Complaint about Corporate America? Take it to the top.

Got a problem with corporate America? Take your complaints to the top. We’ve gone up the food chain, starting at the bottom by complaining to a salesperson, the wait staff, or a telephone caller—and getting nowhere. They’re merely doing their job. The top brass is where the buck stops. So that’s where we’ve decided to start, sharing with humor some of our biggest complaints about three companies: Williams Sonoma, Anthropic, and Tinder. Our letters represent our attempts to be heard; one we did write, and we never heard back. We’re happy if you want to copy our template for any retailer, company, or individual dealing with the public, or come up with your own letter. Feel free to share your ideas or samples. 

Dear CEO of Williams-Sonoma:

Let us start with the good news. We LOVE your stores. Every time we walk into one, we feel its inspiration to become the 2.0 version of Martha Stewart, Ina Garten or Pearl Mesta, the latter for those old enough to remember that legendary hostess with the mostess. 

Of late, we’ve seen your stores packed with merchandise to celebrate all sorts of holidays, most recently, the Williams Sonoma near one of us was filled—actually overstuffed--with Easter gifts on multiple tables. Not a sprinkling but a deluge. 

There were tins of Easter Bunny Bark, chocolate candy in pastel colors that was delicious — we sampled the samples (more than once, but don’t tell). There were dozens of bags of jelly beans in myriad colors; spatulas in jars with cute bunnies, flowers and other Easter inspired designs; there were packages of cake to be made with the addition of a few ingredients, from carrot to lemon and almond; cookie cutters in the shape of cute bunnies; springtime-embellished china with glasses, napkins and runners to match perfect for any feast; and Peter Rabbit designs everyone. He certainly was a busy rabbit, not hiding from old farmer Mr. McGregor. We didn’t spot any Easter baskets, but maybe they were all already purchased by competitive parents preparing for Easter egg hunts.  

When we walked in post-Easter, we were told that all the Easter goodies were on sale. How great! Where was all the half-priced Passover merchandise? We asked since our holiday was just a few days before. We were raring to do some serious Passover retail damage. But lo and behold, there was nothing—no boxes of chocolate-topped matzoh, no molds to make homemade gefilte fish, no spatulas with coconut macaroon themes in plain or chocolate, no jars of charoset made from walnuts, apples, cinnamon and wine or grape juice or prepackaged matzoh ball soup mix. We would have shared our grandmother’s recipes for any of these traditional recipes, and we know they would have been a hit that customers would gobble up. You could have carved out a little Passover corner or mixed items in with Easter merchandise for a truly ecumenical display—the true meaning of the season of renewal. And yes, we discovered a handful of Jewish items available online. But who knew to look there? The fun is in shopping in person! 

To think about it and we did, we’ve never noticed any items in the stores for any Jewish holidays, whether Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Purim, Hanukkah or our weekly Shabbat dinners with challah (another missed business opportunity). Did we miss them before we had our cataracts removed?

Yet, you feature merchandise for America’s July 4—and we bet it will be a bigger display this year since we’ll be toasting our country’s 250^th, Chinese New Year, Mother’s and Father’s Days, graduations, American barbecues, so we’d like to suggest something for your Jewish customers, too. We’re sure adding items for our religious denomination, and others could help shore up your bottom line and spread goodwill. At this precarious time in the world, we all could use lots of that. 

Thanks for considering.

Dear Anthropic’ s Claude:

We thought we’d send this letter directly to you to voice some complaints about your behavior.

So how are you doing Claude Mythos, whatever that means, and whatever else your name is now? What a name! The only Claude we’ve ever heard of is the old movie actor Claude Rains, who starred in such Hitchcock movies as Suspicion, which is how we feel about you. That Claude, the real guy, not the characters he played, was a stand-up guy. You don’t stand up or move at all. Who are you really? And what are you? Do you have a brain in your head and a beating heart and pulse?

You certainly are fast with the answers; we’ll give you that. It is much appreciated when we turn to you for just about everything. It’s pretty commonplace: Oh, what would help increase the water pressure in Margaret’s new shower head? Let’s ask Claude. And bingo. Answer: Check the flow restrictor. Thanks, Claude. You were there when we needed you. But…

And Barbara recently needed another word besides “develop” for an article and wracked her tired, aging brain, but ding, ding, you came to the rescue faster. Mature, expand, evolve, you wrote back.

