I’ll suggest a nice and easy one to begin with: Product user manuals in entirely pictogram format.
I bought a new Philips shaver, and here’s the manual:
I assume I’m translating the hieroglyphs correctly when I think that the manual is telling me that the product takes 2.5 hours to charge (which I find a bit odd because I own a Philips shaver that’s quite similar to this one from ~2014 that takes less than an hour to fully charge, admittedly my shaver is the S5467 which doesn’t have explicit guidance for how long it should take to fully charge), but also it seems to me that they product they’ve sent me is fully charged judging by its guidance on what the display on the shaver should look like while charging (as the symbol hasn’t changed during the ~1hr charging time it has had so far),. Should I unplug it now, or wait 2.5 hours?
OUR SOCIETY EVOLVED AND DEVELOPED LANGUAGES. THE WRITTEN WORD. THE PRINTING PRESS. USE SOME GODDAMN WORDS!
Next up, online-only offers.
For example, EE is traditionally a mobile network company in the UK. They have shops in most cities that one can get a new phone from, ask for help, sort out tariffs, etc. Obviously they also have a website and phone-based customer services. Until Christmas last year, I had a mobile tariff with them that wasn’t too costly (£16/month, which had steadily crept up over a number of years from £13/month), but I was out of contract and they suggested that I should contact them to get a better deal. I looked on their website and found something for IIRC £13-ish quid that sounded reasonable but the EU roaming wording (a perk in UK contracts that isn’t completely standard which allows one’s free minutes/texts/data to be used in the EU, and I have a German wife so we go to see her family reasonably often), was a bit ambiguous so I rang them for clarification. The customer services rep couldn’t help with that because they can’t see that deal on their system, but could offer me… a tariff for twice the price. He suggested that I give notice to cancel my tariff and their complaints department will likely contact me to pick up the slack and offer me a decent deal (similar circumstances have happened re my wife’s EE tariff before). Their complaints department did not contact me so I left and went with another supplier who is giving me a better deal for £5/month.
Another example are supermarkets with physical stores and online stores. Sainsbury’s were offering some fairly good deals, and when we’ve found those deals online before and visited their supermarket, we’ve picked up on said deals, until last time we went through the routine of trawling supermarket sites for offers, and encountered what was described in the store as an “online only deal”… where one has to spend £50 to get free delivery, or spend time factoring in the delivery cost versus the strength of the offer.
Aside from the conclusion I’ve reached being “these companies hate us”, I just don’t understand why a company would want customers to shun their physical shops which logically cost money to run, or make ringing customer services into a total ball-ache. If they don’t want to run those stores any more or have a customer services phone system, just shut them down. Alternatively, why not make the online presence, the customer service teams and the physical stores WORK TOGETHER AS A TEAM?