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Why do companies become hostile to their customers?
It takes quite a lot for me to criticize and turn away from products and companies I have loved and championed. The time it takes for me to do so could also be viewed as a character flaw. However, where I come from, love and loyalty mean more than a mere Tinder-swipe. Lately, it’s been hard to root for companies and products that seem increasingly hostile to their customers.
You already know how I feel about the continued and gradual degradation of Twitter. Let me add two more names to the list: Pocket, a reading app under the Mozilla Foundation, and Square, the payment company. I’ve been with Pocket since Nat Weiner launched the “read later” company. I use it almost every day and am even a premium subscriber. A few weeks ago, Mozilla decided I should move away from my username — @Om — in favor of creating a new Mozilla profile for “enhanced security.” Now, when I access the Pocket website or mobile app, the first thing presented on the “home” screen are articles they recommend, rather than my saved content.
To me, Pocket has always been a repository where I save, store, and archive articles I want to read or use for my ongoing research. That’s its value for me. I don’t care much for their “Home Screen” and its recommendations. While it may seem minor, these changes detract from the app’s core purpose, revealing a user-hostile behavior. The changes implemented by Mozilla and Pocket prioritize their interests and haven’t notably improved my user experience. Conversely, I’ve been using a beta version of Reader from Readwise, an emerging company.
Readwise initially offered a service for saving highlights from various sources — Apple Books, Pocket, Amazon Kindle, Twitter, and even Discord. I appreciated their approach. Then they launched Reader, their own “read-it-later” app. It lets me save articles, highlight text, add notes, enable public links, save YouTube videos (with text captions), and offers other features. Both Readwise and its competitor, Matter, prioritize enhancing the online reading experience. Meanwhile, Pocket seems to be deciding for me what I need.
However, this pales in comparison to Square. Once a groundbreaking company that created an easy-to-use platform for small businesses, I lauded it repeatedly for its fresh take on movable payment experiences. Its receipt philosophy was also impressive. I had co-founder Jack Dorsey come and talk about it at one of my events.
“What if we see the receipt more as a publishing medium — a product unto itself that people actually want to take home, that they want to engage with, be fully interactive with? What can we build into this canvas that’s actually valuable, that’s independent of the product you just sold? What can you give in this communication channel, this publishing medium, that people want to engage with?”
Jack Dorsey, 2014
That receipt has since become a tool for spamming, and the company is nothing less than a spammer. The issue became so egregious that I publicly expressed my displeasure online, which I rarely do.
What went wrong? For weeks, I’ve been receiving emails from businesses I once patronized. I used Apple Pay with Square Reader for these transactions, never creating a profile with Square or the businesses. Yet, Square added me to an email list promoting these businesses. When I aired my grievances online, Square’s response was that I could delete my profile — ironic, given I never created one. The only association I have with Square is through their Cash App, using a different email.
Daniel Raffel delved into Square’s tactics, highlighting their introduction of the term “subscribed customer” and the creation of a Square Customer Directory. As Raffel noted, “Square offers an email marketing service built on sensitive customer data, pitching it as a free CRM to their PoS customers.” They’re monetizing this data under the guise of assisting businesses.
The email addresses Square uses likely come from Apple Pay or Google Pay, and it’s concerning that these tech giants seem passive in this apparent misuse of customer data. This behavior mirrors Facebook’s “ad profile” creation using cookies until Apple intervened. Perhaps it’s time for Apple to step in once more. In essence, Square has turned into a spammer, betraying its initial promise of an optimal customer experience.
I’ve got no issue with Square offering these services. They’ve got every right to monetize their platform. But just because Square can bundle a series of sneaky transactions this way, doesn’t mean they should. I think they’re better than this and I think they outta explore ways to make this more pro-customer.
Square should give me an opt-out choice before adding my info to a marketing directory accessible by any local business. And not just through an ephemeral PoS screen that’s easy to overlook—I mean a clear, permanent message via email or text. Square has the talent to design such a user-friendly communication.
Daniel Raffel.
Raffel is right to urge Square into doing the right thing, but they won’t.
It’s sad because, at one point, Square embodied the idea that the ‘experience itself is design.’ In one of my articles, I pointed out:
During the heyday of the industrial and manufacturing economy, what mattered was the brand, Schauer says. Today, because we as a country are becoming essentially a services economy, the focus should be around the branded experience instead.
Square, for me is that type of experience. I am probably not going to remember what font is being used or what color type is on display. What I will remember is a process of easy cash exchange, whether it is with friends, family, my local butcher or cafe or Starbucks. That is the essence of a modern company — technology, infrastructure and complexity hidden by a well designed experience — that to me is experience design.
Sadly, we are far from that reality. As a publicly traded company, Square has to keep showing growth and figure out new ways to tell a story of endless prosperity to its shareholders. It comes at a cost — the customer and the customer experience.
And this isn’t the first time companies have turned on their customers. The reality is that they’re banking on confusion and poorly-informed consumers to make unfavorable decisions that prove lucrative for the company. In essence, they know they can get away with taking advantage of their customers.
Cell phone providers, cable companies, credit card firms, and even physical fitness chains have relied on mistreating their patrons to boost their profits. Now, it seems we need to add Square and other technology companies to this list.
September 1, 2023. San Francisco
8 thoughts on this post
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I agree about Pocket. I recently started using Omnivore as a replacement and it is excellent – it connects well with Obsidian as a place to capture and link ideas.
I have not tried Omnivore and will give it a shot.
I don’t know how much this has to do with my generally-hostile response to vendor tracking (such that, decades ago, I put fake apartment numbers on my street address to track who sold my address to junk mailers), and how much is due to weirdnesses of Apple’s privacy settings
But for the life of me, why should I—a frequent-enough customer of AirFrance, need to spend minutes scanning their privacy policies for how much of me they’ll sell to brokers who’ll generate more spam, just to see their announcement of special fares?
Insanity. I get it: they think they’re not an airline but a recreation and business services company. But they’ve lost sight of who their customer is and why we give them our business
Yes indeed / this is so galling. They can’t make enough profit from me as a customer so they need to sell me to others. At some point we all have to figure out how to deal with this. Fake apartment details is a good idea 😜
The current digital frontier version of capitalism is based on a limited number of often spurious metrics: new customers, new revenue, more profit, more of this, more of that. Stuff designed to be replaced, not repaired. Who cares about that 1937 Ford truck that will outlive the new behemoths loaded with chips but designed to be unfixable by backyard mechanics? I’ve long noticed that real tech people like to work with low-tech stuff, like to see things break so they can figure out how to fix them. Meanwhile the environment is the negative externality that pays the price. That means us. Our grandchildren will ask, what were you thinking? Answer: we were’nt.
Well said 🙂 it is a huge challenge and we are kicking the can. Even the smartest guys are doing the same.
Sad reality is that we are all victims and beneficiaries of hyper capitalism. If we were thinking different we would be trying to evaluate things differently and instead we all (including myself) are about “more, more, more.”
I have recently switched to Goodlinks from Pocket – so far it’s pretty good. To me I just need a place to save links for later reading, and I don’t think it justifies a subscription.
I appreciate this post.
I would like to inquire why this sentence has any traction?
“They’ve got every right to monetize their platform.”
In my world, they have no rights that right thinking people don’t grant them. Unfortunately, the greedy rich own the politicians that grant legal rights. At least the above quoted sentence should say “legal right” or “politician crafted right” in order to keep us from skimming over and nodding “Yes”.
Much love.