Planet Money complains. To learn.

This is Planet Money from NPR. So, alright. I was out on maternity leave for a while, and... i don't know something about that time just made me view things in the world differently i was questioning why everything is the way that it even is contemplating the big questions like like Why in the world do stores send me so many emails? An email a day from every store I've ever bought anything from ever, why?

things like that you know so okay yeah no not the most important issues of our time but like that little pet peeve that just like oh gets you every single time you open your email i actually really need to know how bombarding us with email like this doesn't backfire on them like

Let's get to the bottom of this. And I was certain that other people at Planet Money also had little petty annoyances that once we understand them could maybe make us less bitter about it all so i told everyone come to me with your complaints vent to me what is annoying you in the world that i can help make sense of And I'm just going to say... Some of us really needed the catharsis. James.

need you have a list sure yeah okay like driving is terrible there's like traffic everywhere nobody knows how to drive everything's expensive nothing nothing's cheap nothing's cheap mary child oh you know i wish that we had

Peace on Earth. We're not interested in the big ones. We want petty. Okay, right here. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Lexi Horowitz-Gazi. What's your beef? You got some beef. Okay, my beef is... Oh, I'm so sorry, sir. We don't do free refills. And then you have to buy an entire... three to six dollar cup of coffee. outrageous. Alex Goldmark, climbing my knees, boss boss. Yeah, it was about my microwave. Okay. Okay.

The short version is my microwave broke. I'm now mad at like all appliance designers. I am sad for skilled labor in the U.S. Like this took me on a journey. I think I haven't gotten a single thing fixed. Since like 1999. I think I just go like. Buy a new product. Okay. Well here's what I'm thinking. I don't want to live in that world. I want to live in a world. Where we can like. Fix. Yes. Hello and welcome to Planet Money Complaining. I'm Sarah Gonzalez and we are complaining for the same time.

We can tackle world peace, but there was a theme to some of our complaints. are annoyed.

So we are going to try to understand the other side. The annoyers. Today on the show, why appliance companies maybe don't want us to repair things. The very sad thing about satisfaction like customer satisfaction that could keep cafes from giving you that little top off and the bane of my existence 70% off sale email why do stores keep sending them As US trade with China exploded, American manufacturing shriveled.

And workers struggled. They saw their communities decline, and then the world changed very rapidly around them while they kind of aged into place. Data doesn't speak in words, but that's a very dramatic story. In a recent Planet Money bonus episode, we hear from the economists who helped tell that story and changed the way economics thinks about the costs of free trade. To hear it, sign up for NPR+. Just go to plus.npr.org. So, can I just...

Can I like vent to you for a little bit? Yes. I know I just met you. I called up Cynthia Price to give her my genius idea that stores should send less emails because Cynthia works. with stores that send these emails. Okay, so I get an email a day from It seems like every store I have ever interacted with, ever.

in any way shape or form and i feel like like something's not working like what could these brands be thinking like they are conditioning me to not open their emails ever because it's too many emails they're conditioning me to just click click click click click delete and also they're kind of making me uh hate them a little bit can i ask you some questions i'm just curious Cynthia is an email marketing expert at an email marketing company called Litmus.

For some reason, Cynthia loves getting store emails. It's a browsing opportunity for me. It's a break from my day. I will say I do enjoy clicking and deleting. I'm an inbox zero girl. I was just about to ask you if you were an inbox zero person. I mean, that is part of the difference between me and you. If you, like me, think that email has gotten out of control, We are right. cynthia says stores send more emails than ever okay if i open my gmail right now it's like

Chase, Massage Envy, Thrive Market, Chase, Carters, Carters, Carters, Carters. Why is Carters appealing you so much? Carter's emails me four times a day every single day, Cynthia. What is that? Carter's is a kid's clothing store. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a lot. who buys things from an email that they get.

A lot of people. Yeah, of course, they're sending emails because it worked. But how? How could this possibly work? It's like a great form of marketing. It is. There are very few tactics that you can use as effectively, as immediately as email. We're out of luck, guys. Of all the forms of marketing, email has one of the highest returns on investment. We know this because stores can usually see when we open their emails, so there's data.

Here's how it all plays out. Let's say you're a store with 100,000 people on your email list and you send out an email that's like, spring deals are in bloom or... 70% off your winter faves now something like 20 to 40% of people will open that email like see it That doesn't mean they're actually clicking through to your store's website, though, to see any of your spring deals on a good day. 3% of those people total. are going to click on your email.

