Dear valued customer,

Thank you for writing us to share your disappointment with one of our products (Hunter Dog Food™, Gram’s Disposable Diapers™, Low-Sodium Teriyaki Canned Soup™, Deluxxe Chocolate Truffles™). We apologize that, due to circumstances beyond our control, a manufacturing error occurred at one of our facilities. Please help us improve our customer satisfaction experience by filling out this brief survey.

  1. Were you disappointed in our product because it was not of the quality you were expecting, or because of the spiders?
  2. Did the quality of our product match your expectations based on its price?
  3. Coming back to the question of spiders, are you afraid of spiders generally, or only “out of context”—say, when finding one on your bathroom towel after a shower, rather than in your tent while camping in the Adirondacks?
  4. Would it have made any difference in your customer experience to have known in advance that none of the spiders that wound up in our products were venomous, or were especially large by South Carolina standards?
  5. Minor production problems occur all the time in our country. In your opinion, why then has our company been singled out for public censure and a federal investigation? Does it have anything to do with the spiders?
  6. Suppose that you had found bluebottle flies, aphids, or potato beetles in our product, instead of spiders. Would that have made any difference in your customer experience?
  7. The vast majority of spiders are harmless creatures, and scientists have shown that they are more afraid of us than we are of them. So why did this experience upset you so much? Did something happen to you earlier in life to make you predisposed to overreact upon finding spiders in one or more of our products?
  8. Researchers warn that many Americans lack psychological resilience, having been mollycoddled by overprotective parents. Young people today panic when no one “likes” their Instagram posts, and many are unable even to meet your eyes when you pass them on the sidewalk. Compare them to the Greatest Generation, when our soldiers—fresh-faced kids barely out of diapers—faced down the Nazis in Europe. You never heard them complain about finding spiders in their foxholes. They had a lot more on their minds, trust me.
  9. When I was child, I once found a spider in my box of cereal one morning. My mother had left for work early, as was her habit after my father left us to marry his graduate student, so I often had to make breakfast on my own. You can imagine my surprise when I poured the cereal out into a bowl and also poured out a spider along with it! It was only a very little spider, smaller than a dime, and was not terribly hairy. Seeing the spider, I got a long wooden spoon from the drawer, coaxed him or her onto it, and gently transported the spider outside. It was not a big deal. Without further fuss, I immediately returned to the kitchen and ate my cereal. At no time did I become hysterical or “make a federal case” out of it. In fact, I do not recall even mentioning the incident to my mother—not even when she was on her death bed and we were clearing the air of all the unpleasantness that had developed between us over the long years. So the question is, why did you set aside time out of your busy day to write us an angry letter about finding a harmless spider in one of our products? That’s the question.
  10. In your view, can any democracy survive if its citizens exhibit distress or even terror in the face of any little damned thing that comes along to interrupt their thoughtless daily routines? If Americans are going to lose their minds over finding a few spiders in their baby’s nappies or their canned soups, how likely is it, really, that they will be able to summon the inner fortitude and emotional maturity needed to deal with global warming, pandemics, or an authoritarian government? We would really like to know.