On the Tiring Annoyance That Is Companies Letting Down Their Users

Published on Feb 10, 2025 (updated Aug 2, 2026), filed under misc. (Share this post, e.g., on Mastodon.)

I wrote a large part of this post in June (2024) and it took forever to get some of the last cases resolved. Which confirmed the points to be made, until in December, I decided not to post this at all. I retrieved the draft, then, after Biblio just charged me for being on their platform, without informing me about this step, and hence without giving me a chance to respond or leave their platform. (I thought something like this was illegal, but I’m not a U.S. lawyer.) I’m sure I’m not the only one to experience such BS with companies, yet it doesn’t seem to stop—unless we speak up, and take our business elsewhere. What follows, then, is a previously discarded list of experiences, with companies that let down their users.

I don’t know how it is for you, but I feel like over the years, something has changed significantly in how companies treat their users and customers. This year [2024], I’ve had a number of exceptionally poor experiences with companies. Some were “minor poor”—and others on the brink of full escalation, when I did involve an attorney.

Here are some of these experiences, in brief, in no particular order, but in my own words.

• Amazon (Prime Video, Kindle): With my move to Spain I lost all access to my Prime Video library, i.e., all videos rented and purchased in Germany. A few weeks later, in a separate incident, Amazon for unknown but likely technical reasons wiped my phone’s local ebook library, consisting of several hundred books of the roughly 1,500 Kindle books I own (I had written about the episode, in a post I archived in favor of this one).

  The damage is on me—I can’t watch the videos I had paid for anymore (not in the way I’d like to, at least), and it would be prohibitively much work, and probably futile, to manually try to restore the state of affairs on my phone’s ebook library (if the problem seems strange, think knowledge in the world). Amazon gave scripted apologies and non-advice, and I’ve decided not to buy anything on Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Kindle anymore.

  As Amazon knows about both incidents and the consequences, I find their inaction remarkable: When you as a company know you’re losing a power user and revenue of north of $1,000 a year just for ebooks (!), shouldn’t you know to be able to act—and, if you know, act? (This seems to hold regardless of company size.)

• Airbnb: When moving to Spain, we temporarily took a place in Santiago de Compostela before traveling on to Pontevedra (where we’ve moved). A long-term Airbnb and Booking.com power user, I opted to book through Airbnb here—and we were in for a surprise. The small apartment, looking great on photos, was not as advertised, in poor condition and, above all, moldy. When the host turned borderline criminal threatening to put mold cleaning charges on us (!), Airbnb, though quick in their responses, pointed to their policies, and essentially said mold was not a concern, “here’s 10% off your first night” (on a multiple-night stay and when we really couldn’t go elsewhere).

  Similar to other incidents, keeping with a policy ≠ providing a good user experience. Feeling let down by Airbnb, who ended up siding with and protecting a host who seems to use deceptive photos, I’ve decided not to use Airbnb anymore. If there’s one thing I learned during my time traveling the world and using Airbnb all the time (“I love Airbnb”), then it’s that you need the platform to have your back. I remember Airbnb having people’s backs. This time, they didn’t, and then it’s not worth using them.

  In the months while this draft was cooking, I ended up being so appalled by Airbnb’s handling of apparently tens of thousands of cases of hidden cameras in Airbnb homes, that I uninstalled the app and suspended my use of Airbnb indefinitely.

• Q-CELLS: Preparing for our move to Spain, we sold our small apartment in Magdeburg. The electricity provider for the place, however, ignored our cancellation; kept withdrawing the monthly fee; and then, when we contested and blocked withdrawals, started reporting payment issues. Yet they ignored more—repeated messages about the cancellation, express revocation of the withdrawal mandate, also notes about updated contact information (as we were moving). No responses by email, no callbacks, nothing. It was like talking to a wall (with the difference that the wall kept pulling money out of our pocket).

