The Marketplace Meltdown: Navigating Rage, Uncivility, And The New Frontlines of Business-To-Customer Conflict
Twenty-two years ago, we set out to replicate a dusty 1976 White House study on customer complaints, never imagining we’d find ourselves chronicling a societal shift from mere dissatisfaction to full-throated rage. Back then, my co-author Marc Grainer thought adding a few questions about hostile customers was a fool’s errand. Today, as we release our 11th National Customer Rage Survey, those “silly” questions have evolved into a diagnostic toolkit for decoding modern marketplace warfare.
The years since our last report in 2022 read like a dystopian playbook. The tragic murder of United Healthcare’s CEO during a protest over prior authorization policies. Viral videos of airline passengers fist fighting over reclined seats. Chatbots being “taught” to de-escalate death threats. Indeed, we’ve entered an era where customer rage mutates faster than a coronavirus strain. Complaint handling has become less about service recovery than conflict mediation and assuaging the ire of conscientious consumers who prioritize ethical, social, and environmental factors when making purchasing decisions.
Most Recent Survey Results
Marketplace Conflict: A New Conceptualization Of A Cultural Fault Line
- Customer Rage
- Customer Uncivility
- Crisis Driven Incidents
- Economic Class Warfare
By way of introduction, here are a few early thoughts about the emerging framework for rethinking marketplace conflict.
Marketplace Conflict – Customer Rage Triggered By Product & Service Problems
Customer rage is the classic, visceral reaction to specific, transactional problems with products and services – exploding in the moment when expectations are shattered. Perhaps in a generation prior, the notion of “customer rage” may have been regarded as hyperbole. Today, customers routinely “go off” about their product and service complaints. Owing to 20+ years of investigation, we know a great deal about customer rage. If you’re looking for a pulse check on the American marketplace, the numbers are both a fever and a warning. Our 2025 survey reveals that:
- 77% of customers reported experiencing a product or service problem in the past year—a rate that has more than doubled since 1976.
- Two out of every three customers with a problem feel rage (64%), and half (50%) raised their voice to express displeasure—a record high.
- The emotional toll on customers is equally sobering: 32% of customers cite emotional stress as a direct result of their complaint resolution experience.
- Digital complaining is the primary mode of grousing (vs. telephone), yet 43% of social media complaints vanish into the algorithmic ether, up from 32% in 2022.
- Revenge-seeking – while down a bit from 2022 – has nonetheless tripled since 2020, with 7% of customers openly admitting to it.
These aren’t just statistics—they’re the warning lights on the dashboard of the American marketplace. Three of these indicators warrant especially close examination and discussion in the coming years.
The first indicator highlights the need to unpack the factors behind rising complainant satisfaction, which has reached historic levels. After remaining stagnant for more than forty years, complainant satisfaction has steadily increased over the past three waves of the Rage Study. Currently, 40% of complainants report being delighted or completely satisfied with how their issues were resolved. This trend prompts key questions: Does this uptick signify a genuine transformation in corporate complaint handling, or are customers simply becoming more effective at voicing their grievances? Likely, both forces are at play. On one hand, customers are perceiving real improvements: the proportion of Americans rating customer care as “Excellent” rose from 12% (2002–2022) to 19% in 2025. On the other, consumers’ expectations are clearly rising. Sixty-eight percent now describe complaining as effortful (up from 65% in 2022), and 50% of those with issues report raising their voices—an all-time high. It remains to be seen which dynamic will have greater influence.
A second indicator draws attention to the role of socioeconomic status in customer care outcomes. The 2025 study shows that, for certain measures of wealth, the saying “fortune follows the wealthy” holds true. Complainants who identify as “upper class” are nearly twice as satisfied with resolution outcomes compared to those in the “middle, working, and lower classes.” This gap raises important questions: Do the “haves” wield more persuasive complaint strategies? Are they simply more persistent, or are companies more eager to please customers they consider valuable? Regardless of the cause, understanding the class-based dimensions of complainant satisfaction is essential for a complete picture.
The third indicator involves the migration from telephone to digital channels for lodging complaints. For the first time, 2022 saw digital complaints surpass those made by phone. Yet, the landscape is far from straightforward. Social media, poses new challenges: the proportion of complainants posting their issues on social platforms rose from 14% (2002–2022) to 24% in 2025, but 43% of these posts received no corporate response at all. This troubling lack of engagement is compounded by emerging challenges—including the risks posed by AI and fraud. The Better Business Bureau recently warned of a surge in impostor scams, with fraudulent actors creating fake customer support accounts to prey on individuals seeking help.
Together, these indicators point to vital questions for the future: What drives improvement in customer satisfaction? How do wealth and class shape complaint resolution? And can companies keep pace with the evolving risks and opportunities presented by digital engagement? Each merits ongoing scrutiny and deeper research.
Marketplace Conflict – Customer Uncivility Activated By Disagreement With Corporate Sociopolitical Positions
Likely additive to the aggressions stemming from customer rage, “customer uncivility” is sparked by customers calling out corporate values and sociopolitical positions that don’t align with their own. And the antagonisms from customer uncivility are becoming increasingly visible and outrageous in daily commerce. In March 2025 alone, organized consumer boycotts targeted major corporations such as Amazon, Target, Walmart & Tesla. Such collective action calls to mind the consumer unrest of the 1960s with one key difference. No longer limited to niche consumer groups and political activists, modern consumer consciousness has transmuted into more individualistic forms of protest. 2025 marks our second foray into customer uncivility (the inaugural year being 2022). Notably:
- 15% of Americans admit to personally engaging in uncivil behavior in the past year toward a business with whom they experienced some kind of sociopolitical or values conflict,
- A majority – 55% – of our fellow citizenry believe customer uncivility is increasing, and 28% cite the “moral decay of society” as the primary reason for this trend – more than twice any other cause.
