Here’s the problem with my decision to let Nabisco off the hook: I assumed they already knew. Surely someone else had complained about the package. Surely someone somewhere inside the vast Nabisco empire had attempted to reseal a package of Fig Newtons, discovered that the sticky little flap had roughly the adhesive power of a Post-it note found at the bottom of a swimming pool, and raised the alarm.
This happened to me recently. And when I say recently, I mean earlier this week. See, that’s purposely vague so that no matter when you read this, you’ll feel it’s happened at that point. Clever, right? Well, not really, because I just gave it away. Anyway, I recently went to Walmart, where I do my weekly groceries because it’s cheaper than Safeway. I have a ritual when I shop at Walmart or anywhere else: I pick a shopping cart, roll it around a bit, and make sure there are no squeaks, rattling wheels, hitches, bumps, or weird sounds that would ruin my shopping experience. On this particular day, the carts were a mess. Cart after cart that I pulled from the line was squeaky or rumbly, and I just couldn’t find the perfect cart. Finally, after, no joke, ten minutes of cart testing, I found one I thought was good. I dropped my reusable bags into its belly and off I went. However, I had made it into the produce section when the cart started to squeak. I immediately abandoned the cart, grabbed my bags, and went back to the foyer to get a new cart. Again, testing and listening, I found one. Bags in, off I go.
I got into the produce section again when a Walmart employee approached me; behind him, I could see a police officer doing his best menacing stare as he stood next to a table of horned melons. The Walmart employee, a heavyset guy with a beard that seemed to be applying for statehood, named Tim, asked me to follow him. I did. He, the officer, and I entered a room with Asset Protection on the door. Inside, two women sat in front of monitors, using joysticks to focus on people and areas of the store. Tim said, “May I see your bags, sir?” I said, “Sure,” and handed him my five reusable bags. He took the bags over to a table; the officer stared at me. After a moment, Tim returned and assessed the situation: “The bags are empty.” The officer looked at him and then quickly at me. His gaze ran up and down my body, looking for any lumps or bulges that would give away all the items I had stolen. There were none. Tim and the officer stepped away and conferred. After a moment, I heard Tim say, “We could just ask.” They returned to me. The officer looked at me and said, “What’s the deal with the shopping carts?”
Here’s the weird thing: if we want to pick just one. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I hadn’t even begun my shopping; I was still in the process of giving tomatoes a squeeze when I was pulled in. Still, despite doing nothing wrong, I was anxious about explaining my shopping cart ritual. I knew that it was going to be too weird to be believed. Instead of taking a breath and saying, “I’m very particular about my shopping carts,” and letting that land, I stammered, shifted my feet, shoved my hands into my pockets, and started to sweat. All of these actions were like dropping a moving ball of catnip in front of a Maine Coon cat; the officer perked up, stepped closer, and eyed me. I stared back. And then, I let go with a complaint.
“Look, it’s not my fault. I like a shopping cart that runs smoothly while I’m here, no squeaks or rumbling, no shaky wheel, no pull to one side or the other. Is that asking too much?” I actually asked; I didn’t say it rhetorically. I asked the question and let it hang in the air. Tim looked at the officer; the officer looked at the ladies at their monitors. No one said a word. I pounced. “That’s what I thought,” I said apropos of nothing. “Well maybe, just maybe, customer service should involve keeping your shopping carts in good working order. Did you hear that? I said good working order. People like a cart that responds; that’s yar, and is silent when they shop. Your carts feel designed to be noisy and fulsome. So, is it wrong for me to take the time to select the perfect cart so that I enjoy my shopping experience? You know, prices are up, it’s barely affordable in here, and I need to grab on to anything that’s going to make this task as simple and pleasant as possible. You’re not helping. You’re making it harder, and I personally do not appreciate that.”
Silence.
“Yar?” the officer said. I nodded. “Light at the helm, agile, easy to handle,” I told him, and he nodded, showing his appreciation for the term. “So that’s the deal with carts,” I continued, “and if Walmart took some pride, some care with their carts, maybe I wouldn’t have to spend time rolling them around the foyer like some deranged physicist if you maintained the damn things. If you truly cared about the quality of experience your customers have.” Again, silence. Then Tim said he was sorry, that he’d mention the problem to his managers, and he would look into it. Then the officer said I was free to go.
Both Tim and the officer followed me out of the room and into the store, where I informed them that someone had taken the cart I had put so much effort into picking. Tim, very kindly, helped me find a new cart; he even remarked on how difficult it was to find one that wasn’t squeaky or shaky. “Now you know,” I said and moved into the produce section to buy my weekly groceries.
Oh The Joy
I was worried that my shopping cart ritual would cause the police to put a psychiatric hold on me and then a disgruntled, chain-smoking social worker would have me locked up for observation for years. That didn’t happen, but something else did. Once I decided to speak and the words poured out, I realized that I had been harboring this complaint for a long time. Not only Walmart, but Safeway, Stop ‘n Shop, Wegmans, and even the Piggly Wiggly had all let me down when I came to cart maintenance. I had been holding this complaint in for years, and it finally came out, and when it did … OH MY GOODNESS, what joy!
