How many times this week have you gotten a spam phone call? How long have you spent on the phone trying to deal with an insurance issue? And have you tried to cancel a service, only to find that it was much harder than you thought it would be?
All of these situations are collectively part of what some researchers are calling “the annoyance economy.” In a recent report, the left-wing think tank Groundwork Collaborative looked at the costs that such bothersome situations create for consumers and noted that no matter their political background, Americans are interested in cutting them down.
Is public policy the best way to get rid of these costs? Those on the left side of the political spectrum definitely seem to think so. Politicians who have suggested policies addressing some of these annoyances include former President Joe Biden and current New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
But even if big government isn’t your preferred way of dealing with these issues, understanding the challenges—and how they might be costing you not just time but money—is the first step toward finding a solution.
Customer Service and the Burden of Paperwork
Time is money. Accordingly, one finding from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics seems pretty costly: over the past two decades, the amount of time that people in the US spend on the phone with customer service has risen by a startling 60 percent.
Considering that businesses of all sorts have moved to automated systems for their customer service phone trees, often complete with AI voice recognition, one might expect the process to have become more efficient. But as anyone who has actually had to deal with these systems can testify, that is rarely the case. A more likely outcome is spending a frustrating amount of time in an auditory labyrinth until you finally reach a human—who may or may not be able to help you. Even if they do offer assistance, you may find out that their help wasn’t actually worth the time you spent securing it.
Of course, these systems often benefit the companies. After all, if you’re calling them for a refund or some other costly service, leaving you to stew and possibly never complete your task keeps your dollars in their pockets.
Sometimes this rises to the level of malfeasance. In 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Comerica Bank, saying that, among other policies, it rigged its call service to deliberately hang up on customers before they could reach a human representative—intentionally dropping over 24 million calls to avoid addressing fraud disputes. At the beginning of 2025, the CFPB fined the payment service CashApp for having a fake customer line that actually led nowhere.
Some companies use these schemes to ensure that customers don’t cancel their subscriptions. Both the radio provider SiriusXM and Toyota Motor Credit deliberately used a long series of delays and rerouting to keep customers from being able to cancel their products, until a court and the CFPB, respectively, intervened.
And, certainly, sometimes the runaround is simply the result of a company not bothering to consider the needs of the consumer. For the person on the other end of the line, that’s not much better.
In certain sectors, runarounds and poor customer service can have dire consequences. For example, the frustrations related to medical insurance may leave people without coverage for a while. Getting prior authorization for a medical procedure can mean jumping through paperwork and phone call hoops that go on and on and on—sometimes delaying life-saving treatment.
The statistics, once again, bear that out. Polls revealed that one in three Americans had at least 20 instances of problems with their health insurance in a year, an alarming frequency. And 80 percent of Americans said they had at least “a little bit” of frustration with the bureaucratic aspects of maintaining health insurance coverage.
One of the main time-wasters is a very common experience: trying to find a medical provider who actually accepts your insurance. Despite laws mandating that insurance companies can be fined for not keeping their provider directories up to date, experience and investigative reporting by outlets like ProPublica show that many of the listings you will find in the directories of medical insurance companies are outdated and inaccurate, listing doctors who no longer participate in certain plans—leading to more time wasted on trying to find a provider who does.
Academic estimates put a monetary value on all that frustration: about $21.6 billion worth of time for American workers every year, dealing just with healthcare related phone calls and paperwork.
While some of the annoyances exist simply because no one cares enough to fix them, others are the result of deliberate lobbying. People from outside the US are often astonished to discover that Americans must hire professionals to do their taxes or spend hours doing them themselves, despite the data that the government already possesses on most workers’ wages. In many other countries, you simply receive a notice at the end of the year telling you how much you owe.
In the US, tax preparation remains notoriously difficult, in large part due to the advocacy of tax preparation companies, which wheedle out a promise from members of Congress to stall on modernizing and streamlining the tax process. With huge amounts of money being spent on tax preparation, one would imagine that making the process more efficient would be a boon—until you figure out who is benefiting from the delay.