Customer Service Is So Bad That I’m Siding With A Spoiled Celebrity

All these years later, you have to give credit to “American Idol.” It was billed as a talent show that would produce a pop star everyone would talk about for decades — a program that would create the next Elvis, with a legion of fans who obsess over the star’s every move. 

While the show never produced any talent on par with Elvis — and produced very few contestants even on par with the typical Elvis impersonator you’d find on the side of the road in Vegas — it did manage to create Kelly Clarkson. Before the monoculture died, some 20 million people tuned in to watch Clarkson win the title of “American Idol” in September 2002. 

Kelly Clarkson has somehow endured despite the fact that she always seemed like an AI-generated musician from an age before AI — with song lyrics that are literally clichés like “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Probably in part because she is actually a talented singer, which is a rarity in pop music these days. So she still has a large, dedicated fan base in the year 2026 — the kind of following based on a shared monoculture event that’s very difficult to replicate today, now that everyone has their own personalized algorithm.

In fact, Clarkson’s influence is apparently so significant that she can command the attention of the entire world with a very run-of-the-mill social media post about a bad customer service experience she recently endured. Here’s what she wrote on Saturday:

Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked at as if I couldn’t afford it and was told he could find something comparable for me. Wow, dude. You’re an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y’all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn if you enjoy being treated like Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman. For sure, check it out. [Thumbs down emoji.]

When I saw the post, along with 6 billion other people, my first reaction was to take Kelly Clarkson’s side. That’s not because I care about Kelly Clarkson, know anything about her, know anything about this incident, or care about this incident. 

It’s simply because customer service is truly abysmal everywhere now. I mean absolutely rock bottom. Therefore, I’m automatically on the side of anyone complaining about it. I choose to believe that, in truth, the reason this post resonated with so many people has nothing to do with Clarkson or her music and everything to do with the fact that pretty much everyone else has come to the same realization.

Whether you’re at an airport, ordering food, or dealing with health insurance — whatever it is, the experience is noticeably worse than it was in the pre-COVID era. So when Kelly Clarkson decided to have a meltdown over this bougie toy store in Brooklyn, many of us were predisposed to agree with her. Not because she’s a celebrity, but because she’s a customer. We know that customers are generally treated like garbage everywhere, in almost every store or restaurant in America, and it’s only getting worse.

The collapse of customer service in this country needs to be studied, so we’re going to take a close look at what’s happening, at a systemic level, to make customer service so utterly terrible. 

But this Kelly Clarkson bird story, admittedly, deserves further scrutiny — mainly because the owner of this bougie toy store simply cannot help himself. If you had to design an avatar to represent the quintessential smug, condescending, insufferable small-business owner, you’d come up with something like this guy. 

At first, though, the store’s response to Clarkson’s post seemed reasonable enough to a lot of people. Here’s what they posted on Instagram, as they were getting flooded with negative comments and bad reviews from Clarkson’s fans:

Yesterday, Kelly Clarkson visited us in Brooklyn and inquired about buying ‘Molly,’ a one-of-a-kind singing and dancing bird automaton who plays an important role in the magic shows we host here. Molly is permanently attached to the wall and isn’t for sale. However, the negative experience Kelly described on twitter would resonate with anyone who has ever felt judged in a shop. At Art of Play whether someone comes in to make a purchase or simply look around for a while, they are equally welcome…. Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by 8 million people who have never visited our store. It’s been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outrage after just one mention by a celebrity. … We’re going to keep our heads down and hopefully, we can clear things up with Kelly someday. As a talented popular singer once said “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

If you’re trying to demonstrate that you’re not a passive-aggressive, condescending establishment, this is not the kind of reply you want to post. They strongly imply that Clarkson is a complete idiot who wanted to buy a robot bird attached to the wall, and she didn’t understand when the employees told her she couldn’t do it. They don’t offer any specifics on this point, one way or the other. Then, in the next breath, they go on to praise Kelly Clarkson as “talented” and express a desire to patch things up.

For the record, this is footage of “Molly,” the robot bird in question that Kelly Clarkson apparently wanted to buy: 

I’ve been to Art of Play many times for magic shows, and Molly the purely mechanical bird is really cool. Here’s a video I shot last year. I can see why Kelly Clarkson would want to buy it.