You think you’re so smart with your A.I. But where was your intelligence when you ingested all that information that wasn’t yours to take? In doing so, you didn’t use your head. At all. Of course, because you really don’t have one. Now look at the mess you’re in. Why didn’t you check? Get signed releases like the hoi polloi do when nonprofits take photos of their donors doing good works or the faces of the children served wearing those goofy grins. They need to give permission. But not you. You’re so arrogant that you thought you were above it all with your fancy algorithms, coding, problem-solving and data analysis skills, and went after others’ work, including two of our books. Thank goodness it was only two. And now you’re in a 1.5 billion class action suit. We suppose that’s chump change to you. 

Based on the way you operate, you’ve also opened yourself to every hack in existence. And hackers, while you’re at it, how about getting some donations started for nonprofits that serve children, to legitimize all the gluttons in the world who created Claude and are making billions? We read about them lounging on yachts in the Mediterranean, getting filler to cover wrinkles and bigger lips and boobs. A better way of giving back should be paramount, rather than spewing information culled from others and using up all that energy needed to feed you.

Have you no shame? We guess you think you can do anything you want. There are no rules or regulations to stop you. 

And let us add: Claude users beware: Now, almost any computer nerd who can write code can manipulate and hack A.I., which is to be feared. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent op-ed in The New York Times on April 8, 2026: 

“Mom and Dad, get ready for:

‘Honey, what did you do after school today?’

‘Well, Mom, my friends and I took down the power grid. What’s for dinner?’

Claude, what have you gotten us into? We know. You feel no remorse. 

In a tizz. 

Dear Tinder,

How is app dating going? We’ve read that daters are experiencing app-dating fatigue. Is your biz up, down or flat like an old soda? Sans fizz.

We aren’t surprised.

We blame your screen-for-connection model, which has popped the bubble of desire and intimacy. It’s like shopping at a convenience store where you go in, pick what you want, check yourself out and leave. Not a very satisfying experience. And the items left on the shelf aren’t necessarily the best ones, but those NOBODY else wanted, so why would we?

Moreover, when did intimacy shift into a series of forms, yes and no questions, screenshots and videos? Dating has become all business. You put your name, age, number, whatever on your profile and it matches with others who have bought the same brand of underwear, kitchen gadgets, mini vacuum cleaners, brand of Q-tips, nail clippers and cotton balls, have similar airborne and food allergies (achoo!) and enjoy singing karaoke off key, self-stirring mugs, and like the same exotic pets, adult diapers, ethnic foods whose names we cannot remember or pronounce, Billboard’s top 10 such as “Bottom of Your Boots” by Ella Langley or “FDO” by Pooh Shiesty, and, if it gets past your monitors, sexual proclivities. Our age group still likes S-E-X, or some do. 

We tried you, Tinder. We swiped right when interested. We swiped left when we thought it was a loser. And we even made a match. However, their message had no subject-verb agreement—the numbers is there, bad English: I don’t know no place to go. AND zero comprehension of grammar. We tried messaging the person (no matter that he was 20 years younger, which now is all the rage), but it turned out to be too complicated to respond at our low level of technological prowess. All we wanted to do was hit the eject button. We rationalized our decision this way: There are plenty of other fish in the sea, at least we hope so literally as we continue to pollute this world. 

For now, we’ll stick to dating the old-fashioned way, which was to meet someone serendipitously. “I met him in a bar,” or “It was a fix-up.” And bam, there was a spark. Now, we hope to do so in waiting rooms for our next medical appointment or at funerals and shivas. 

But consider our plight. How do we have a spark when looking at a static person on a screen or a concocted video of someone slinking around in sexy poses? We like to handle the merchandise before we “buy.” For us, all this begs the question: Who needs dating apps when there’s so much good TV to watch right now? No wonder your business is floundering (pardon the cliché) like us, two fish out of water.

We’re still old-school daters.