction. It does not show the spending created by the habit.
I ran into a version of this while shopping for my dishwasher.
I was also looking at televisions. Best Buy had a 65-inch model priced at around $699. Compared with the other televisions around it, some priced at $1,200 or more, it looked like a deal. As a Best Buy rewards member, I would get free delivery and installation. If I didn’t know any better the whole thing looked like a great deal.
But I know how much TV’s cost and they are the last cheap thing out here. I know you can get a 75-inch brand-name high-quality TV from Walmart or Target for $500.
The deal only looked impressive because the comparison happened inside the store.
The higher-priced televisions created the anchor. The membership benefits sweetened it. The entire experience encouraged me to evaluate the offer within Best Buy’s system rather than ask whether Best Buy had the best offer at all.
By their very nature the loyalty program narrows the comparison.
A grocery store can label something a member special, knock two dollars off the shelf price, and make you feel rewarded. But the same product may still cost less at another store without the special price, the membership account, the app, or the collection of your purchase history.
The loyalty program is screwing you over in more ways than one.
Companies make investment decisions.
A company can spend millions improving a product and hope customers notice. Or it can spend millions improving the system that gets customers to buy the existing product more often.
Technology made behavioral engineering a serious competitor to product improvement.
The more predictable you become, the less the company has to give you. Why would they waste a great offer on someone who was going to show up anyway? If McDonald’s can increase frequency through its app, it has less pressure to improve the quality of the food to produce the same result.
If a retailer can keep members shopping through personalized offers, exclusive pricing, and accumulated benefits, it has less pressure to be the cheapest option.
Customers can hate an experience and remain profitable.
They can complain about the price, distrust the company, criticize the quality, post a bad review, and return the next week because an offer appeared in the app.
Gamification doesn’t force a company to cut corners on quality. It just makes cutting corners financially painless, because repeat business no longer depends on the product being good.
Gamification is only half the story. The other half is companies making it genuinely miserable to leave. Nobody casually switches banks, internet providers, or insurance companies, because leaving means research, account transfers, new passwords, and inevitably one customer service rep who mysteriously discovers a much better discount the second you say the word “cancel.”
Companies know plenty of people are only there because leaving sounds like flushing my entire Saturday down the toilet, I’d rather spend my time doing literally anything else. But everyone gets counted the exact same way on a retention report, so who cares, right?
They aren’t going to change, so we have to. Calling a company greedy while still guarding your points balance like it’s a retirement account isn’t accountability. The company only ever sees the purchase. Everything else is just sentiment data sitting in a spreadsheet nobody in finance is required to act on. If our behavior stays predictable, companies have very little actual reason to change it, no matter how loudly we complain on the way to the register.
None of this means deleting every app or turning down every discount out of spite. It means getting honest with yourself before you tap “redeem.” Would you have made this purchase without the offer? Are you actually saving money, or just spending money to avoid the feeling of wasting points? Has the product genuinely gotten better across the years you’ve stuck around, or just the marketing around it? Would you still choose this company if the points vanished tomorrow?
You are not rewarded for your loyalty. The company is rewarded for your predictability. The only way to change that is to become less predictable.
Is Your Favorite Brand Actually Earning Your Loyalty?
Run your favorite brand through the Trust Gap tool and see how well its promises match reality. Compare marketing claims against customer sentiment, policies, pricing, and accountability before deciding whether your loyalty is actually being rewarded. Try it here https://trustgap.app/
Follow Moni Oloyede at https://www.linkedin.com/in/moni-oloyede/
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Tons to think on here Moni, and seeing tech as an evasion tactic...I can't unsee it now....
This is where the behavioral layer becomes more important than sentiment. A customer can sincerely dislike the product, distrust the company, and intend to leave, while the surrounding system keeps making return behavior easier than exit. The company does not need loyalty in the old sense. It needs a sufficiently stable pattern. That is a very different business model.