AskSlashdot: Are we customers kings or scum?

shanen writes: Responding mostly to negative experiences with the smartphone makers Samsung and Oppo, so I wanted to find a positive and constructive way to approach this topic. Therefore I started by websearching for best customer service. The results didn't exactly surprise me. Many lists, but no smartphone companies, for sure, for sure. Actually the easiest list to understand included three luxury hotels and an insurance company that I'd heard of but I could only speculate about the rest of the words. Short reaction is "You can't handle good customer service" as a twisted joke on "You get what you pay for."

So as a Slashdot question, I feel like a more open approach may help. Maybe it's just me and I'm imagining things have gotten that bad, and perhaps Slashdot can provide a dose of reality?

I actually think there's a fundamental problem here. No simple definition for "capitalism", but it's supposed to include an adversarial element. Customers are supposed to find the best values and companies are supposed to be rewarded for creating the most customer satisfaction... But maybe you can already detect the root of the disconnection? Both "best" and "satisfaction" are intersubjective entities that can be manipulated for profit maximization... You don't need to fool all of the customers all of the time. You just need to fool the most profitable customers at the time of their shopping decisions and you can even improve your profits relative to your competitors by repelling the least profitable customers...

So let me throw in a few details of my latest smartphone shopping experiences. Samsung is definitely a "shame on me" situation. I had a Galaxy about 10 years ago and eventually grew to hate it, mostly because of the 'support' experiences, but two years ago I was fooled into giving Samsung a second try. This time the hate grew more quickly and I was eager to dump the phone within a year--but it took another year to scrape enough information out of my carrier/ISP to decide on a second Oppo. My first Oppo wasn't that bad, but it's already beginning to look like another "shame on me" situation... Several minor problems and questions and no useful support or even interest in the problems... My carrier has delegated support to a enhanced-stupidity AI chatbot, so I wasn't expecting any help there, but Oppo also proved to be as useless as Samsung.

My theory is we customers have become scum, but I wonder what we did to deserve it. But maybe it's just me? I'm sure that my bad attitude isn't helping.