That's not to mention the people that are going to buy from it. Yeah, just like 3,000 of the 100,000 people you emailed are going to click through to your store. And even fewer are actually going to buy something. Not that many people fight. But some do. And that's worth it. For every $1 spent on email marketing, there is a $42 to $48 return on investment for the store. That's the average. Yep. And that's a real stat. It's a real stat. A 4,000% return on investment. Yeah.

I mean, it is incredibly effective. Part of that is just that email is cheap, right? You're paying for someone to write an email, maybe make it pretty. But the bigger part is that email has such a high return on investment because... You... invited these stores into your inbox.

You have actually raised your hand and said, yeah, send me promotional emails in some way, shape or form. You at some point liked what they were selling or even bought something. That's how you ended up on their email list. So it's just more likely that you will buy something again. which just is like an entirely different world to play in as a marketer than it would be if I was putting up a billboard on the highway or just trying to target everyone on Instagram who is

between the ages of 20 and 25. I mean, those are way different scenarios. It's expensive to get your ad in front of people online who might not even like what you're selling. I'm sure Instagram marketing is also relentless and it feels like all social media just knows everything about our wants and likes and our buying patterns. but Cynthia says email marketing is still usually more effective because they just know that we want their content.

But do we, though? No. I just sign up because when you buy something online, you have to put your email if you want the receipt. Yeah. You just wanted the transactional emails that say, like, where's my shipping? That's all I want for every store. Alright, Cynthia says... Some brands, some stores, they do do email marketing very well. Like they have cult followings. There's a snowboarding gear company that sends out emails when there's fresh snow on the mountains. Targeted.

to your location like the closest mountain to you with fresh snow

That seems useful. Inundating you with emails? Cynthia says, I was right. It is risky. What they're training you to do is block them out. And you're going to unsubscribe because you're so annoyed by it. Or you will completely learn to just completely tune them out. And you won't even look at what the subject line says at all. You probably are already there. I'm there.

And every couple of months I will do like a mass unsubscribe purge, which Cynthia says is kind of like the biggest F in marketing land. Like you had me and you blew it. You lost me. But it doesn't really matter because someone else will like it. So some stores... don't really care if they lose me and maybe even damage their reputation with me. I have to wake up every single morning to 30 marketing emails just because someone else out there is gonna buy something.

Who else has to get something off their chest? I know I have things to complain about but... married child. We should all be on the same time zone. Which would mean like nighttime is daytime for some people. That would mean that perhaps you and I wake up at what is called 10 p.m. and we go to work and the sun is out and it's shining. I'm just gonna

Watch this one right away. You don't want to go to work at 10 p.m. and it's daylight outside. It's just called 10 p.m. What do you care what it's called? A.M. p.m.? That's just made up. You were a baby when you learned that. It doesn't matter. I don't know. Countries of the world. Consider it. and cafes of the world, consider Alexi Horowitz-Gazi's next girl.

basically alexi hates it when coffee shops charge him for refills it just like taints the whole cozy coffee shop experience for him makes him not want to even go back At least give him a discounted refill. He's a reasonable guy. Some places, they'll say give me a buck. How about a neck?

That's pretty chill. And then it makes you want to be like, here's an extra dollar in the tip jar. Yeah, exactly. We are on the same team. I feel like we're on the opposite team when they're charging me for the... this is just like regular coffee not like the fancy that's not like a mocha truck or something it's just like straight up straight up like coffee black cup of coffee No, no adulterants. Oh, oh, no sugar, no cream, no sugar, no nothing. The gesture of a free little top off when he's

Setting up shop at a cafe, ordering snacks, spending money would go a long way for Alexei. He says it would make him so loyal. He'd be like the best repeat customer. so he wants to know why so many coffee shops don't see the benefits of offering customers a free refill on like a small 12 ounce Can I ask you, do they make a 16 ounce? cup yeah i could buy the larger cup isn't that just like the free refill no look there's a there's a problem with that it gets cold way too fast

It gets cold. It's just a mood thing. It's just a mood thing. It's just the tiniest signal I get about what kind of business this is. For Alexi, it's less about the money or even what... practical it's more about how all of this makes him feel in a coffee shop so I called up a sort of expert.

in how we experience things. I study both experiences that cost something as well as experiences that don't cost something. So I'm really interested in how paying attention to certain things gives us more or less enjoyment. so yes enjoyment kristin deal studies joy technically satisfaction at the university of southern california like the joy we get out of experiences she teaches consumer behavior among other things and i'm just gonna say it kristen

