Oklahoma City, OK — 25 November 2025 — This Black Friday, while Americans are refreshing tracking numbers and begging chatbots for help, author and former customer service executive Amas Tenumah is breaking a rule the industry swears you’ll never hear spoken aloud:
Customer service isn’t broken.
It’s rigged — on purpose.
In his new book HOLD, Tenumah exposes how corporations quietly built a service system that looks chaotic on the surface but works perfectly for the people who designed it. Long hold times, dead-end bots, impossible cancellations, and endless transfers aren’t accidents. They’re cost-saving strategies disguised as incompetence.
Tenumah spent years running contact centers and advising Fortune 100s. He helped build the machine.
Now he’s telling the truth about it.
What HOLD Reveals
Tenumah names the system for what it is: the suffering economy of customer service — a model that pushes unpaid labor onto customers while executives boast about “efficiency.”
The book lays out how it works:
- Every minute you wait is free labor for the company.
- Every broken chatbot shifts work from employees to customers.
- Every maze-like phone tree is engineered to make people give up.
- Every ‘friction’ point is a financial decision, not a mistake.
- AI is not fixing service — it’s industrializing the suffering.
For years, the industry told consumers to “be patient.” HOLD argues the opposite: Patience is how the system wins.
Why This Matters Right Now
Black Friday is the Super Bowl of corporate indifference. The perfect storm:
- Record orders
- Minimal staffing
- Automated everything
- Bots that can’t solve anything meaningful
- Phone numbers buried six pages deep
Millions of Americans will spend hours trying to fix problems they didn’t create — and billions of dollars of their time will disappear into the void.
Tenumah says the quiet part loud: “They’re not understaffed. They’re over-profiting.”
HOLD gives people the language and framework to finally understand why every service interaction feels like a hostage negotiation — and why nothing improves.
Who’s Behind This Whistleblow
Amas Tenumah wasn’t an outsider watching from afar. He was inside the engine room:
- Running contact centers
- Managing budgets
- Training leaders
- Designing service strategies companies still use today
He witnessed the real rules:
- Solve fewer problems → save more money
- Make the customer do the work → call volumes drop
- Route frustration into bots → expense lines look heroic
Now he’s done being quiet about it.
From his platform Waiting for Service, Tenumah is leading a growing consumer movement demanding transparency, accountability, and an end to corporations taxing Americans with their own time.
The Book
HOLD
Available Black Friday
Paperback + eBook
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FXN4PQRW
Website: https://www.waitingforservice.com
The Stakes
This is not a customer service book.
It’s a declaration.
HOLD confronts a truth most executives hope never reaches daylight:
America doesn’t have a customer service problem.
It has a design problem — and the design was never for you.
Tenumah calls for journalists, consumers, and policymakers to stop accepting “bad service” as a natural outcome of modern life and start seeing it as the intentional cost-saving strategy it truly is.
“You’re not stuck in a broken system,” Tenumah says.
“You’re stuck in a profitable one.”
Black Friday is the perfect moment to expose it.
Media Contact
Amas Tenumah
amas@amastenumah.com
405-492-7881
5830 NW Expressway, Suite 148
Oklahoma City, OK 73132