FIELD NOTES

October 2026

10 MIN READ

TVC FIELD NOTES · No. 03

The trust tax

Why we keep buying from people we don’t believe.

Where trust used to live

The shopkeeperThe founder storyThe About pageFive-star reviews

Where trust lives now

The shopkeeperThe founder storyThe About pageFive-star reviewsReddit threadsGroup chatsCredit card disputesFree returnsFriends who’ve tried it“legit reddit”

Shopping in 2026 always starts the same way. Pinterest serves me a linen dress the color of boba tea, or Instagram slides a lopsided mug into my feed I definitely don’t need.

So I open a new tab and type the shop’s name plus “legit reddit.” I don’t look at Google reviews or the five-star testimonials on the shop’s own site or the About page with the founder surrounded by bolts of fabric or dried flowers or whatever the hell we’ve agreed means small-batch. I want to hear from the person with the cartoon frog avatar talking shit with no affiliate code and, as far as I can tell, no reason to lie to me.

More than 1 in 5 shoppers in Reddit’s own survey say they do some version of this, and half of US shoppers say they use Reddit to double-check what AI tells them to buy.

So we’ll take the word of a stranger called onlyflans_87 over the person whose name is on the packaging.

DEFAULT SETTING

Our default setting right now is to not trust anyone selling us anything.

We’re all amateur media critics now. We can smell the #ad before the influencer gets to the discount code. We know the algorithm is working us, feeding us whatever keeps us scrolling or keeps us snug in our little echo chamber. We know the founder story might have been written by AI and the founder photo might have six fingers. We get scam calls constantly (Truecaller estimates the average US smartphone user gets about eight spam calls a month). And we know that charming little ceramics shop might be drop-shipping the same mug as the twelve other charming little ceramics shops on Temu.

Or at least we think we know. The UK’s ad regulator found people feel confident they can spot influencer ads, but that confidence “does not always translate into accurate recognition.” Same with drop-shipping. In a Nordic consumer survey, more than half of people said they know what it is, but over 60% didn’t realize those sites often don’t come with the consumer protection they assume they’re getting.

I recently watched You Can See Everything, the Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. Thirty-four days before she went to prison for fraud, she let cameras into her house for what was pitched as “radical transparency.” I went in pretty smug about it. She’s obviously using the film to lie to us, and I could see exactly what she was doing.

Then somewhere near the end, I couldn’t. She tells this whole story about how her brain works differently, and I started wondering if she actually believes it, or if that’s the manipulation. Then I started questioning Nathan too, whether he’d gone soft on her or was just playing it that way for the bit. I walked out realizing I knew diddly squat.

That’s the part that’s unnerving. It’s not that we can’t see. We can see everything now. We just don’t trust our own read on it anymore, so we hand that job to someone else.

THE UNDO BUTTON

We still buy because we trust the undo button.

Here’s a personal example: I needed a dress for a wedding, last minute. On this day, I had Reddit amnesia and hit ‘complete purchase’ way too quickly. The dress arrived 3 weeks after it said it would, 3 weeks AFTER the wedding, which was annoying, but what made it worse was that when it arrived, it looked less like a dress than the early stages of one. It was so ridiculous I laughed about it and then sent a threatening email. But I got crickets.

So I disputed the charge, got my money back and went on with my life. A remarkably frictionless ending to a transaction with a business I’ve never heard from since.

I didn’t actually need to trust that shop, because I trusted my credit card. In a 2025 survey of people who’d recently disputed a charge, nearly half (48%) went straight to their bank without contacting the seller at all. And 88% said winning a dispute makes them more likely to do it again. Chargebacks911, a payments research firm, calls this the “convenience paradox” and it’s colloquially also known as the “undo button”.

Returns work the same way. Retailers expected nearly a fifth (19.3%) of online sales to come back in 2025. Half of Gen Z shoppers “bracket,” meaning they order a few sizes knowing most of it is going back. And 82% of shoppers say free returns are a major consideration when they buy.

It’s kind of how a lot of things feel right now. You can always swipe again, send it back, start over. A bad purchase is a temporary grievance.

The undo button has made us very brave shoppers. We’ll buy from a brand we don’t trust, order three sizes we don’t intend to keep, and call the bank before we call the seller. That dress shop never had to earn a second of my trust, and it never tried.

That’s what I mean by the lie being priced in. The possibility that a seller is lying to us is already built into how we shop: the refund policy we check first, the chargeback we know we can file, the three sizes in the cart. Distrust is part of how the sale works now.

BORROWED TRUST

Or we borrow trust from people we know.

What I’m really doing on Reddit is borrowing trust. I’m looking for someone who’s already been through it, so I don’t have to. And more of us are doing it: 43% of US consumers told Gartner this year that they rely more on real people for shopping info because of all the AI content out there.

Word of mouth has always been the most trusted kind of marketing. In Nielsen’s last big trust study, 89% of Americans said they trust recommendations from people they know, more than any ad. That was 2021, so it’s a little dated, but I’d bet it hasn’t gone down.