It's very joyful. I'm generally a happy person, I think. And my advisor told me that people either study what they're good at or what they're bad at. Okay, I think this is the perfect match. I think I have some insights there. much more complicated question than you would think it is. I agree. First of all, Kristen says, we can blame diners for the expectation of free drinks.

right because they're the ones who kind of suggested to us that that's something normative like the norm for a diner maybe still like i walk around with this like The coffee pot that has the coffee burned on the bottom, right? Yeah, giant or coffee. But, you know, they also tend not to be the ones who are profit maximization entities.

sorry but a coffee shop is not a diner they don't particularly want you to linger taking up seats maybe for hours with just your five dollar coffee so even if a free refill would make alexi happy The incremental benefit of him being a little bit happier with this is probably not worth their cause. Even for like a little top off. Yeah, it's just a little top off to you, but times 24-7.

it's still an expense coffee shops are just gonna do what makes them the most profit right that's why they don't do this our extra happiness isn't worth it the man. So if Alexei is gonna be happy in a coffee shop, he's gonna need to charm the workers. Get the rogue employee that's like, I'm supposed to charge you for this. like I'm not gonna gonna charge you and then you're like yes we're in this together okay so that is actually research

There's research on how satisfying good surprises actually make us. That works the first time, but then the next time, she was like, okay, where's the rogue employee? Turns out customer happiness is not as valuable as you might think it is. The problem for companies is that when they give things out for free as a surprise,

We come to expect it the next time. And we are not happy if we don't get it. Yeah, and then you're like, is Jack working today? Is Jack here? Because he's normally the guy who gives me my... Kristen says... There's actually a sad ending to anything that brings us satisfaction. We adapt to that and we get accustomed to that.

Even if the rogue employee always reliably gave us the rogue free refill, or even if it wasn't rogue at all, if it was company policy like Alexi wants it to be, they could do the exact same thing that made us happy last time. but we're just not as happy that is sad yeah i think that's sad but it's called hedonic adaptation hedonic adaptation or the hedonic treadmill the theory behind this is basically that

You don't just go up, up, up in happiness forever. For instance, as you make money and you can buy more and more things, your expectations also rise. This seems like a good reason for a coffee shop to not get free refills because they're like, whatever, you're just gonna get mad at us about something later on anyways. It definitely will. give your colleague a bigger bump the first time than the fifth time. No question asked. Yeah.

yeah okay i'm gonna tell him just suck it up because we're just gonna be dissatisfied eventually anyway because we're terrible people because people are terrible and the upside that got us out of the caves right if we had been happy in the caves we wouldn't have ventured out. Yes, she did just say on the upside, dissatisfaction is why we came out of the caves. By the way, Alexi might be onto something here, because Starbucks, of all coffee shops, is bringing back some free refills. Which...

Very exciting now. We know the excitement will fade. After the break things these days. Yes! Umbrellas are the worst! A quick complaint from Kenny Mo. too much room, pour water on other people. An umbrella? negative consumption externalities is how we You benefit, I'm happy. But you're making my when you use the umbrella. So can we just stop- all right alex goldmark planet money's executive producer his microwave broke and he got ranty and just like the perfect amount of

concerned about the future of fixing things. I go to use the microwave and it just doesn't work. It doesn't turn on. The little digital clock doesn't tell you the time.

i've got one of the ones that goes over the stove the light underneath it doesn't work nothing and it seems pretty pretty obvious to me that like a fuse blue like that's just the way it broke right alex wants to fix the fuse himself even though you apparently definitely should not try to do this it can be very very dangerous but there's no like fuse panel on the microwave no little door to open where he can swap it out and he's like oh come on why would you bury the fuse

so i'm being a little dramatic with my fuse panel but it's a stand-in for why don't we design things for repair like a appliance that is in your house made out of lots of metals and like like toxic parts he doesn't want to throw it out i want to try to like it's just a thing i believe in and i'm so sure it's a fuse but with no fuse panel it's more complicated than alex can handle and he calls up repair people and most of them are like we don't we don't repair mic

Like they're too small. Like it's too little. It's not even worth it. But the manufacturer, they have their official repair people, right? So he calls them up. And they're like, cool, we will send somebody. It will be $179 for them to show up. Then it will be $200 an hour billed every six minutes in increments as they do the repair. the parts. It was going to cost Alex $981 to fix his broken microwave and just...

