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I’ve been spending more time on Facebook this year, participating in discussions in author communities, keeping tabs on friends from middle school who don’t remember that I exist, and getting served tantalizing targeted ads.
In advance of return trips to my parents’ house, it’s become a tradition to ship gourmet food from online purveyors like D’Artagnan and Marky’s. My family has enjoyed all types of luxurious and eccentric food items, and many holiday meals have been constructed around roasts, tenderloins, and birds from D’Artagnan. It makes sense that I receive targeted advertisements for other types of luxury foods.
However, continuing to evaluate ads after one particularly disappointing purchasing experience, I’ve realized that niche food purveyors running ads on Facebook are increasingly making use of “dark patterns” and techniques that I feel misrepresent their brands, taint ads, and ultimately mislead customers.
On April 15, 2025, I ordered a box of fruit from Tropical Fruit Box.
As if the colorful, exotic products don’t sell themselves, the company selling them is a well-tuned marketing machine, with saturation for those sweet fruity keywords across the internet and plenty of mouth-watering pictures. However, my experience was not so sweet. In this blog post, I’ll explore some of the mishaps involved in ordering a box of fruit in 2025 while trying to speak more generally about bad practices in modern marketing machines.
Email Marketing Onslaught
From the moment I handed over my email address, I faced a deluge of emails from Tropical Fruit Box. The day after ordering: a “thank you” email, a tracking link, an order confirmation email, an email beckoning me to earn “Tropi Points,” and, finally, an email asking how my Tropical Fruit Box was. That’s right–five emails in a day.
The emails continued at a regular cadence. Before cancelling my email subscription on July 19, I received over 30 emails from Tropical Fruit Box, excluding customer support or order status emails!
Opaque Processing and Delivery Times
I ordered the fruit box for Easter, which was on April 20, 2025. Based on what I had read on the website, I thought there was a pretty good chance things would arrive on time. Unfortunately, the processing and shipping times were conflated. It took eight days for the fruit to ship, and then three days for it to be delivered, finally arriving on April 25, 2025.
I find it odd that a company using so much marketing “technology” can’t just provide a delivery date selection box at checkout like major meat purveyors do. This part of the experience was disappointing.
Masquerading AI as Human
When I received the shipping email, I had already left my parents’ house and wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the fruit with them. I didn’t ask for a refund or anything, but I asked for a clarification of what the shipping timelines on the website actually meant.
Tropical Fruit Box employs an AI email response system. A minute after I sent my email, I received a kind but opaque response asking for 24-72 hours “for a response.” Hm, I thought. This…was…a response.
In the footer of the email, it is revealed: “P.S. Normally we shy away from automated messaging like this because it feels impersonal. However, we’ve heard from many customers that they like confirmation that we received the request. Don’t worry, a human will get back to you”
Translation: since customers have poor reading comprehension and short attention spans, we can trick some of them into thinking that their (stupid) requests have been responded to and thus alleviate our support burden.
A human never got back to me.
I wrote a review complaining about this.
Reviews.io Misleading Review Management
The most awful dark pattern employed by Tropical Fruit Box is its exclusive usage of Reviews.io, a review platform. One might ask, “Why not use Google Reviews?”
Because, you see, reviews are a liability. Companies don’t want negative reviews. They really, really, don’t want negative reviews. So, while they beg customers for positive reviews, they’ve created a cottage industry of manipulative review platforms like Reviews.io, which “moderate” bad reviews.
Remember a world where you’d leave a review, it’d be posted immediately, and then the company would have to respond?
That’s not how it works anymore. Reviews.io helps companies accumulate positive reviews while silencing negative ones. On Reviews.io, my first review was never posted. I was asked to verify my email address, or phone number, or something. Yet, that confirmation code never arrived. Malicious or just a technical bug? Most people would write it off and move on. I didn’t.
On May 23rd, I tried again. Although I did receive a confirmation code, my review–again–wasn’t posted.
This triggered ANOTHER canned, AI response from Tropical Fruit Box. My review, referenced in the email, had a status, “Moderated,” meaning it was never posted. Ahem, “moderated,” meaning, inconvenient. “Moderated” meaning: “There’s no way this guy can post a public review of our product or customer support.”
My review: “Fruit came extremely late as the handling/shipping combo time was concealed during ordering. Customer service never answered my email after first sending an AI response. At least a quarter of the fruit was inedible. Wrote a review weeks ago and it never got posted here, pretty suspicious.”
This was an accurate, honest, totally fair review. Nobody should be moderating a review like this. Doing so, in my opinion, is an effort to deceive consumers and silence those who haven’t had good experiences. Not everything in this world is five stars out of five.
A second chance?
Five days after responding to the AI, Monica from customer support emailed me, offering to send a courtesy replacement. I said “ok, this is reasonable.” I said send it over for 7/3/25, the next time I’d be home.
A few days later, I received an email from someone named Anna asking for my order number or name. I sent the order number.
On June 26, after not hearing back, I asked for a confirmation email. Again, the AI responded, saying that things were being escalated.
The next email, from Anna, said “We did not receive a response back to our last message as to why we have not proceeded.” They had created two separate threads for my email address–one for me, Tim, and one for my very old Grandmother, who I had shipped the fruit to, who for a brief period of time was able to read and write emails, but is no longer capable of doing so.
I responded letting the support team know they had been viewing the wrong thread and that I was the only point of contact.
On July 1, I was informed that the replacement order was created, but that it wouldn’t arrive until “next week,” again missing the delivery window. Contrary to this, the fruit did arrive on time. I finally had the chance to try it, after jumping through more hoops.
Summary
As I said in my book Framed, nobody was ever looking out for me when I explored the early internet. These days, shady companies “moderate” things under false pretenses while employing dark patterns and crappy customer service. I’m frustrated, and now I’ve found myself in the position where I am looking out for people. Go figure. We need better consumer protections. Corrupt review platforms like Reviews.io need to be exposed for what they are. My review was never posted, so my hope is that this platform can be used to escalate my complaint and offer a few words of caution to anyone else getting served ads for tropical fruit.
