Being a Consumer in India Mostly Sucks

Let's get one thing out of the way. There is a version of "being a consumer in India" that people love to celebrate — the cheap domestic help, the groceries at your door in ten minutes, the restaurant meals that cost less than a coffee abroad. That version exists on the back of deeply exploited labour and dire economic inequality. It is not something to be proud of, and it is not what this article is about.

This is about the other side. The side where you pay for a service — actually pay, with money, like a normal transaction — and what you receive in return is either a scam, a lie, a blank stare, or someone getting inexplicably angry at you for expecting what you paid for.

"You're the paying customer. You get scammed. You object. And somehow, you become the problem."

THE GAS THAT WAS NEVER LOW

Let's start with air conditioners. At some point, your AC needs routine servicing — filter cleaning, a basic check-up, nothing dramatic. You call a technician, whether through a platform like Urban Company or a local contact. Within minutes of arriving, almost inevitably, comes the line: "Sir, gas is low. Needs refilling." Two thousand rupees, usually. Sometimes more.

Here's the thing about AC refrigerant gas: it doesn't just disappear. It operates in a closed loop. If the gas is low, there is a leak — and if there's a leak, that's a completely different and much more significant repair job, not a casual top-up. The "gas is low" pitch on a routine service call is almost always a lie. A rehearsed, practiced, confident lie delivered to people who don't know enough to push back.

THE PATTERN: When you say no to the unnecessary gas refill, things can turn quickly. During a recent house move, the AC technician sent by the packers and movers company tried the same routine. When refused, he didn't shrug and move on. He turned hostile — raising his voice, borderline abusive, warning of "no cooling" like a curse being placed on the unit. A man who had been hired and paid to uninstall and reinstall an air conditioner was now furious because his attempt to sell a fabricated problem had been refused. He was the one getting paid. He was the one who failed to execute the scam. And he was the one who was angry.

This inversion — where the consumer is made to feel guilty, threatened, or like a nuisance for declining to be cheated — is perhaps the most defining feature of the Indian consumer experience.

CONFIDENTLY, ARROGANTLY WRONG

Walk into an electronics store in any of India's growing tier-two cities — the shiny new malls, the bright lighting, the stocked shelves — and you might be forgiven for expecting a reasonably informed salesperson. You would be wrong to expect that.

Consider a simple scenario: you're looking at power banks. There's a Belkin on the shelf and a Boat. A global electronics brand with decades of product history versus a domestic company that is, at its core, a marketing outfit slapping its label on Chinese OEM hardware. The salesperson — with a remarkable combination of certainty and wrongness — insists that Boat is the superior brand. Not as a preference. As a fact. Delivered with the air of someone correcting a child who has said something embarrassing.

"Partial knowledge delivered with total confidence. It is the LLM hallucination problem, but in human form and with an attitude problem."

This is the intellectual texture of bad consumer service in India. It's not just ignorance — ignorance is forgivable. It is ignorance fused with arrogance, a knowledge superiority complex built on a foundation of misinformation. The technician who invents a gas leak. The salesperson who has decided that a marketing brand beats a heritage one. They are not uncertain. They do not ask questions. They inform you, and they expect compliance, and when you don't comply, something curdles.

THE FOOD THAT NEVER CAME

You go to a movie. You order food to be delivered to your seat — specifically so you can have it during the film. This is the entire reason the service exists. The food doesn't arrive. The film plays. You sit there waiting, then give up and walk out mid-scene to find out what happened.

"I forgot," says the counter staff. No apology. No urgency. And then, with genuine irritation: "Why didn't you just come during the interval?"

The staff member who forgot your order is now annoyed that you interrupted the movie you paid for to follow up on the food you paid for. The logic, laid bare: if you had waited for the interval, you would have missed even more of the film to collect food you had specifically pre-ordered to avoid exactly that. There is no version of this where the customer is not losing something because of their mistake. But the customer is not the one who is annoyed. The customer is the one being lectured.

When you try to document the interaction — take out a phone, capture what's happening — the dynamic shifts completely. Suddenly there are more of them. Suddenly there is a circle forming. "How dare you take a video without permission?" In a commercial space. In a cinema. In the middle of a dispute about an order they forgot. The customer, already a victim of negligence, is now being physically surrounded and intimidated for having the nerve to want a record of it. What option does one have, exactly?

WHEN THE BANK HOLDS YOU HOSTAGE

The consumer failures that merely ruin your mood are one thing. Then there is the category that has real consequences.

An active LLP current account. Minimum balance maintained. The registered email ID is lost — access to net banking goes with it. You go to the branch. They require all partners to be physically present. You coordinate, you show up. You bring the LLP deed, the authorization documents, the company seal. You hand it all over. You comply with every single thing asked of you.

Then: nothing. No follow-up. No update. No resolution. The account sits there, active, with money in it, completely inaccessible. And when you push for a solution, the branch's answer is to suggest opening a new account. Not fix the existing one. Open a new one. Because updating a registered email address, apparently, is beyond the bandwidth of a functioning private bank.

THE REAL COST: This is not a minor inconvenience. Statutory filings require bank statements. Deadlines do not pause while your bank's staff figures out how to do their jobs. The consequence of institutional laziness dressed up as process is real financial and legal exposure for a legitimate business. And there is no accountability, no escalation path that actually works, no one who owns the problem.

A NOTE ON CLASS — AND WHAT THIS ISN'T

There is a type of person in India — you have seen them — who treats every interaction with a service worker as an opportunity to establish hierarchy. The security guard who doesn't get a second glance. The salesperson spoken to in a tone reserved for furniture. The assumption that deference is owed simply by virtue of who is doing the buying. That person exists, and that behaviour is its own problem, a different and uglier one.

That is not what any of this is about. Basic professional service doesn't require groveling. It doesn't require the customer to be treated like royalty. It requires competence, honesty, and a baseline level of accountability when things go wrong. The bar is not high. In most functioning consumer economies, it is simply the floor. In India, across too many industries and interactions, it remains aspirational.

"India has cheap. India has fast. What India doesn't reliably have is good."

THE PIPE DREAM

There is a comforting narrative that gets repeated a lot — that India's consumer experience is improving, that it's world-class now in many ways, that those who've lived abroad are being elitist when they point out the gaps. Some of that improvement is real. Apps work. Logistics have gotten faster. Certain sectors have genuinely professionalized.

But the underlying culture of the consumer transaction — the honesty, the accountability, the reflexive response when something goes wrong — that hasn't caught up. The gap between what is paid for and what is received, between the promise and the delivery, between how staff treat customers when things are fine versus when they're challenged — that gap remains wide and largely unacknowledged.

Saying "it's better than it used to be" is not the same as saying it's good. And pretending that a 10-minute delivery app is proof of a mature consumer economy is, at best, a very convenient distraction from the reality of what happens when something goes wrong, when a scam doesn't land, when an order gets forgotten, when a bank refuses to do its job.

The Indian consumer, in most everyday interactions, is not a king. They are a mark — to be extracted from, talked down to, blamed when things go wrong, and intimidated when they push back. Until that changes at a cultural and systemic level, the celebration feels premature.

"You paid. You deserved better. That should not be a radical idea."

The examples above are ordinary. Not extraordinary horror stories — ordinary Tuesday experiences for ordinary people paying for ordinary things. That is precisely the point.