The Indicator from Planet Money - A rebate runaround, a car rental rip-off and … roaches?!

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

A labyrinthine rebate process. Shrinking cereal boxes. Mystery rental car charges. Cockroaches?! We share listener tales of Consumer Rage and unpack the economic forces driving that ANGER.Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.Your Next Listen –Consumers are mad as hell and aren't gonna take it anymore–Over 2,000 episodes in our archive on the NPR AppConnect with The Indicator from Planet Money–The Indicator newsletter — a weekly roundup of news, ideas and staff picks. –Instagram, TikTok and YouTube –Find the Planet Money book –Find the Planet Money game, Sell Me A Sasquatch, and other merch at the NPR Shop!Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. A few weeks ago, we did an episode looking at the various systemic reasons why American consumers are feeling rage right now. And at the end, we asked you for your tales of consumer rage. Today, we're going to share a few of those stories. Think of it as group therapy, indicator style. Four tales of consumer woe, with a few econ lessons sprinkled in.

Our first story of consumer rage comes from Joe Morton of Boynton Beach, Florida. Recently, he bought a new dishwasher. And at the time, the company was offering customers a $200 rebate. So after Joe bought the dishwasher, he went online to fill out the rebate claim form, which asked for the appliance serial number. When I put in the correct serial number, the button to submit disappeared. So you couldn't actually submit the form. It just seemed a very convenient glitch to have on the website.

convenient indeed. So Joe calls customer service and they tell them, don't worry, just send us a picture of the serial number and we'll enter it for you. But then, a little while later, I get an email back.

Hey, your serial number is incorrect. You need to correct it. And I'm thinking, how in the world is it incorrect? You guys put it in for me. I sent you a picture. The only way around that was to call customer service again. And thankfully, this time, it worked.

A few weeks later, Joe got an email for a $200 gift card. But oddly, Joe says... It comes from a third party, mypaymentvalt.com. Mypaymentvalt.com. I mean, sounds like the kind of email that could easily end up

in your spam folder without you ever knowing about it. I'm sure it's very calculated to make it hard to get the rebate and then to make it hard to even claim the rebate after you've been sent it, you know? Joseph, have you heard of,

An economist named Richard Thaler. Oh, yeah. For those who don't know Richard Thaler, Nobel Prize winning behavioral economists who coined this term choice architecture. And I couldn't help after reading your email thinking of this because choice architecture is basically this idea that there is no such thing as neutral design. And like a process can be designed with ways that help people, which Thaler calls nudges. or these processes can be designed to hinder people, which he calls sludge. Does this resonate with you?

Oh, for sure. This process is just full of sludge on purpose. Our second story comes from Deb Orsini from Gilderland, New York. And the first thing you got to know is that Deb's husband loves breakfast cereal. And he eats, he layers his cereal. So, like, there are five different types of cereal that go into this bowl in the morning. What? He's making, like, a cereal layer cake.

every morning? Yep. So he puts, I think, checks in first, and then he puts in raisin brand, and then he'll sprinkle it with a little bit of oatmeal. He puts black seed in there. He puts weedies in there, and then sometimes he'll put shredded, little mini shredded, frosted shredded shredded shredded wheat's in there. Wow. Yeah. He's really coloring with all the colors in the crayon box. Yeah. So Deb buys a lot of breakfast cereal, which is why she immediately noticed one day in the cereal aisle that the boxes were getting smaller. But instead of the normal, you know, big 15-ounce box, they had these little tiny boxes next to the bigger boxes. I was like, you're kidding me. They have shrunk the size of the box at the cereal, but the price didn't go down.

The dreaded shrinkflation strikes again. We've talked about this on a bunch of shows, and you've probably seen this happening to your favorite packaged foods. According to the Consumer Price Index, The price of cereal and bakery products have increased 25% in the past five years. That is due to a number of factors. First, there was the war in Ukraine, which disrupted the global grain market. Then there was the rising price of labor, energy, and transportation. And all these have added costs to the cereal manufacturing process. And the companies have passed a good chunk of that on to the consumer.

I think that once the companies know they can start charging that higher price, they're not going to lower the price. So it's frustrating. Economists have a term for that. Do you know what it is? Is it up like a rocket and down like a father? That actually is good, too. That's a great metaphor.

But the one I was thinking about was the term is downward sticky. Prices go up and they have trouble going back down. Yeah. Yeah, that's what it feels like anyways. Our third story takes place in Louisville, Kentucky. That's where Jonathan Palmer recently rented a car from dollar car rental. When he returned it, he says an agent walked around to inspect it for damage and said he was good to go. But a couple of hours later...

I receive a text from the rental agency letting me know that there has been damaged to the vehicle. And they're charging $148. Ouch. The company sent him pictures of the car before it left the lot and when he returned it, but the photos were pretty blurry. They were claiming there were scratches to the Fender. And it was just, you know, everything they sent me was, to my eyes, fairly inconclusive. Jonathan shared these pictures with us,

and we couldn't see any apparent damage either. He says he made multiple calls to customer service to try and get clearer images of the alleged damage, but they just kept sending him the same pictures and messages asking him to pay up. So it just felt like we were in a loop. And here we are five months later, and it still is not resolved.

to my satisfaction or to theirs probably. He says in the future he'd like to avoid patronizing a company that's treated him this way, but there's a slight problem. Back in 2012, Dollar was acquired by the Hertz car rental company, and Hertz also owns the thrifty brand. I recognize that our options are fairly limited with this sort of consolidation that's been going on, and this is, you know, Hertz, thrifty dollar multiverse. And this, of course, is a trend we've seen in the world.

a lot of industries. Corporate consolidation, leaving customers feeling like they have fewer choices. In any case, Jonathan says he recently rented a car from a different company, and this time, at pickup and drop off, he made sure to take his own pictures. And by the way, we reached out to Hertz, and they told us they are looking into Jonathan's complaint. For our final tale of consumer rage, I'll just be upfront. I'm not sure what the econ lesson is here, but it was so strange. It was so strange that we just had to include it. So the story, funny enough, comes to us from a woman named Katie Story. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and recently she called her internet service provider Spectrum to try and negotiate her bill down. And eventually got through this person who was like,

you've come to the right place and the person with the good deals. They agreed to lower her rate from 110 bucks a month to just 60. And they're like, we're going to improve your service and we're going to send you these brand new modems and routers that will have like better speed. A few days later, Katie gets a box in the mail from Spectrum. She opens it and inside there is a modem, but there was also something else. And it's immediately apparent that the modem is shrink-wrapped with a bunch of cockroaches inside. Uh, yeah, you heard right. Even though the modem was shrink-wrapped, there was somehow a family of roachy.

nested inside. Katie also sent us pictures, and you could see, like, adult roaches, like about a centimeter long, and little baby roaches. They are tiny and translucent. It looks like they're actively being born, potentially. They seem to be doing well.

Like, they had a little society going on. Katie contacted customer service, and they told her to bring the modem into her local spectrum store. So she double-bagged it in a couple trash bags, took it in, got a replacement and a $30 credit for trouble. The lady was pretty disgusted. Like, she didn't want to see it.

Despite this whole experience, Katie says she is sticking with Spectrum. When I spoke to actual people, they were pretty accommodating. And, you know, the Cocker just kind of bring out the humanity in people. We reached out to Spectrum, and they told us this incident was clearly unacceptable and does not meet their standards. Thanks, Katie, for sharing that story. And thank you, Jonathan, Deb, and Joe, and everyone who reached out with your story of consumer rage.

This episode was produced by Angel Carreras and engineered by Jimmy Keely. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, kicking canon edits the show, and the indicators of production of NPR.