What the complaint line never hears

The complaints about a packet of crisps are easy to sort.

The bag splits along the seam. The flavour powder clumps in one corner. The packets at the bottom of the carton arrive crushed. Each complaint comes in from a shopper or a shopkeeper, and each one has a fix: a stronger seal, a finer powder, a stiffer carton. A brand that answers all of them is doing its job.

Nobody calls to say the bag is too big to finish on a bus ride and impossible to close afterwards. Nobody asks for a size that fits in a school pencil case, or one that a family of five in Faisal can share without an argument. Shoppers do not complain about things that were never offered. They buy whatever comes nearest, or they buy nothing.

That is the limit of listening only to complaints. They describe the product as it is. They are a map of its cracks, and a crack is always easier to see than an empty space.

Mending cracks feels like progress, because it can be counted and closed. The larger improvements tend to live where nobody is complaining, precisely because nobody has imagined them yet. Finding those means watching how the thing is actually used, at the corner shop at four in the afternoon, and asking what people are working around rather than what is going wrong.

A product with no complaints left can still be missing the best part of itself.