Tell HN: There needs to be a “right to speak with a human”

You're quibbling. The grand jury has to do its duty regardless of how the defendant has behaved. A business does not have to give you what you want regardless of how you behave. These two things are not in the same category, no matter how you try to twist words.

> The discussion was always about creating a right

Yes, "creating" a right that currently doesn't exist, just because you feel entitled. That's not how rights work.

> choice is greater when the business is small, because then there are more competitors.

And the best way to discourage such choice is to pile more and more regulations on businesses. If you want more small businesses to provide choice, you need to make it easier to start a business, not harder. All these "rights" people think businesses owe them have a cost. If you as a customer are willing to pay the cost, then it's not a matter of "rights" at all; it's a straightforward business transaction, value for value. If you as a customer aren't willing to pay the cost, where is it supposed to come from? Things like grand juries ultimately get paid for by all of us as taxpayers. Are you willing to raise your taxes so the government can pay for phone support for all businesses?

> We can agree that it would not be efficient for the economy for every establishment to be its own business, meaning that every hardware store and every restaurant was its own corporation.

No, I don't agree to that. What size of business is most efficient in a free market gets decided by the market. What size of business is most "efficient" in our current society, which in many ways is not a free market, gets decided by lots of things, most of them having to do with various ways the government interferes in the economy. See further comments below.

> do you not think predatory pricing is a thing?

No, I think it's a buzzword used by people who have a political axe to grind but don't understand basic economics.

> This is something recognized to be used by institutions such as Wal-mart and Amazon.

And claims like that are, as I implied just above, bogus. Wal-mart and Amazon have the market positions they do for two main reasons, one good and one bad. The good reason is that they make use of economies of scale to provide products and services at prices nobody else can match, which is good for us as customers. The bad reason is that part of what enables them to do that is taking advantage of government interference in the economy (such as cheap loans for building facilities like warehouses and distribution centers that they can get but mom and pop small businesses can't) and bullying their supply chain in various ways that often cross the line into regulatory violations, but of course those regulations aren't enforced the way regulations are enforced against small businesses who don't have deep pockets and lots of lawyers.

> How would I even tell the company I want this feature, if I can't get through to them on the phone in the first place?

This is silly. Do you call companies on the phone to tell them about all the things you would like them to provide? Of course not. Nobody does.

Companies don't adopt these business models because they don't know that support is a valuable service. They adopt these business models because they don't think they can provide the support people would want at a price people would pay for. And in many, if not most, cases, I suspect they're right. That's not something that can be fixed by government regulation. It can only be fixed by either customers changing how much they are willing to pay, or some innovator (like, oh, I don't know, a startup entrepreneur on HN) figuring out how to provide that kind of support more cheaply and selling it as a service.

Clearly companies are en masse externalizing the costs of support onto users, and plainly not supporting users in fixing real problems with systems that are now required to live in society. It's at the stage where it's breaking our well functioning civil society and turning the first world into a third world kafkaesque dystopia.

I believe this is an economic race to the bottom and regulation is the answer to fixing it.

Here's the basis of an idea for how to fix the power dynamics so the market works properly

1) an ombusdman that can fine companies for user abuse of wasting user time, and redistribute the fine to the users 2) regulations of how long a company can on average keep users on hold, such as no more than 10 minutes to speak to a human, otherwise the speak to a human option is useless as the company makes it take longer than the median user can afford 3) regulations of threshold of acceptable customer complaints against a company, otherwise the company will make the service operators unable to actually fix anything as you note 4) a process with the ombusdman where when the number of complaints exceeds a threshold the company is fined and the fine distributed amongst the complaining users 5) some sanity check here to prevent user abuse, such as checking the average wait times, and confirming the customer service actually never fixes issues from a number of tests. The tests could be made in collaboration with a subset complaining customers.

The reason they can have such bad CR is because their marketshare is leaps and bounds beyond the competition so they CAN.

They provided an amazing product until they hit monopoly status then started cutting quality..

Oldest trick in the book.

Some solutions are to remove whatever government policies are giving them an advantage, or break up the monopoly via government, or provide government help to the competition.

There's tons of ways.