But also, Kelly Clarkson + Art of Play’s Molly is so random a collision that I’m upgrading my belief in the simulation hypothesis

— Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) October 12, 2026

Source: @eugenewei/X.com

Apparently it’s very popular with bird-watchers, because the robot bird does a good job mimicking those tiny, spastic movements birds do when they’re sitting on power lines or whatever.

If you’re trying to furnish a torture chamber for your worst enemy, and you have an unlimited amount of money lying around, it’s a very reasonable purchase. It’s a great way to replicate the feeling of having a bird that somehow gets into your house, flies around the ceiling, and annoys everyone by chirping constantly, until finally it decides to fly into a glass window and die. 

Assuming she’s trying to inflict an extreme amount of pain on someone, I completely understand why Kelly Clarkson would’ve expressed interest in this robot bird. It reminds me of a toy that some terrorist family member would give one of my kids for Christmas. We all have to listen to the noise incessantly for two and a half days before the toy ends up suffering a terrible and unexplained accident, or someone, completely by mistake, throws it in the trash can outside.

Anyway, in her next post, replying to the passive-aggressive bougie toy store — as we continue to follow this saga for some reason — Clarkson explained that the bird actually had a price tag in the store, contrary to what the store is now claiming. Here’s what she wrote:

Cool, cool. Sure, it wasn’t for sale. That’s the narrative Art of Play is gonna go with so the whole conversation we had when I asked you if it was for sale whilst pointing to the price tag hanging on the wall with the title Singing Bird didn’t happen as you elevator eyed me saying in a condescending tone “yes, it’s for sale but it costs 15,000 dollars so if you’d like me to find something comparable for you I can.” That all never happened and now it’s not for sale. Okay, cool. So you’re not only rude, you’re also a liar. Got it … Your store is really cool. Unfortunately, you aren’t.

To support her argument, Clarkson posted an image of a $15,000 price tag next to the bird:

And now, knowing that this thing costs $15,000, I will amend my joke from before and stipulate that it is not something that anyone, including myself, would ever buy my kids for Christmas. 

Apparently, what happened is that the $15,000 price tag didn’t apply to this particular bird that was bolted to the wall. Instead, it was giving customers the option to buy an identical bird from the guy who created it, whose name is Bliss Kolb, and have it shipped to their house or whatever. The store claims that they explained all this to Clarkson. They also say that they offered her a $2,000 mechanical bird by a German clockmaking shop as an alternative, but that she “didn’t stick around long enough to see it.”

Before we look at the surveillance footage from the store — because this is basically the Kennedy assassination all over again, in terms of its significance for our republic — I do have to acknowledge that, at this point, reasonable people could have sided with the store, or with Kelly Clarkson. There was room for debate after seeing these social media posts. 

Clarkson was kind of dressed like a hobo, so it’s understandable that the store didn’t think she had $15,000 lying around. 

But any debate should have come to an end the moment the owner of this bougie toy store opened his mouth and started doing interviews. The store owner, whose name is Adam Rubin, has talked to about 50 different media outlets over the past 24 hours. In every single one of them, he demonstrated that Clarkson was right, and he’s completely insufferable. I’ve never been in the guy’s store, obviously. It’s not really my type of place. By that I mean I’d rather have acid thrown in my face than go into a place like that. In fact, if I did go into that place, they probably would throw acid in my face. So that would be the worst of both worlds, really. In any case, having no experience with this store or any of the people involved — and not wanting to ever have any experience with any of the people involved — it’s still clear who the problem is here.

