Sludge: you know it when you see it! Sarah Lang’s month of hell – and it all has an ANNOYING common theme.
I just experienced *quite* the month. I hurt my back in an Uber accident, and Uber gaslit and email spammed me. I was verbally abused by a bus driver, and never informed what, if any, action was taken. I was charged for a subscription even though I’d cancelled in time. A government agency tried to prevent or delay me sorting out something pretty simple, including putting me on hold for 45 minutes. It took me more than half an hour and tremendous effort to cancel HelloFresh.
Basically, I’ve been tramping in heavy gumboots through sludge.
BTW, I haven’t appropriated that word. Part of behavioural economics, ‘sludge’ refers to the invisible barricades erected by companies and organisations that systematically impede your actions or decisions. Their embedded processes make these organisations and their representatives exhaustively resistant to getting things sorted out.
Sludge is particularly thick when something involves money, of course. For instance, a company wants you to continue a paid subscription, or won’t refund you for something.
Sludge is when there’s far more paperwork than seems credibly necessary. Sludge is when you’re transferred from person to person on the phone, until someone puts you on hold for 45 minutes as you listen to ‘Sweet Caroline’ (I quite like the song but ‘good times never seemed so good’ isn’t the vibe in these moments). Sludge is when you have to physically go somewhere in person when it could clearly have been sorted over the phone or over email. Sludge is when you’ve had to jump through so many hoops that you’re seriously puffed.
Eventually, many people think ‘I’m so over this, I give up’ because they’re fed up or hungry or tired or busy or parenting etc.
I’m assertive, but sometimes the sludge tactic works on me because I no longer want to waste time on something that may never be sorted out.
My month of sludge
The worst incident has a bit of a back story (pun intended). My back was injured in a minor car accident. My husband and I were coming home in an Uber, the driver wasn’t slowing to turn into our street, so I said ‘hey here’s our street’ and he hit the brakes way too fast. A car crashed into our car and another crashed into that car. It stirred up nerve pain in my back.
I complained to Uber, although it was hard navigating that app. When my complaint finally landed, I received multiple emails from various people or bots (it was unclear which was which) that contradicted each other and confused me. One said “we have now been informed by the driver from this trip that there was no accident”. I replied something like ‘WTF? So I’m making this up?’. Another email said “we’re sorry to hear that this trip didn’t go as well as you had hoped”. That is at least true; I had had hope to get home uninjured. Then another email said ‘We’re sorry to hear that the driving on this trip made you feel unsafe’. Unsafe? I was literally injured. Another email told me I’d got a refund. Wow, thanks for that! But which of these people/bots was my point of contact? No idea.
Pressing further, I finally got an email saying “we will review the driver’s profile to determine if they should have access to Uber’s platform”. All this took two hours.
Maybe I should just walk everywhere. Because, the other week my Snapper card was declined when I tried to swipe onto the bus. As I tried to top it up on my phone, the driver spoke nastily and angrily to me. When I got off the bus (to her scorn), I was so upset (my back also hurt) that I didn’t notice that I’d sat on a bench covered in paint. I called Metlink and while the operator sounded sympathetic, I didn’t hear anything back about how they were handling it, despite me also sending an email.
Subscription conscription
So much sludge is involved in subscriptions, and I need to do another declutter. Anyone else been charged for a subscription even though you’ve cancelled in time? That happened to me the other week, when an American publication refused to refund me. I gave up.
When I wanted to unsubscribe to a newspaper, I had to phone them to do so. I was put on hold for maybe 40 minutes. I finally got through to someone who asked me why I was cancelling my subscription. I said “I’ve been on hold so long that I’ve forgotten what my original reason was but now my reason is that I had to phone you to cancel it”.
Hello?
Has anyone tried to cancel the meal-delivery kit service HelloFresh? You get a box unless you press ‘skip’ on the app on or by the Tuesday that precedes the Sunday’s box.
Trying to cancel my subscription on the app was like trying to find my way through a maze with no signposts. I’ll relay my ‘conversation’ to get across how frustrating it was.
The FAQs under ‘Help’ didn’t, well, help. When I clicked ‘contact’, ‘Freshy the HelloFresh virtual assistant’ popped up. ‘How do I cancel my subscription?’ I typed. It suggested that I instead skip deliveries or change their frequency. I said ‘no please cancel it’. I’d found the ‘password’, right? Not so fast. ‘Freshy’ passed me onto ‘a Customer Care Agent who can process your application’. Huh? I thought that was happening already?
Next I had to fill out a form. Sigh. Then ‘Agent NZ’ said ‘please provide us with your query or concern and one of our representatives will be with you shortly’. What? Wasn’t I already speaking to one?
Another message popped up: “Hi, my name is Jon, we’re very sad to hear that you want to cancel your subscription” (I believe that). “I hope you don’t mind me asking the reason why would you like to cancel the service”. I typed “because I’m drowning in sludge’. Jon said ‘I recognized it’. “What did you recognise?” I typed back. “That you no longer the service at the moment”. I’m guessing ‘Jon’ is a bot. But my subscription is, finally, cancelled, after a Kafka-esque experience.
I won’t get into the details here, but in July, HelloFresh pleaded guilty to misleading behaviour under the Fair Trading Act for underhanded tactics in getting back former subscribers. A story about this by The Press stated that “the Commerce Commission has warned of subscription ‘traps’ – subtle ways in which people are nagged or mislead into subscribing or find it difficult to unsubscribe – as subscription-based services become more ubiquitous”. They called them ‘dark patterns’.
Sludge audits
Turns out there’s a book about sludge! Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein published Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done And What To Do About It in 2021.
It followed a 2008 book that he co-authored called Nudge (could Budge, Fudge, Judge, or Grudge be next?). Nudge is the opposite of sludge. Also part of behavioural economics, it’s the idea that small prompts can have big (positive) effects on behaviour. One example of this is when I met the ‘future me’, though I haven’t changed any habits yet.
But back to Sludge. Sunstein says that private firms, and public institutions, should regularly conduct ‘Sludge Audits’ to measure the cost of sludge, catalogue its effects, and decide when and how to reduce it. On balance, Sunstein argues, sludge infringes on human dignity, making people feel that their time and even their lives don’t matter. He also explains that, because of sludge, too many people don’t receive benefits to which they’re entitled.
Look, trudging through SLUDGE is hard enough for me, even though writing this story has spurred me to push back. But what about people who don’t have the time or bandwidth to deal with sludge? Maybe they’re working two jobs; maybe they can’t make a call during office hours; maybe they have a teething baby; maybe they’re struggling with ill-health; maybe many things.
Behavioural scientist Isobel Madle writes that sludge often involves “the intentional creation of friction in digital processes to manipulate consumers, often leading to decisions that benefit the company but harm the user. This includes tactics like hidden fees, complex cancellation processes, and misleading pricing”.
She says, while sludging can impact everyone, “those most at risk are vulnerable individuals such as the elderly, those with limited digital literacy or people experiencing financial or mental health struggles, these seemingly small annoyances can have much larger consequences”. Sludge can lead to cognitive overload, financial harm, exploitation of trust, and increased stress and anxiety.
What are people being denied, or having to put up with, because of sludge? And how many organisations and companies are counting on – even banking on – us giving up?