THE DEEPER AUDIENCE TRUTH

We’ve always trusted the people we expect to see again.

My bank will still be there next month. My friend will still be my friend next week. They both have something to lose if they steer me wrong. Dodgy shops that sold me that dress has nothing to lose. It was never going to see me again. And even if they get reported a hundred times and taken down, they will just respawn under a new name next week. More on this later.

Buying used to work like the bank and the friend (the baker, the tailor, the person behind the hardware store counter all had to face you next week). Sell you something bad and you’d be right back at the counter all red in the face, and so would your neighbors. Game theorists actually have a name for this. The political scientist Robert Axelrod called it “the shadow of the future”: people play fair when they expect to meet again.

And it shows up in what people actually do with real money. Researchers had an experienced eBay seller list matched lots of vintage postcards, same prices and same terms, under his established account and under seven brand-new ones. Same seller and same postcards. The established account made 7.6% more. The extra money was basically for proof he hadn’t just shown up yesterday.

Someone you’ll never see again is also easier to overcharge. In one study, taxi drivers took airport passengers on routes about 8% longer than comparable Uber trips, and went farther still when the passenger was from out of town. Apparently “you’re not from here, are you?” is also a business model.

Sellers have an undo button too. New domain, new logo, same basic Shopify theme. When The Globe and Mail tracked more than five million Shopify stores, the median store opened in 2021 lasted 143 days (Shopify disputes the analysis, and it’s from before AI store builders). Fake shops move even faster: a 2026 European Parliament study found they often relaunch under a new domain within hours of being taken down. Customers have to investigate every new seller from scratch, the sellers respawn, and it’s honestly exhausting.

THE FIRST PURCHASE

Your founder story gets you the first purchase, and that’s about all it can do now.

The founder story has become brand wallpaper. My face, my childhood, the moment I realized the world needed another adaptogenic beverage. It still works for getting someone to try you, which is exactly why everyone does it. Mark Gallo, a beverage sales and distribution manager, told Modern Retail this summer that a celebrity’s name “helps convert the first purchase,” but “the product’s taste, effectiveness and price point drive the second purchase.”

It’s also now the cheapest part of a brand to fake. The UK’s ad regulator has documented scam clothing ads with AI-generated photos of the “owner,” sad closing-down stories, “handmade” claims and British city names in the brand name to sound local. Meta took down a whole set of fake “British” boutiques, invented owners and all, after the BBC exposed them. A face still persuades people but it doesn’t count as evidence anymore.

PRESENCE

Presence only counts if people can still find you later.

I have a sweater that taught me something. Someone came into my community and sold us a bunch of streetwear. I spent $50 on a sweater, and if I’m being real, I wasn’t just buying a sweater, I was buying into the idea that I was supporting one of us. Then they moved, and we haven’t heard from them since.

The sweater is a perfectly good sweater. But it doesn’t feel like it came from someone invested in us anymore, or from a brand we’re proud of. It feels like I bought it off a traveling snake oil salesman.

(not the real sweater, but similar vibe).

That person was physically there, standing right in front of us in our own community, selling to us face to face. That’s about as real as a brand gets. And it still didn’t hold, because they didn’t stay.

When they left, it kind of changed something I’d already bought. Sure, the sweater’s the same sweater, but it means something different to me now. In No. 01 I wrote that we don’t just consume things, we consume symbols, and this is that, playing out in my own closet. When I bought it, it stood for belonging to something, but now it pisses me off and reminds me that I misread the transaction. I tried to donate it, but even the thrift store didn’t want it.

It’s kind of like cash, honestly. We trust it because it’s supposed to be backed by something real. A brand’s backing is whether it’s still around to answer for what it sold.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Be the reason they don’t need the undo button.

If your customer’s plan B is their credit card company, they’ve already planned for you not to come through. And the undo button costs you, not them. In a 2026 survey, merchants said they lose more than $4 for every $1 disputed, and 38% are now building chargeback costs into their prices.

So the lie gets priced in on both sides. Merchants build chargebacks and returns into their prices, and shoppers build suspicion into the way they shop. Everybody ends up paying for trust nobody actually has.

You can’t stop people keeping a hand on doorknob, and you shouldn’t want to, because easy returns also make people more willing to try you. Unfortunately, the things that work are kind of... unsexy. Like answering an email or honoring the refund without asking a million things or admitting you got something wrong or still being there when the excitement of the launch is over and nobody is filming it for the gram.

QUESTIONS BRANDS SHOULD BE ASKING

If a customer had a problem today, would they email you or call their bank?
What would someone find if they googled your name plus “legit reddit”?
What can a customer check about you that a scammer couldn’t fake in a weekend?
What did people buy into when they bought from you, and are you still showing up for it?
If you stopped trading tomorrow, what would happen to the people who bought from you?

Customers already have a backup plan for you. Your job isn’t to ask them to trust you.

It’s to make them feel smart for trusting you, not stupid for wanting to.