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corporate greed
Meet the $165 Billion 'Annoyance Economy' That Drives You Nuts—and Sucks Us Dry—All Year Long
"While seemingly minor, these little annoyances add up."
Feb 09, 2026
Corporate profits in the US have surged in recent decades, with subscription-based businesses reporting some of the biggest revenue growth as more Americans use streaming services and sign up for "subscribe and save" models in a quest for ease and convenience.
While promising consumers that subscribing to a service will save them money and time, subscription-based businesses have made canceling the services increasingly difficult, contributing to Americans spending 60% longer on the phone with customer service lines than they did two decades ago.
And although corporations hardly need the extra money, making cancellations more arduous for customers can boost their revenue by anywhere from 14% to over 200%, according to the think tank Groundwork Collaborative, which released a report Monday on what it calls "the annoyance economy."
The labyrinthine processes that millions of Americans face each year when they try to cancel subscription services is just one part of the annoyance economy, according to Groundwork, which detailed the seemingly endless time, money, and patience people spend "just trying to get basic things done"—as well as efforts by corporations and the Trump administration to make sure it stays that way.
While millions are struggling with the rising costs of groceries, healthcare, housing, childcare, and just about everything else, the report explains how—thanks to corporate greed and a White House intent on enabling it—Americans are also shelling out at least $165 billion per year in fees as well as lost time.
In addition to cancellation processes, the annoyance economy includes the $90 billion people across the US spend every year on junk fees when they buy concert tickets, make hotel reservations, and order food delivery; rental application fees that keep people from even attempting to move to new housing that could put them closer to work or school; and administrative healthcare tasks like obtaining coverage information and resolving questions about premiums and deductibles.
"While seemingly minor, these little annoyances add up," wrote Groundwork policy fellow Chad Maisel and Stanford University economist Neale Mahoney, the authors of the report, who cited a 2019 survey that found 1 in 4 respondents delayed getting healthcare or avoided it altogether specifically because of the administrative tasks they had to complete in order to get an appointment and make sure it was covered.
"All told, American workers collectively spend about $21.6-billion-worth of time each year dealing with healthcare administration, between calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork, according to a recent analysis."
Another new poll from Data for Progress found that nearly 80% of Americans reported "at least a little frustration" when coordinating their healthcare and filling out health insurance paperwork.
"All told, American workers collectively spend about $21.6-billion-worth of time each year dealing with healthcare administration, between calls, claims, explanations, and paperwork," reads the report, citing another recent analysis. "Polling confirms this: More than 1 in 3 Americans report dealing with health insurance headaches more than 20 times per year."
With frustration over health insurance companies' practices increasingly common, reads the report, "policymakers are missing important opportunities to take on a handful of egregious and particularly annoying practices."
Lawmakers could require insurance companies to make it easy for patients to fill out and submit claims online—instead of downloading, printing, and physically mailing claim forms with itemized receipts as Cigna requires patients to do.
Congress could also create a "healthcare sludge unit" to monitor and root out "needless friction throughout the healthcare experience."
Such a project could leverage tools "like 'blind shopper' experiments, public feedback lines, and direct engagement with industry to surface and fix barriers that waste patients’ time and erode trust."
The report also takes on the spam texts and calls that have become all-to-familiar to anyone with a cellphone.
"Text messaging, once reserved for conversation with friends and family, now resembles our email spam folders, dominated by unsolicited offers from companies, politicians, and fraudsters," wrote Maisel and Mahoney, who shared that on the day they wrote about spam in the report, "one of us received five spam calls, a text from 'Victoria' offering a $500-a-day job, and two breathless fundraising messages from political candidates we’ve never supported—or even heard of."
Those spam communications were some of the more than 130 million scam and illegal marketing calls Americans receive each day and the nearly 20 billion texts that were sent each month over the past year—leading "virtually all respondents" to Data for Progress' poll to report that the calls and texts are at least "a little frustrating" and 68% call them "very frustrating."
State and federal lawmakers could and should take action against spam calls and texts, said Maisel and Mahoney. Congress should modernize the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which was passed in 1991—well before companies began inundating Americans' inboxes with the newest robocalling and texting software.
"If a platform automatically dials from a stored list of numbers, it’s now exempt from the TCPA’s rules," reads the report. "The result: far more robocall and spam text operations can legally target people without their consent. Congress should update the definition of autodialer to include any callers and texters who automatically contact stored numbers, unless there’s real human involvement in sending each message."