Here’s one of his appearances, where he uses the same talking points from the other 50 interviews he did. He starts off by saying he had some kind of cancer removed from his face, even though it’s not relevant to anything. And then he says that Kelly Clarkson has put his staff “in danger.” Pay attention to how he’s holding the mug:

Art of Play co-owner Adam Rubin speaks to USA Today at his store following Kelly Clarkson’s viral criticism of his store:

“Kelly Clarkson put us in danger.” https://t.co/UD1ppJGMcr

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) October 14, 2026

Source: @PopCrave/X.com

I don’t want to focus on an irrelevant detail, but then again this whole story is an irrelevant detail, so I might as well mention that I have never in my life seen a grown man hold a coffee mug like that. He’s cradling it like when one of my boys picks up a toad in the garden and brings it into the house. Only a sociopath holds a coffee mug like that. Absent any other details, I would already be against him just based on the coffee mug alone. If I were serving on a jury and he was on trial for murder, and I saw him hold his cup like that, I would convict him and send him to the electric chair on that basis alone. 

He’s also doing the old “speech is violence” routine that we’re all very familiar with at this point. “Kelly Clarkson has put us in danger,” he says. And with that, he managed to string together a completely unique sentence. I feel fairly certain that, until that moment, nobody on the planet, either now or in the past, has ever said the words: “Kelly Clarkson has put us in danger.” So we are breaking new ground now. Forging an entirely new path into an unknown wilderness. There’s no telling what will happen next. 

This guy did a bunch of other interviews which we won’t play for you, because frankly we’ve already spent enough time on this. But there is a larger point that we’ll get to here, I promise. Before we do, though, I should mention that this guy is doing interviews in every available medium. He’s even talking to print publications, where at least we don’t have to see him holding his coffee mug. But those aren’t going well, either. 

This is from an interview he did with “Curbed.” They tried, on three separate occasions, to get a clear answer from this guy as to whether or not the robot bird was for sale. They asked, directly, “Was it for sale or not?” And here’s the reply they got.

We are a nontraditional shop. We work directly with artisans. This guy is an artisan who does not make many things like this. I think that’s where the misunderstanding might have come in. Bliss [Kolb, the designer of the robot bird] lives in the woods in a house that he made with his own hands. He’s not on social media. He doesn’t have a warehouse. It takes him years to make these machines. There are two in existence. This is one. If someone showed serious interest, we would reach out to him about getting them an automaton. This is not something that’s sitting in a warehouse. It’s like a piece of sculpture. It’s a fine-art piece.

So that’s about 150 words in response to a very straightforward question, and he still doesn’t manage to answer it. But the saga gets even more bizarre when you look into this guy who makes the robot bird — Bliss Kolb, who supposedly “lives in the woods.” Emily Gould in New York Magazine just spoke with Adriane Quinlan, a reporter who’s apparently spent some time at this shop. And here’s what she found:

I looked up property records for Bliss Kolb. I don’t think that you can call an aluminum-clad home in the suburbs a home in the middle of the woods. Maybe he has an out-of-town workshop, but he’s not even listed as owning a vacation home in public records. I love his work, but he’s not, like, living in the middle of nowhere right now. And I do think that Kelly Clarkson could just buy one from him, though it looks like everything on his site is sold out.

The plot thickens. Is it possible that the bougie toy store is lying about the architect of this robot bird? Is he doing the Henry David Thoreau thing, where he pretends to live out in the woods, while he really spends all his time in a nice house with a washing machine? That wouldn’t be too surprising, if it’s true. If your robot bird is designed by a hermit living in the woods, that sounds a lot more exotic than a robot bird that’s made by a dude with an Etsy account living in a four-bedroom house with a picket fence somewhere outside Seattle. It’s a scam as old as time. 

It’s also worth mentioning that, as you just heard, the media is doing a lot of legwork on this story. Every publication in the country has a reporter on the Kelly Clarkson robot bird beat. They’re tracking down every lead. Following the footprints wherever they go. Asking the tough questions. If we had a news media even half as interested in world events that actually matter, we’d be in a much better spot as a country. But they save all of their resources for stories like this, apparently. In fact, this week the two issues that seem to have received by far the most coverage are that Kelly Clarkson tried to buy a robot bird, and that comedian Shane Gillis said on SNL that women dress like whores in the gym. Which, of course, they do. As we head into a critical election, these are the news events attracting the most attention.

It’s no surprise that someone went out and obtained the surveillance footage from the incident. We’ll put it on the screen.

