> This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong.

Many organizations have one of two perspectives on customer service:

A) It's an opportunity to ensure customer happiness and repeat customers.

B) It's a cost to be externalized to the customer as much as possible.

The organizations in group A are often like the local appliance shop nih mentions in another comment: small, with an interest in repeat business, and relying on word-of-mouth as the primary customer acquisition channel. They may be in a competitive marketplace nominally (i.e., there are big chains around) and so they know they can't compete on price, so they compete on convenience, attitude, help-when-things-go-wrong, advice, etc. Customers are often not so price-sensitive that they'll always go with the cheapest option. This used to be many businesses, but technology grants advantages to those in group B --

The organizations in group B compete on price, or exist in a local environment in which they don't really to compete for customers. Movie theaters, insurance companies, FAANGs, etc. -- they know that most customers are not really there by choice (at least anymore, perhaps they used to be) -- they're there because that's where their friends (F), the best stuff (A, A), their favorite movies (N), or the quickest results (G) are. They're there because their employer has a contract (insurance companies), they're there because it's the only theater in town, they're there because it's the strictly cheapest flight from SFO to YYZ.

For group B organizations, a dollar spent on customer service is a dollar lost; when things go wrong, it's up to the customer to resolve it, and the customer incurs basically the entire cost of this "fixing" it, even if the organization nominally issues a refund. The OP here was not reimbursed for any of the costs incurred by the theater's screw-up. When insurers deny claims spuriously and force their customers to do the leg work to show they're in the right, and the insurer doesn't reimburse the customer for the cost of time, energy, missed work, etc -- and would almost certainly laugh at an invoice for work the insurer should have done, but didn't.

After all, what's the customer going to do about it? They probably can't or don't want to switch to another vendor. If there even is an industry regulator, it's almost certainly not going to be worth it for an individual customer to even file a grievance.

> no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong

I think it's less that "no one has to think about what happens" when things go wrong, it's that the cost of things going wrong has simply been passed along to the customer.

One way to think about the extra cost of customer service for a company is as a mandated "insurance" plan for the customer when something goes wrong. The cost is spread across all customers, but the benefit only accrues to those who have something go wrong, or who want smiles -- except of course it also accrues to the customers who value the knowledge that if something goes wrong, there's an insurance policy for it.

Few people pay for insurance when they don't have to, so perhaps it's no surprise we see a trend towards group B.