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Stories from Black women’s customer service hell
The women who answer the phone when you call Disney, Airbnb, Carnival and others.
The internet age has certainly transformed journalism; these days we mostly think about investigative journalism’s decline, but there are digital investigative outlets that shine like diamonds.
I’m thinking here about Propublica.
Propublica’s Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel wrote a series of blockbuster stories about the monopolist Intuit, a business organized as a cult around its then-CEO Brad Smith, engaged in decades’ worth of dirty tricks to kill free, IRS tax-prep services.
Not only did they stay with this story for months on end, digging up incredible stories of corruption, they also shamed the IRS and spurred state AGs into investigating the company.
Then a funny thing happened: Intuit customer service whistleblower revealed another scandal, one that sprawled outside of Intuit and spilled over into the world’s largest blue-chip companies from Disney to Airbnb to Comcast and more.
That was the story of Arise, yet another cult-like business that you have almost…
