It was a Tuesday. There I stood at a Burger King holding my tray of chicken fries and regret. The cashier slid the receipt across the counter. “Don’t forget to rate and review us! If you leave a comment, you get a free small order of fries!”
Purchasing a $3.99 value meal on my burger app I was met with a 12-screen survey about bun integrity, fry temperature, and whether the “ambiance” of the drive-thru speaker “inspired me to thrive.” I haven’t felt this interrogated since the “Arby’s Incident of 2007.”
We live in the Golden Age of Feedback, where every human interaction must be graded like a kindergarten macaroni art project. Call your bank to dispute a fraudulent charge? First, rate the hold music’s “banger score.” Order socks online? Prepare to defend your 4-star review (“They fit my feet, Brenda, not my soul”).
Even my bathroom scale recently asked me to evaluate its “judgmental tone.” I gave it one star and a passive-aggressive comment about its mother.
The corporate world has weaponized enthusiasm. Customer service reps now sound like over caffeinated game show hosts, chirping, “How’s your FANTASTIC day going?” while secretly hoping you’ll say “terrible” so they can deploy a pre-scripted empathy speech. Last week, an Internet rep told me my outage was “a great opportunity to reconnect with nature!” Ma’am, I was trying to watch A Handmaid’s Tale. My idea of “nature” is the plastic fern in my office.
And don’t get me started on the nonsense of these receipts. Every transaction now ends with a QR code demanding I “share my journey.” My journey? I bought lightbulbs. I’m not Marco Polo. If Home Depot wants a testimonial, I’ll send a haiku: LED despair / checkout checkout line moves like grief / Let me live, Chris.
The worst offenders are apps that beg for ratings before you’ve even used them. I downloaded a health tool last week, and before I could exhale my existential dread, it asked, “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” “I don’t know, Doris—I’ve been here 12 seconds, and already you’re raising my blood pressure.”
This obsession with metrics has turned us all into unpaid Yelp critics. I recently caught myself mentally drafting a review while getting a flu shot (“Quick service, but the lobby magazines were clearly post-2017”). My therapist says I should “set boundaries,” but how? Every time I decline a survey, I picture a marketing team somewhere weeping into a spreadsheet.
Maybe we’re approaching peak Rate Us Culture. Soon, babies will exit the womb clutching a tablet: “How were your contractions? ⭐⭐⭐⭐ ⭐Would you push again?” Until then, I’ll be in the drive-thru, muttering “Five stars, five stars, five stars” into a ketchup-stained screen—a hostage to the endless quest for actionable data.
The funniest thing is that you know nobody is really watching these numbers except maybe for a quarterly review. That Scott forgot my fries won’t make it back to anyone “actionable.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need you to rate this column. Did it make you laugh? Did it waste your time? Could it have been 10% shorter? Your feedback helps us serve you better! ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (I’m withholding one star out of spite. You know what you did.
(Rate and review Chris Kamler on X, where you’ll find him performing as @chriskamler)