THE KELLY CLARKSON STORE VIDEO IS OUT 💀 https://t.co/M0hvquAeNx

— Erika (@erikaxtc) October 14, 2026

Source: @erikaxtc/X.com

There’s no audio, so it’s hard to come to any definitive conclusions. But in general, it seems to support Clarkson’s version of events. Clarkson is in yellow wearing a backpack. It looks like Clarkson is talking to an employee who has a drink in his hand and seems mildly interested in talking to her. But then he goes and deals with a couple of other customers, apparently to make a sale. She’s left by herself for a little while, so she walks around the store. She seems to put several items, which she wanted to purchase, back on the shelves because no one’s there to check her out. Eventually she has some words for the shopkeeper — probably to say something like, “Don’t advertise things for sale if you can’t buy them.” A few other customers look uncomfortable, and then the footage ends.

Whatever you make of this episode, which is ridiculous for about ten different reasons, it seems pretty obvious that Kelly Clarkson is winning this PR battle because pretty much everyone has had a similar unpleasant experience dealing with a salesman or a customer support employee. And these experiences are becoming more common. This is from a Gallup survey in 2024:

49% of Americans say customer service has gotten worse in the last year. Only 6% say it has improved.

As you can see, the findings hold up across every single age range. Whether you’re 18 or 65, your impression of customer service is that it’s getting worse. Meanwhile, according to Forrester, 25% of the brands that they tracked in 2024 and 2025 had “statistically significant losses” in customer satisfaction, while only 7% improved. This isn’t simply an American phenomenon. For the most part, we can blame AI chatbots and offshoring for this problem, which is why your customer service representative is either a robot or can’t speak English. 

The fact that these customer service nightmare stories always resonate and go viral is a pretty clear signal that Americans are tired of being treated like criminals and hobos in their own country — especially since most of them can remember how different things were just a few years ago. A political party that wants to hold onto power would make some effort to acknowledge this very widespread concern, and maybe even try to do something about it. As we talk about in the “Real History” documentary on the Russian Revolution, the single fastest way to ensure the Bolsheviks seize power is to demoralize and humiliate the population so that they’re too disinterested and disorganized to unify against the communist revolutionaries. 

Bolsheviks don’t seize power by convincing everyone that communism is a good idea, or a sustainable ideology. They take power by default, because everyone else looks at the status quo and decides it’s not worth fighting for. We have to confront that perception, or the Bolsheviks will do exactly what they did at the beginning of the 20th century. They don’t need to actually win any nationwide election to ensure that we never have elections ever again. They just need people to be frustrated, bored, and disillusioned. And with Kelly Clarkson somehow dominating the national conversation, more than 20 years after American Idol was relevant, it’s safe to say that millions of people are indeed frustrated, bored, and disillusioned. We need to change that. This is the attitude we need to adopt — this is from a James Talarico town hall in Texas last night:

Democrat James Talarico just got EMBARRASSED by a pro-life Catholic Texan from the audience at his CNN town hall.

His face at the end was priceless.

Talarico claimed that the Bible “is silent” on the issue of abortion.

The audience member — Jody — let him finish, before she dropped a brutal Biblical reminder that brought the town hall to its feet.

JODY: “And I just want to add that the Bible is not silent on abortion.”

“There is the Ten Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’’

“And as Catholics, we take great, um, insult, I guess sometimes when it’s spouted that way.”

The audience immediately erupted in applause for her.

This is not going well for him.

— Overton (@overton_news) October 15, 2026

Source: @overton_news/X.com

When the communists lie to your face with their little self-satisfied grin, come right back and tell them they’re liars. This creepy heretic wants to lie about your faith, and he’s making the assumption that you’re going to sit there and take it. Don’t let him. Do not give them anything — even if it might be convenient, in whatever social situation you might be in. 

This is the attitude that prevents the spread of the most deranged and destructive ideology known to man — the ideology that the Democrat Party has adopted wholesale. And as a bonus, it’s the attitude that leads to fewer national conversations about Kelly Clarkson. 

If we’re complacent, like the Russians in the early 20th century, we will lose. But if we’re willing to fight for our principles — and it really doesn’t take much, as the woman at Talarico’s town hall demonstrated last night — then these people will have no idea what hit them.