Former President Joe Biden's Federal Communications Commission tried to close the "lead generator loophole,” which allows third-party marketers to collect people's contact information and sell it to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of businesses, but companies sued over the FCC's action and won in court.
President Donald Trump could issue an executive order directing federal agencies "to leverage all available resources and authorities to end robocalls and spam texts once and for all," said Maisel and Mahoney.
But the authors noted that the Trump administration's mass layoffs across the government would make enforcement more difficult.
"The Department of Justice also needs to prioritize enforcement against bad actors," they wrote. "While the FCC can levy fines for violations, it cannot pursue their collection without the DOJ. Of the eight robocalling forfeiture orders referred by the FCC, the DOJ has pursued only two for collection."
In the case of the hoops consumers are made to jump through in order to cancel subscriptions and services, the report emphasizes that the federal government has made significant inroads before to help the public.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) intervened in 2023 and stopped Toyota Motor Credit from continuing its practice of routing all consumer calls through a hotline "where representatives were instructed to keep promoting products until a consumer asked to cancel three times, at which point they were told cancellation was only possible by submitting a written request."
Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was lauded by consumer advocates for its click-to-cancel rule in 2024, requiring sellers to “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up."
But Trump's FTC last year delayed implementation of the rule after industry groups said that "it would take a substantial amount of time to come into compliance.” A federal appeals court then effectively killed the rule altogether.
While the fees that gradually trickle out of Americans' bank accounts into the annoyance economy are often small individually, the report emphasizes that they add up—and the consequences of these business practices and the government's failure to stop them "extend beyond wasted time and money."
"When life is reduced to jumping through an endless series of hoops—just to fix a billing error, secure a refund, or cancel a subscription—it breeds cynicism and disengagement," reads the report. "If the government can remove even a few of those obstacles, we can show the American people that someone is paying attention and begin the long process of rebuilding public trust."
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Tax the Rich, Say Mamdani, Sanders, and NYC Inauguration Crowd
"For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it," said the new mayor. "Our City Hall will change that."
Jan 01, 2026
"Tax the rich. Tax the rich. Tax the rich."
The chants broke out at City Hall in New York on Thursday as US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) addressed the crowd before swearing in Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who campaigned on a platform that prioritized NYC's working class.
"Demanding that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes is not radical. It is exactly the right thing to do," declared Sanders—who endorsed Mamdani even before his June primary victory over former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and "the billionaire-backed status quo."
The 34-year-old mayor on Thursday described Brooklyn-born Sanders—50 years his senior—as "the man whose leadership I seek most to emulate, who I am so grateful to be sworn in by today."
During the afternoon inauguration ceremony—which followed an early morning swearing-in at the abandoned subway station beneath City Hall—Mamdani also called for taxing the rich as he reiterated the agenda that secured him over 1.1 million votes in November.
"Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try," he said. "To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers' lives."
"Here, where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home," Mamdani vowed. "Not only will we make it possible for every New Yorker to afford a life they love once again, we will overcome the isolation that too many feel, and connect the people of this city to one another."
The mayor said that "the cost of childcare will no longer discourage young adults from starting a family, because we will deliver universal childcare for the many by taxing the wealthiest few. Those in rent-stabilized homes will no longer dread the latest rent hike, because we will freeze the rent."
"Getting on a bus without worrying about a fare hike or whether you'll be late to your destination will no longer be deemed a small miracle, because we will make buses fast and free," he continued. "These policies are not simply about the costs we make free, but the lives we fill with freedom. For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it. Our City Hall will change that."
The ceremony also featured remarks from another early Mamdani supporter, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), as well as the swearing-in of Jumaane Williams for a third term as New York City's public advocate and Mark Levine, the new comptroller.
"New York, we have chosen courage over fear," said Ocasio-Cortez, whose district spans the Bronx and Queens. "We have chosen prosperity for the many over spoils for the few. And when the entrenched ways would rather have us dig in our feet and seek refuge in the past, we have chosen instead to turn towards making a new future for all of us."
AOC: New York City has chosen the ambitious pursuit of universal childcare, affordable rents and housing and clean and dignified public transit for all. We have chosen that over the distractions of bigotry and the barbarism of extreme income inequality
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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 1:47 PM
As NYC kicked off the new year with progressive city leadership, 2025 findings from the Bloomberg Billionaire Index sparked fresh wealth tax demands. According to the tracker, the world's 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective fortunes last year. About a quarter of that went to just eight Big Tech billionaires: Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg.
