More About (dis)Satisfaction

It’s not so much the service as it is the expectations.

Jul 02, 2026

My post from last Friday was all about how I was less than happy that something I just purchased (a pair of prescription hearing aids, at considerable cost) had already shown signs of defects. The remedy was to send it back to the shop, leaving me with only one of a pair of hearing aids. To add insult to injury, I was told that “half a loaf was better than none.” My semi-rant led into a discussion of Likert Scales, the forerunner of today’s 5-star satisfaction reviews that are ubiquitous for every product and service out there, including my own.

When I worked in market research, it was always a struggle to ensure that the results were “true” in that people (respondents) often report what they think you want to hear versus what they actually did/feel about the product or service in question. Some respondents take the job seriously, while others go at it half-heartedly, and there are a whole lot of other issues that, as a researcher, you try to take into consideration in designing the survey so that the results are the best possible estimate of how things really are.

It’s an art and a science, and at best, it’s a crapshoot.

There are plenty of tricks researchers use to get at “the truth,” but in reality, it’s still only what they tell you, which may or may not coincide with reality. No matter how hard you try, it’s never enough. Because (and I really do believe this), a negative response (dissatisfied or worse) isn’t so much “this didn’t meet my expectations” as “my expectations are out of whack.”

And IMHO, expectations are fueled by desire.

It’s a theory I developed while working in Market Research and came face-to-face with while owning a business, and again as an author. I’ve only received one really negative review for any of my books, and had the reader bothered to notice that (a) I said it was fiction, and (b) what he expected the stories to be about were not what I said they were (nor was the sample anything close to his expectations), he might have skipped buying the book. Alas, no.

Anyway, I told you all of that to tell you another story about dissatisfied consumers. I’ve been thinking of replacing my decade-old printer, and by chance, a colleague mentioned her printer and how wonderful it was, and I looked it up, and I liked what I saw, AND it was on sale at Costco (where I got my hearing aid and just yesterday picked up the repaired aid that I took in last week that launched the previous post, so my ears are back to full strength [thanks for asking])…

But some of the reviews left me puzzled.

I understand that not everyone uses printers in the same fashion. Some are directly connected, others use Wi-Fi, some print from their phones, etc. I tried to filter out the negative reviews that didn’t apply, but as I continued to review the reviews, I was struck again by the “what the hell did you expect” problem.

Like my current printer, the one I’m considering has a small viewing screen. You can see it when you look at the product online, in the many reviews, in the setup guide, and they even describe it as such: “1.44-inch color display.” And of course, when you’re in Costco, it’s there on display so you can see with your own eyes up close and personal just how big (or small) it is.

And why, perchance, did some customers leave a negative review? Because the screen was so small. Some even referenced the statement of the screen size in their review, as in:

The most maddening aspect is that the window on the machine where you tell it what to do when setting it up and to make copies is only 1.5” X 1.5”.

Really? Duh!

When we ran the ice cream parlor, we told our youthful employees that “the customer is usually (but not often) right.” Add to that credo this one about satisfaction: “When the customer’s expectations are misguided, you can expect their satisfaction to be disappointing.” Which is probably a nicer way of saying “When the customer is stupider than dogshit, expect the worst.”

Hope you’re satisfied with today’s Substack!

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