$793 to buy a new one, have someone deliver it, and install it. Where's the incentive to fix things? Sarah, there's a saying in our business. Our number one competitor is the price of a new appliance. Oh, this is Stuart Cowder with the repair company, Mr. Appliance. Wait, are you, are you Mr. Appliance? I'm Mr. Appliance, New York City. I own the New York City franchises. Stewart has repair people driving to people's homes all over the city, and he has his own complaints about that.

Expensive parking. Tolls. Congestion pricing. A ridiculous thing. Stuart, Mr. Appliance, is very proudly non-woke, as he says. Yes, very good. Very proud of his Queens, New York accent. Oh, of course. It was my nickname in college. What was your nickname in college? Queen? Queens. Oh, that is such a great nickname. And Stuart is based in Manhattan, where Alex's broken microwave was and where Alex got his decently expensive repair quote. Yeah, $200 an hour, I think, is the...

Going right? Does that seem right? Seems cheap to me. Oh. Stuart asks me a bunch of questions about alex's microwave which i'm gonna let alex take first of all how old is the microwave five years how much did you pay for the microwave four hundred dollars okay and what brand is it bosch Knowing the brand is very important. And the reason for that is some brands make their units easier to repair than others. Yes, Stuart says several manufacturers make products.

that are not meant to be repaired at all. They make the repair difficult. They put the replacement parts in difficult spots. They make it time-consuming, hard to get to, hard to take apart. They just, they make it difficult as opposed to other companies that make repairs very easy. This is what I'm talking about. It's like some appliances, even if you're like the handiest handy person. The manufacturer doesn't want it.

all right some manufacturers put parts in difficult to reach places because they want you to rely on them for repairs there's actually a whole right to repair movement of people saying We shouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer. We should have access to the tools and information we need to repair the things that we have bought. Some states have laws that give people the right to repair.

but then other brands just actually make it impossible for anyone to repair like if the part breaks they do not make the replacement part it doesn't exist so you have no option you have to throw the appliance out and buy a new If you ask Stuart, manufacturers do this because they don't really make any money when you repair things. They make money when you buy a new appliance.

but it's not just that sometimes brands are just making things in the cheapest way possible like one brand makes a part out of 100 steel when another one makes it out of 100 plastic so it's just not meant to last that long on the bright side means that there are cheap appliances available everyone can have that Alex's Microwave is apparently not one of those brands. No, Snow Bunch is actually, uh, their products are meant to be repaired, and that doesn't mean it's cost-effective to repair them.

But they're meant to be repaired. And that means Bosch will make parts for them for many years. Yeah, just because it's designed to be repaired does not mean that it will make sense financially to repair it. a repair person has to come to you, right? It's a very high-skilled trait. It takes a long time to learn it.

And you're not just learning how to fix one appliance, you're learning how to fix all appliances. If you have to know how to fix a microwave, you have to also know how to fix a dishwasher and a washing machine, stoves, which mean you need to know... plumbing electrical there could be gas leaks pretty heavy lifting a refrigerator right and this was alex's point at the very beginning of the show that the high cost of repair makes him sad for the future of this skilled labor in the U.S.

He wants to be able to use that labor, but when it becomes so expensive it's like well yeah just buy the other one that's just the way of the industry so and you guys try to like oh let's bring down our prices but like you're just your stock you you can't bring them down for us it costs And sometimes this is nothing you can do. The repair is more expensive than the appliance. A lot of times the customer still repairs it because

It matches the kitchen. It has custom cabinetry. The new one is different. It's a different size. They have to call a carpenter. So your bread and butter is kind of like... People with, like, a fancy modern kitchen. High-end. Yeah. With all the high-end appliances. If it was a $500 microwave, we wouldn't even come out. We'd tell you to go buy a new one. The repair market? It's a higher-end market.

By the way, Alex did not buy a new microwave. A repair person came to him and actually told him exactly what the problem was and where he could go on YouTube to fix it himself. Which again... Oh, you should not do. Never. What about, like, if your own microwave breaks? Would you know how to fix your own microwave? I wouldn't even try. I'm going to tell my boss that. So those are our gripes. And didn't it feel good? Complaining catharsis.

well apparently recent research has shown that venting and letting it all out can actually make you more riled up more stressed out venting may not actually be good unless the person you're venting to Broaden your perspective. See the other side. We did! Right?

This is a very... Okay, this is... I'm going to sound ridiculous. Erica Barris. I cannot stand a little... free libraries they are actual libraries they are called libraries Erica this is a genius grievance This episode of Planet Money was produced James Need and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact check Thank you. We are. Thanks for listening to us, Ben.