Crack Down on the Annoyance Economy

The typical American family loses more than $1,200 a year to junk fees and hours spent being jerked around. It's time we did something about it.

Hidden fees. Hours on hold. Headaches and runarounds. These may seem like unfortunate byproducts of navigating daily life, but they're not. Companies engineer it that way, piling on fees and friction until we just give up. The hassle is the business model. We call it the Annoyance Economy, and it's costing the typical American family more than $1,200 each year. The next President should stand on the side of American consumers and stand up to the scammers, spammers, and big corporations that steal our time and money.

The Problem:

It’s become a defining feature of modern life: the steady grind of small hassles that eat away at our time, patience, and wallets. Everyday interactions with health insurance companies, airlines, and other businesses that should be simple too often turn into fraught ordeals, leaving us feeling overwhelmed, ignored, or jerked around.

Welcome to the Annoyance Economy — what we pay in time, fees, and irritation to navigate our daily lives. These costs show up in many forms: hours spent on hold with customer service or lost in convoluted insurance paperwork; the relentless ping of spam calls and scam texts; the steady creep of extra fees and surprise surcharges on everyday transactions. Each year, the Annoyance Economy costs American families at least $165 billion in wasted time and lost money.

By all accounts, the Annoyance Economy has gotten worse. Over the past two decades, time spent on the phone with customer service is up 60 percent. Text messaging, once reserved for conversation with friends and family, now resembles our email spam folders. Surprise fees have spread from the travel and banking sectors to everything from concert tickets to food deliveries.

While some of these annoyances may be unintended — the result of clunky technology, legacy paperwork requirements, and outdated regulations — most are cynical attempts to slow us down, wear us out, or quietly extract value. Simply put: corporations make it easy for us to do things that they want, but conspicuously difficult to do things that we want but are not in their interest. Take product subscriptions: one study found that making cancellation more difficult can boost revenues as much as 200 percent. 

American companies derive big profits from these painful interactions — and fight to protect them. The airline industry spent millions of dollars opposing a new rule that would have entitled passengers to cash refunds for significant delays (the Trump administration scrapped the rule in November 2025). Telecom industry groups sued to block the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC)  proposed “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required companies to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up. 

Policymakers, for their part, have too often treated the Annoyance Economy as a second-tier concern, unworthy of serious attention. And so the Annoyance Economy continues unabated.

The Solution:

The next President should go to battle against the Annoyance Economy. While it’s easy to see why urgent concerns like the high cost of housing, child care, and health care get the headlines, policymakers shouldn’t overlook the smaller pain points that add up. Ending these daily headaches gives the next President a chance to show that government can deliver—replacing death by a thousand cuts with a thousand wins.

What follows is an agenda to address some of the Annoyance Economy’s most infuriating practices, treating them not as distractions from serious policymaking, but as a core opportunity to deliver meaningful, tangible improvements to Americans’ quality of life.

Ending Health Insurance Headaches

Perhaps no part of the Annoyance Economy hits harder than the American health care system. American workers collectively spend about $21.6 billion worth of time each year dealing with health care administration — calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork. More than one in three Americans report dealing with health insurance headaches more than 20 times per year.

First, federal regulators should establish a standardized claims system that allows patients to easily submit claims online. Many of us have wasted hours shuttling back and forth between providers and insurers to obtain the correct paperwork to process a claim. Too often, out-of-network claim forms must be downloaded, printed, and physically mailed along with itemized receipts. Snail mail and faxing were the cutting edge communication forms of the Big Band and Boy Band eras. It should be illegal for insurance companies to require patients to use them today.A system that standardizes documentation and sets clear limits on what's required would substantially reduce this time tax, along with system-wide administrative costs. 

Second, the use of prior authorization — the requirement to obtain upfront approval for certain drugs, tests, and procedures — should be overhauled. Prior authorization has become a defining frustration of American health care, with 34 percent of insured adults calling it their biggest burden beyond cost. The current system embeds a conflict of interest: insurers earn more when they deny care. It should be replaced with independent clinical bodies that have no financial stake in denial decisions and would review only a narrow list of high-abuse services. 

Finally, policymakers should create a “Health Care Sludge Unit” charged with monitoring and rooting out needless friction throughout the health care experience. One issue the Sludge Unit should take on: requiring that provider directories be accurate and up to date, with fines when they fall short. A 2024 ProPublica investigation found widespread “ghost” listings — providers shown as in-network who don’t actually take the insurance or aren’t accepting patients. In New York, a secret shopper survey by the Attorney General’s office found that 86 percent of listed mental health providers were unreachable, out-of-network, or closed to new patients. The Unit should also address the law that forces contact lens wearers back to the optometrist every year for a new prescription. Extending the minimum to two years, as states like New Jersey and Minnesota already do, would spare millions of Americans a recurring cost and the time it takes to sit for an exam. 

Stop the Spam

Americans receive over four billion scam and illegal marketing calls each month — more than 130 million a day. Spam texts are surging too, with nearly 20 billion messages sent each month. Polling by Data for Progress found that 68% of Americans consider spam calls and texts "very frustrating," and almost hald said they'd be willing to pay just to make them stop.

We can start by modernizing our foundational laws. In Facebook v. Duguid, the Supreme Court gutted the Telephone Consumer Protection Act — the law meant to shield consumers from unwanted calls and texts — leaving the newest and most prolific robocalling systems largely unregulated. Congress should update the law's definition to cover any system that automatically contacts stored numbers without real human involvement in each message.