  In the end, blocking them hard from withdrawing any more money helped, and we did end up receiving one email about “system issues.” Any other communication, or a final invoice? No—not until half a year later, when Q-CELLS even charged for failed withdrawals, withdrawals they had tried after we had quit, after we didn’t even get their services anymore, after we forbade them to withdraw from our accounts and to instead send us the respective invoice—i.e., charges that they themselves caused. We’ve filed a complaint with the Bundesnetzagentur and prepared additional steps, but are currently waiting whether the Q-CELLS relationship has finally ended.

• lastminute.com: To prepare for our move to Spain, we tried lastminute.com to do a quick home search trip. Due to strikes, the trip was canceled. lastminute.com neither notified us about the cancellation (we had to inquire about it), did not offer an alternative even though nearby airports were open, and then didn’t reimburse us the full amount, but kept a three-digit amount for themselves.

  This experience, too, was—tiring. lastminute.com funnels customers into a single communication channel, a half-automated chat. No other support options seem available. Then, it has always been the same play—push back, push it onto the customer, or push it on someone else (as in a game they tried, where both Iberia, the airline in question, and lastminute.com each pointed at one another, and…—I don’t want to know how often that’s being played). We spoke with lawyers during the whole incident, and the only reason we didn’t sue was that we would have to pay more than what lastminute.com took from us. I can’t recommend and won’t use lastminute.com again.

• HMP Umzüge: Also move-related. For that we decided to work with HMP Umzüge, a Hamburg-based moving company. The offer was steep (think nearly five digits), but so were other offers, and it seemed what the market was asking for. The first sign that the experience was to be a company-centered, and not a customer-centered one, was when HMP asked to pay everything upfront. No matter whether needed at all, also no matter that they hadn’t done a thing yet. Company policy. Fine. It soon started to p_ss us off: After our goods had been packed up and we were in Galicia, waiting for the keys to our new place, they asked for an extra payment, to accommodate new conditions on-site. That extra payment wasn’t expected, but what was upsetting was the hidden message: No delivery and perhaps extra charges, if we didn’t pay immediately again. For all practical purposes, HMP held our goods hostage—although financially, they most likely had already made a profit.

  We budged, after insisting on an invoice that deducted materials that we hadn’t needed, and paid in advance once again. The way it all went down was that despite several hiccups and issues (late communication by HMP, delayed delivery, missing parts and not provided service, furniture damages), we received most of our goods (with the exception of two boxes and some individual items). And yet, the saga continued, when our own demands for damages didn’t seem to be processed, communication deteriorated, and we found that there were two standards—everything that HMP needed had to be done immediately, everything that we needed, didn’t need attention. After waiting for progress on compensation for a few months, we involved a lawyer, who helped us get expensed for half of the damages we reported. We decided to stop there, instead of involving the police (for the missing items, which by our understanding must have been stolen) and insisting on a higher compensation.

• Trade Republic (TR): What a ride this was. I was a happy TR customer, until I needed their support. And their support is such that if people rely on it, it’s so bad, it’s truly incredible. But what was the issue? I was asking whether and how to transfer my portfolio to Spain—and TR support took so long to respond, only to respond to something I didn’t ask for, that I had to cancel my account to make sure I could maintain access to my assets. That is, their support was so slow, ineffective, and all-around bad, I had to leave, in the process killing any chances also to return to TR.

  You’d be right, then, to speculate that Trade Republic may not have complied. For cancellation and transfer of my assets, TR support again took many weeks to respond, then to respond in a manner that suggested they wouldn’t accept my cancellation (and leave my assets in limbo). That seemed outright illegal, and had me involve the Bafin, the regulatory authority—I was running out of time for the transfer, and my trust in TR had plummeted.

