I Paid $2,000 for an Ebike. Then I Spent Months Trapped in a Corporate Chatbot Maze.

My fiancée and I live in one of Atlanta’s steepest neighborhoods, so last spring we treated ourselves to a pair of ebikes—hers arrived without a hitch. Mine, ordered separately from a different retailer, kept getting delayed. Then one Wednesday evening, FedEx texted to say my $2,000 bike had been delivered and signed for. I was standing in my kitchen at the time, air-frying chicken thighs, with no bike in sight. The signature belonged to someone with the initials “M.M.”—not me, not my fiancée, not anyone in our building.

What followed was a months-long odyssey through customer-service purgatory. Every call to FedEx, the bike company, my bank, and even the Atlanta Police Department funneled me into chatbot-run waiting rooms that refused to connect me to a human. The police department’s automated system asked me to leave a message and wait for a callback. When I missed that callback during a work meeting, there was no voicemail, and returning the number landed me right back in the same chatbot queue. FedEx eventually opened a claim, only to send an automated email confirming my bike was missing and telling me to contact the shipper for reimbursement. The shipper got FedEx to refund the shipping—about $200—leaving me $1,700 in the hole.

This isn’t just my bad luck. A recent survey found that 59 percent of consumers are frustrated with AI customer-service agents, and 85 percent would rather talk to a real person. Corporations are leaning hard into chatbots, often as a deliberate tactic called “sludge”—designing friction into the system to discourage customers from pursuing resolutions. As one marketing professor put it, AI has simply given sludge a dystopian new face. Some CEOs have been blunt: Verizon’s boss recently told Bloomberg that AI will likely replace a “large percentage” of the company’s customer-service jobs. The result is a less human, more exhausting version of the hold music and runaround that have plagued shoppers for decades.

Three months later, I’m still out $1,700 and my bike is still missing. The Atlanta Police Department did eventually confirm they dispatched an officer the day I missed their call, but said returning those calls sends you back to the chatbot line. FedEx sent a statement about using technology to “amplify” human care while “continuously refining” their processes. I’ve spent so many hours talking to AI agents that feel designed to block real help, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth the fight anymore. For now, I’m stuck in chatbot hell—and I’m not alone.