In New York, Mamdani has proposed raising the state corporate tax rate from 8.85% to 11.5% and hiking taxes for individuals who make more than $1 million a year. Achieving those goals would require cooperation from state legislators.
Mamdani acknowledged Thursday that for much of history, the response from City Hall to the question of who New York belongs to has been, "It belongs only to the wealthy and well-connected, those who never strain to capture the attention of those in power."
In the years ahead, he pledged, "City Hall will deliver an agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance, where government looks and lives like the people it represents, never flinches in the fight against corporate greed, and refuses to cower before challenges that others have deemed too complicated."
"Together, we will tell a new story of our city," the mayor said. "This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the 1%. Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor. It will be a tale of 8.5 million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe, each of them woven together."
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British Activist Blasts 'Sociopathic Greed' of Big Tech After US Judge Blocks His Detention
"I chose to take on the biggest companies in the world, to hold them accountable, to speak truth to power. There is a cost attached to that," said Imran Ahmed, one of five Europeans targeted by the Trump administration.
Dec 26, 2025
After a US judge on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump's administration from detaining one of the European anti-disinformation advocates hit with a travel ban earlier this week, Imran Ahmed suggested that he is being targeted because artificial intelligence and social media companies "are increasingly under pressure as a result of organizations like mine."
Ahmed is the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The 47-year-old Brit lives in Washington, DC with his wife and infant daughter, who are both US citizens. While the Trump administration on Tuesday also singled out Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of HateAid, and Thierry Breton, a former European commissioner who helped craft the Digital Services Act, Ahmed is reportedly the only one currently in the United States.
On Wednesday, Ahmed, who is a legal permanent resident, sued top Trump officials including US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
"Rather than disguise its retaliatory motive, the federal government was clear that Mr. Ahmed is being 'SANCTIONED' as punishment for the research and public reporting carried out by the nonprofit organization that Mr. Ahmed founded and runs," the complaint states. "In other words, Mr. Ahmed faces the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest, punitive detention, and expulsion for exercising his basic First Amendment rights."
"The government's actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny," the filing continues. "Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation—may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration."
Just a day later, Judge Vernon Broderick, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the administration from arresting or detaining Ahmed. The judge also scheduled a conference for Monday afternoon.
The US Department of State said Thursday that "the Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: The United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here."
Ahmed's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said that "the federal government can't deport a green-card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn't like what he has to say."
In the complaint and interviews published Friday, Ahmed pointed to his group's interactions with Elon Musk, a former member of the Trump and administration and the richest person on Earth. He also controls the social media platform X, which sued CCDH in 2023.
"We were sued by Elon Musk a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully; a court found that he was trying to impinge on our First Amendment rights to free speech by using law to try and silence our accountability work," Ahmed told the BBC.
Months after a federal judge in California threw out that case last year, Musk publicly declared "war" on the watchdog.
CCDH's work is being targeted by the U.S. State Department trying to sanction and deport our CEO, Imran Ahmed. This is an unconstitutional attempt to silence anyone who dares to criticize social media giants. But a federal judge has temporarily blocked his detention.More in BBC ⤵️
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— Center for Countering Digital Hate (@counterhate.com) December 26, 2025 at 4:05 PM
"What it has been about is companies that simply do not want to be held accountable and, because of the influence of big money in Washington, are corrupting the system and trying to bend it to their will, and their will is to be unable to be held accountable," Ahmed told the Guardian. "There is no other industry, that acts with such arrogance, indifference, and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people."
Ahmed explained that he spent Christmas away from his wife and daughter because of the Trump administration's track record of quickly sending targeted green-card holders far away from their families. He said: "I chose to take on the biggest companies in the world, to hold them accountable, to speak truth to power. There is a cost attached to that. My family understands that."
The British newspaper noted that when asked whether he thought UK politicians should use X, the former Labour Party adviser told the Press Association, "Politicians have to make decisions for themselves, but every time they post on X, they are putting a buck in Mr. Musk's pocket and I think they need to question their own consciences and ask themselves whether or not they think they can carry on doing that."
Ahmed also said that it was "telling that Mr. Musk was one of the first and most vociferous in celebrating the press release" about the sanctions against him and the others.
"He said it was great, and it is great, but not for the reasons that he thinks," the campaigner said. "Because what it has actually done is give a chance for the system to show that the advocacy that we do is both important and protected by the First Amendment."
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