  Fast forward, reporting to Bafin, and mentioning that to Trade Republic, eventually had TR do what I asked them to do—only for them to then appear to refuse to close the account, and me to add to the documentation I gathered for any case of TR violating my rights. Although there’s TR in Spain, well, let me ask you what you would do. My experience with TR was that when you have one problem, with TR you have at least two. The double irony at the end is, one, that TR has such a dysfunctional support, the business may not even know that they’re unnecessarily losing customers—and that, two, the Bafin never did a thing: They got back to me a few months after my report, with their own non-answer 😂😭

• Google, Facebook, OcasionPlus, Süddeutsche: I could go on with other experiences. I could talk about Google, who raised prices for YouTube Premium (again it seems), by 40% in my case, which had me cancel and have such a poor YouTube ads experience that I now wonder whether to keep using YouTube at all (and what happened to Google). I could talk about Facebook (where I’m essentially only holding my name), and how they offer various options to keep your data secure and private, but may have created a jungle for even the most tech-savvy people to find and control important settings. I could talk about OcasionPlus, a Spanish car dealer, and their tactics to avoid price negotiations, and instead try to bump prices. I could talk about Süddeutsche, the German newspaper, and their ways of, let’s say, not recognizing loyal readers and making it easy for them to stay—or to leave (which is making it easy to return). But, I won’t.

  Oh, and then that Valve thing last year [2023], killing one of the most popular online games on macOS—including negatively affecting players’ paid inventories—, without any notice whatsoever. Business first, users last.

Let’s get back to all of this in a second, because you may wonder whether I’m sensitive, perhaps even feeling entitled. I understand—there are probably people who wouldn’t care much about these experiences. I’d like to use this moment, then, to also call out companies with which I had pretty positive experiences:

• LBN, DKV, KS/AUXILIA: Straightforward, no-fuss handling of cancellations over our move to Spain, including automatically, correctly, and promptly returning any money overpaid. Awesome.

• Santander, Jazztel: Swift, friendly customer support (on-site in the case of Santander, on-line in the case of Jazztel). Helpful when help was needed.

  [A year later, in 2026, I need to revisit my Jazztel experience, as they denied my right to transfer to another provider, something I now need to fight through authorities.]

• IKEA!—Fantastic management of issues we had over parts that our moving company mishandled.

Thank you!—that we thank for good support, should also be a matter of course.

Patterns of Annoyance

Now back to the tiring annoyance. There are patterns:

• No, hidden, or automated support. In most cases in which we and I have experienced problems, it was made difficult to talk to anyone, response times were abysmal (remember Trade Republic, with up to two months), and responses themselves were of poor quality, often not answering the question that was asked.

• A general attitude of company and company profit first, user second last. One fairly quickly picks up whether a company is interested in the relationship, and respects and values their customers, or doesn’t. For big companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Google, we may be reaching the turning point, when these pay lip service to user satisfaction, and you spot them act like it’s just about them. For other companies, you can pick up that spirit right away—reaching someone is difficult, policies favor the company, and the customer is being made the annoyance (their wallet is what the company wants).

• The company may try to get away with something that’s damaging to the user and customer. Worse, now, at times you get the feeling that companies intentionally violate trust, or even the law. Content providers deleting your purchased content. Financial service companies not transferring your funds. Utility companies that keep withdrawing money even though they provide no service. In a world that revolves around property, that hits each user. Where it gets worse is where individual users may be (or may feel to be) too small to defend themselves.

This is what makes this all so extremely tiring. As users and customers, we are the oxygen that companies need for their survival. Not only do companies seem to forget, burning all that oxygen, they squeeze and sometimes fight us, leaning their weight against us—with many who may not decide to or be able to fight back.

And so, companies let us down. Ultimately, however, and that’s why I think we need reports like this, they let themselves down. Because as one consequence of this, users will not be let down; they will leave, and they will share their experiences.

Focus on the user, and all else follows.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager at various companies (e.g., Google); I’m an active web and tool developer (code optimization, digital defense), a contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and a book author (O’Reilly, Frontend Dogma).

I love trying things—in web development and engineering management, but also in politics and philosophy, where I hold to one idea in particular: that we can only be well if we take good care of everyone. Here on meiert.com I talk about some of my perspectives and experiences. (Please share feedback: Interpret charitably, keep it friendly, but do be critical.)