Congress should also close the "lead generator loophole," which allows third-party marketers to collect your contact information and sell it to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of businesses. Simply entering your phone number on a single website can legally trigger a cascade of calls and texts from companies you've never heard of. Requiring companies to obtain clear, one-to-one permission before making contact would significantly reduce unwanted communications.

Then there's the plague of political fundraising texts. Policymakers should close the loophole that allows "peer-to-peer" texting platforms — often used by political campaigns — to send billions of unsolicited messages. The Facebook v. Duguid decision gave these platforms a legal escape hatch from basic consent rules. In practice, this means campaigns can blast mass texts to huge lists of voters without permission, simply by having a human press “send” on each message to skirt rules meant to stop spam. 

Beyond legislation, the President should issue an executive order directing agencies to deploy all available resources against robocalls and spam texts. Of the more than 1,000 executive orders issued over the past two decades, not one has taken on this issue. Such an order would direct the Federal Communications Commission to move more quickly against carriers transmitting illegal traffic — if a carrier is notified that it's routing scam calls and doesn't stop, it should be immediately blocked from the U.S. network.

Customer Service Run-Arounds and Doom Loops

Terrible customer service has become an increasingly familiar feature of modern life. Forrester’s CX IndexTM found that customer experience quality was the lowest on record. The aptly named Consumer Rage Survey found that 74 percent of customers reported a product or service problem in the past year — more than double the rate in 1976.

Many of these frustrations are the result of deliberate corporate policy. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) alleged that Comerica Bank adopted a “Heavy Queue” policy, intentionally dropping calls before customers could reach a representative. A judge found that SiriusXM forced customers to endure as many as seven retention offers before being allowed to cancel their subscriptions. The Trump administration has made things worse, dropping enforcement actions and withdrawing from settlements with bad actors that would have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers.

Federal law should require “click-to-cancel” rules that make it as easy to end a subscription as it is to sign up, notification when plans convert from a free trial to a paid subscription or renewal, and reminders and automatic pauses for inactive users. These common-sense rules would end the deliberate friction that companies build into what should be straightforward cancellation processes.

Federal agencies should also require that companies in regulated industries offer a clear escape from automated phone menus and restore the once-common “press zero to speak to a live agent” option. They could also require limits on average wait times–so that the cable company or airline has to either pick up your call quickly, or call you back at a time convenient for you.

And finally, the federal government should consider creating a centralized portal for grievances — a complaints.gov — where Americans can get a real response when companies in government-regulated industries screw them over. Modeled on the CFPB's complaint database, which has delivered real money to consumers who would otherwise have gotten the runaround, a government-wide version would mean that whether your grievance is with your airline, your bank, or your internet provider, you have somewhere to go that companies are required to take seriously.

Kill the Junk Fees

Then there’s the scourge of junk fees, those surprise add-ons and surcharges that seem to make their way onto every bill. An analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that 10 specific junk fees alone amount to $90 billion per year, or more than $650 per household. Data for Progress polling found that 87% of voters said surprise fees were at least “a little frustrating,” with 56% calling them “very frustrating.”

The Biden administration made real progress, much of which the Trump administration has reversed. A landmark FTC rule required all-in, up-front pricing for hotel rooms and event tickets, ending the practice of inserting surprise service and resort fees at checkout. The CFPB cracked down on excessive overdraft fees, protecting Americans from being charged up to $35 for small purchases that briefly overdrew their accounts. Despite the popularity of these measures, with support from two-thirds of Republicans and virtually all Democrats, Trump and congressional Republicans repealed the overdraft rule, and the threat of Republican action forced the FTC to narrow the final all-in, up-front pricing rule to selected industries. 

The next step is extending these principles across the economy. Nonrefundable rental application fees are a prime target: prospective renters routinely pay up to $50 or more per application, and in competitive markets, the cost of simply trying to find housing can reach hundreds of dollars. Policymakers should cap these fees at a modest rate reflective of landlords' costs. The FTC should also cap or ban excessive add-on fees, such as the common practice of charging $10 to $15 per day to add a second authorized driver to a rental car. These fees greatly exceed any administrative costs to the company and can add $100 or more to the cost of a family vacation.

Conclusion:

The Annoyance Economy isn’t an abstract concept but a daily reality of wasted time and drained wallets — to the tune of more than $165 billion per year. The hassles and costs add to the burdens on families already stretched by the high costs of housing, child care, and other necessities. 

The market isn’t solving the problem. Many industries are highly concentrated with a small number of dominant players. That means fewer businesses competing for customers by offering better service and more companies able to pad their profits by layering costs on captive customers. Federal oversight has weakened and enforcement has lagged. Artificial intelligence is already supercharging the tactics companies use to extract time and money from consumers.

The consequences of the government standing by and enabling the Annoyance Economy extend beyond wasted time and money. When money and influence lead Washington to turn a blind eye while corporations grind simple interactions into fraught ordeals, it breeds cynicism and disengagement. If government can remove even a few of those obstacles, make it easier to fix a billing error, secure a refund, or cancel a subscription, it can show Americans that someone is paying attention and begin the long process of rebuilding public trust. 

Today, the problems our nation faces sometimes feel impossibly big. We need big ideas to address them. But we should also go back to basics: an agenda to unwind the Annoyance Economy is straightforward, universal, and instantly relatable. It doesn’t require complicated eligibility rules or phase-ins; it simply makes daily life less aggravating. And it would deliver something too often missing in politics today: visible, everyday improvements in people’s lives.

By: Neale Mahoney, Trione Director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the TG Wijaya Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and Chad Maisel, Executive Director of Project 2029. They previously wrote on this subject in “Taking on the Annoyance Economy,” published by the Groundwork Collaborative.