Allow me to explain. I was raised to never complain. Accept what is there and live with it. You don’t know what a clerk or a cashier is dealing with, so if they are short with you or a little rude, don’t complain, don’t make things worse for them, just button your lip and move along. I was taught that, and I have lived by it until now. But when I was pressed and unleashed my shopping cart screed, I felt great. I felt free. All the years of seeking a good cart, finding none, dealing with the squeaky wheels, the shaking cart, the rumbling noises had finally been given voice, and that voice was angry. I allowed anger to have the day and, frankly, anger won.
That night, I was at home, and I was on a rampage. I stalked around my apartment, looking at things that have bothered me all my life, that I never complained about, and suddenly thought about writing letters. Lots and lots of letters. The top of my Fig Newtons package that you peel away and is supposed to reseal, keeping the figgy gems fresh and soft. A LIE! After years of dealing with half a container of hard-as-rock Fig Newtons, I had had enough, and I sat down to write a serious complaint to Nabisco. I would complain about how the packaging had ruined the Newtons for me. A cookie that I have loved since childhood at my Grandma’s house, eating Fig Newtons and drinking cold Coke out of a glass bottle—that memory RUINED!
I finished the email and danced around my apartment like Rocky when he ran the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, arms raised, a bounce in my step; I was the conquering hero. Sadly, the conquering hero was derailed because I didn’t have an address to send my oh-so-well-crafted complaint to. I took that in stride, made a cup of tea, had a long hot bath, and later, sitting in my cozy robe, sipping Sleepy Time tea, I thought, ah, why bother? They don’t care; what good would my email do? So my rage abated, and I told myself, I’m sure someone has said something, and if it were important enough, they would have fixed it. And that was that. I returned to my ways of not complaining and woke the next morning feeling just fine about the whole thing. But should I have?
A Complaint Can Be Good
Here’s the problem with my decision to let Nabisco off the hook: I assumed they already knew. Surely someone else had complained about the package. Surely someone somewhere inside the vast Nabisco empire had attempted to reseal a package of Fig Newtons, discovered that the sticky little flap had roughly the adhesive power of a Post-it note found at the bottom of a swimming pool, and raised the alarm. There had to have been meetings. Charts. Committees. Perhaps a task force. I decided all of this must have happened because the alternative was believing that nobody knew, and that seemed impossible. But maybe they don’t know.
That’s the strange thing about being a customer. We assume companies experience their products the same way we do, but they don’t. They designed the package. They tested it. They approved it. Somewhere along the way, somebody probably watched that little flap close beautifully in a controlled environment and checked a box that said resealable. Then the product went out into the world, where people like me opened it in their kitchens, folded the flap back over the package, pressed firmly, watched it slowly peel itself open again, and eventually accepted stale Newtons as part of the human condition. Oh, the humanity!
There’s a gap there, and that gap matters. It’s the distance between the experience a company believes it created and the experience its customers are actually having. Companies can study sales numbers, conduct surveys, hold focus groups, watch conversion rates, and examine whatever other data they’ve decided tells them how things are going. All of that has value. But somewhere out there is a guy rolling shopping carts around a Walmart foyer for ten minutes because nearly every one of them sounds like farm equipment. Nobody at Walmart had to send me a questionnaire to discover that. Tim only had to come shopping cart selecting with me.
That’s what happened when he helped me find another cart. Until that moment, I was just the suspicious guy behaving strangely near the entrance. Then Tim started pulling carts out himself. Squeak. Rumble. Shake. Suddenly my weird little complaint wasn’t weird anymore. He was experiencing what I had been experiencing, and for a few minutes, the Walmart employee stopped seeing the store from Walmart’s side of the doors and saw it from mine.
That’s what a good complaint can do.
I’m not suggesting companies surrender themselves to every irritated customer who wants to deliver a twenty-minute monologue because the decorative stitching on a throw pillow has offended them. People are unreasonable. I know this because I am one of them. But complaints, especially the small recurring ones, can tell you where reality has wandered away from intention. They show you the places where something that seemed perfectly acceptable in the meeting room became annoying in the grocery aisle, the hotel room, the app, the package, or wherever your customer actually encounters you.
Maybe that’s why we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss petty complaints as petty. The complaint may be small because the problem is small. But the experience is made out of small things. And sometimes the person complaining about the squeaky wheel is simply the person who finally bothered to tell you that the damn thing squeaks.
The Gap Is the Brand
Brands spend a lot of time telling us who they are. They put enormous thought into the words they use, the promises they make, the values they claim, and the experience they want us to associate with their name. Somewhere in a conference room, people have worked very hard to decide that the company is effortless, friendly, innovative, dependable, premium, customer-focused, or whatever word survived the meeting. Then they put that word on the website, work it into the advertising, train employees around it, and send it out into the world.
The problem is that customers don’t experience the conference room. We experience the cart.