- Nearly one-fifth of customers believe that “making verbal threats”, “making physical threats”, “making fun of/mocking a customer service rep” and “cursing/using profanity” are either “civil” behaviors or that “it depends on the circumstances”.
With two waves of data about customer uncivility, we’re beginning to make inroads into a deeper understanding of value-based conflict between businesses and their customers.
Marketplace Conflict – Crisis-Driven Incidents As A Form Of Conflict & Disruption
Sometimes the unpredictable, extreme, and aggressive behaviors observed in the marketplace have nothing whatsoever to do with a lousy product or service experience or an outburst resulting from acrimony over corporate sociopolitical stances—and you don’t need to do a formal study to appreciate this. Instead, the intensity and irrationality of some hostilities may stem from crisis-driven incidents that set off underlying mental or emotional challenges for certain individuals. For instance, the root cause for a passenger opening an emergency exit door midflight on an Asiana Airlines flight had no connection to the quality of the airline food or service, nor was it related to the airline’s sociopolitical stances. Instead, it resulted from a set of psychological and emotional factors specific to this traveler that may have been triggered by the circumstances. After all, one in three customers report that their most serious product or service problem precipitated emotional distress.
And that’s just one case. Hurling objects, personal threats, full-on attacks, and other extreme behaviors brought on by addiction or acute distress are only a sampling of some of the disruptive and distressing crisis-driven incidents that frontline service staff may confront. The US Bureau of Labor & Statistics reports that about two million Americans are victims of workplace violence annually. Customers are reported to be the primary perpetrators of such victimization, accounting for 40% of these incidents. Owing to our investigation of customer rage, we also know that—under the right circumstances—the customer experience milieu can be a lightning rod for public outbursts that may escalate into crisis-driven events.
Crisis-driven incidents, when enacted in these spaces, have effects on par with (or greater than) other, more traditionally recognized forms of conflict. They fundamentally challenge the marketplace’s ability to provide safety, order, and predictability, and require the negotiation of competing interests and needs (individual vs. collective, care vs. containment, inclusion vs. exclusion). Thus, they fit both the spirit and operational reality of marketplace conflict, even if their origins are not always intentional or adversarial.
Given this reality—and the paucity of empirical data about the occurrence and phenomenology of crisis-driven incidents in the realm of the day-to-day customer experience—there is clearly a need for future research to advance deeper insights into these events as a form of marketplace conflict.
Marketplace Conflict – Economic Class Warfare As A Form Of Conflict & Disruption
Every time I visit a CVS or Walgreens nowadays, many of the everyday items we use which were previously on open shelfing are now under the protection of lock and key. One way to read this rather sudden change in company policy is to see it a corporate countermeasure to an uprising of the economically disadvantaged. It is a testimony to the fact that marketplace conflict needn’t reveal itself in the overt sorts of “hand-to-hand customer experience combat” such as screaming, cursing, boycotts and public protests. Rather it more closely resembles economic class warfare, perhaps tied to increasing income inequality and relative deprivation.
The societal consequences of income inequality and the feeling of relative deprivation (that overwhelming perception of feeling left behind) are well documented: higher violent crime rates, greater economic instability and political inequality, just to name a few.
While less is known about how such economic inequities and the resulting economic class warfare show up and in and disrupt everyday business, one might persuasively argue that these economic disparities only serve to exacerbate customer fury and reshape consumer behavior through assorted psychological, economic and social pathways. For instance, some studies contend that relative deprivation can fuel a frustration toward business that leads to verbal abuse, hostile complaints and vandalism. Is it any surprise that high-inequality geographies see 40% higher shoplifting and vandalism? And business, perhaps, responds in kind. Retailers report a 93% increase in shoplifting since 2019, 71% of retailers have increased their budget for AI surveillance systems and security guard hires in urban stores shot up 45%.
I don’t know about you, but to me this resembles an emerging form of economic class warfare, a new variant of marketplace conflict.
Looking Ahead: Rethinking Hostilities in the Marketplace
The 1976 White House study warned that poor complaint handling could dent profits. Our 2025 update calculates the stakes of lousy complaint handling at $596 billion in revenue risk—a figure that would’ve made even the most stoic ’70s bureaucrat sweat through their polyester suit.
However, as you digest the findings from this 11th National Customer Rage survey, I urge you to go beyond the theoretical bottom-line consequences and consider them through the lens of our practical and compounding societal complexities: a record number of product and service problems fueled by technologies and ever-increasing consumption, inflationary pressures turning small fees into flashpoints, generative and often clumsy AI scaling corporate complaint handling, and a generation raised on “call-out culture” now wielding it against retailers.
This is no longer just a customer experience challenge. The insights from this important inquiry also represent a societal stress test. Future inroads to understanding and responding to marketplace conflict may require rethinking and evolving a more sophisticated rendering of hostilities—one that better recognizes the varying root causes of friction between businesses and their consumers. The evolution of a more nuanced framework that distinguishes between transactional customer rage, the uncivilities of conscientious consumers, outbursts brought about by crises, and the cat and mouse game of economic grievances can, we hope, help us to chart a path toward genuine empathy, effective problem resolution, and a less combative marketplace.
As always, we invite you to wield these insights not as a mirror reflecting our worst impulses, but as a compass pointing toward empathy’s fragile north.
Kindest Regards,
Scott M. Broetzmann
Co-founder, President & CEO, Customer Care Measurement & Consulting scott@customercaremc.com
www.customercaremc.com