You can tell me you’re committed to making my life easier, but if your website makes me hunt for a phone number when I need help, I’ll have a different opinion. You can tell me your product is thoughtfully designed, but if I can’t figure out how to open the package without scissors and a minor injury, your thoughts and mine will diverge. You can tell me that customer service is at the heart of everything you do, but if solving a simple problem requires forty minutes on hold, I’m not going to remember the sentence on your About page. I’m going to remember the forty minutes.
That space between what a company believes it delivers and what the customer actually experiences is where the brand really lives. Not entirely, of course. A bad shopping cart isn’t going to erase decades of affection for a company, and one annoying package probably won’t send me marching through the streets demanding justice for Fig Newtons. But these moments accumulate. They become evidence. Each one quietly tells us whether the promises a company makes about itself hold up once we encounter the actual thing.
This is why complaints should make companies curious rather than defensive. A complaint points directly at the gap. Maybe the company already knows about the problem. Maybe there’s a perfectly sensible reason for it. Maybe fixing it would cost a fortune and benefit twelve people, one of whom is apparently me. Fine. But before explaining it away, somebody should at least look. Roll the cart around the foyer. Try to reseal the package. Call the customer service number. Use the website without the benefit of knowing where everything is. Experience the thing from the other side.
Because the customer doesn’t know what you meant to build. We only know what you gave us. And if there’s enough distance between those two things, eventually all the beautiful language you created to define your brand stops mattering. The experience has already defined it for you.
The Complaint You Never Heard
Which brings me back to my Fig Newtons and the email I never sent. Somewhere in the middle of my bath and Sleepy Time tea, I decided that Nabisco didn’t need to hear from me. Surely they knew. Someone else had probably complained. If the problem mattered, they would have fixed it. I managed to construct an entire customer service response on behalf of a company I had never contacted, then used that imaginary response as justification for keeping my mouth shut. That’s impressive when you think about it. But what if everyone does that?
Companies hear from the people willing to complain. They hear from the furious customer who wants a manager, the person willing to fill out the survey, or someone like me who briefly decides that the structural integrity of a cookie package demands immediate corporate attention. Those people create noise, and noise gets noticed. What companies can’t hear nearly as easily is the much larger group that encounters the same problem, mutters something under its breath, and gets on with the day. Silence is easy to mistake for satisfaction.
Maybe I never stop buying Fig Newtons. Maybe I simply accept that the second half of every package will have the texture of roofing material. From Nabisco’s perspective, everything looks fine. I’m still a customer. The package still sold. Nothing appeared in the complaint department. Yet my experience with the product is slightly worse than it should be, and the company has no idea because I decided the problem wasn’t worth mentioning. Multiply that across thousands of customers and all the tiny irritations that accompany any product or service, and there’s an enormous amount of useful information disappearing without ever reaching the people who could do something about it.
That’s why waiting for customers to complain isn’t enough. You have to go looking for the irritation. Use the thing the way they use it. Walk through the process without the advantage of already knowing how it works. Pay attention to the workaround customers have invented because something you designed isn’t doing its job. Most importantly, become interested in the moments people have simply learned to tolerate. Those may never generate an angry email, but they’re still part of the experience you’ve created.
Tim learned something about Walmart’s shopping carts because, for a few minutes, he stopped listening to me complain and started pulling carts out of the line himself. He didn’t need a survey or a report. He grabbed a cart. It squeaked. He grabbed another. It shook. The complaint became real because he experienced it.
There are probably complaints about every brand that nobody has ever made. Not because everything is wonderful, but because most of us have better things to do. We compensate, improvise, shrug, and move along. So perhaps the most valuable question a company can ask isn’t, “What are our customers complaining about?”
It’s: “What have they stopped bothering to complain about?”
The Takeaway
So, complain. I’m apparently a convert now. I’m not suggesting you spend your days demanding supervisors because your coffee arrived at 137 degrees instead of 140, or turn every minor inconvenience into a personal crusade. There are limits, and I’d like to believe I still recognize them, although the Fig Newton incident suggests I may be closer to the edge than I thought.
But I do think we’ve gotten complaints wrong, especially when it comes to brands. A complaint isn’t necessarily an accusation that somebody failed. Sometimes it’s simply a customer pointing toward a part of the experience the company can’t see from where it’s standing. You built the thing. You know how it’s supposed to work. You know why decisions were made and what compromises were necessary along the way. Your customer knows none of that. They only know what happens when they push the cart.
That makes their irritation valuable. Not sacred, not automatically correct, and certainly not an order that must immediately be obeyed, but valuable. Listen long enough, and you may discover a problem you didn’t know existed. Better yet, don’t wait for someone to become irritated enough to tell you. Get out there and experience what you’ve created from the customer’s side. Look for the little frustrations they’ve learned to work around and the inconveniences they’ve decided aren’t worth mentioning. Somewhere in those seemingly insignificant moments may be an opportunity to make the experience considerably better.
At ThoughtLab, we talk a lot about asking questions because good questions have a habit of taking you somewhere you weren’t expecting to go. Complaints can do the same thing, as long as you resist the urge to explain them away. Instead of asking why the customer doesn’t understand what you intended, ask what they’re experiencing that you haven’t noticed. And if you really want to know what your brand is like, maybe you don’t need another meeting. Go grab a cart.
