I’m just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I’ve recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
Good question and good examples. With things like forced arbitration in user agreements I’d love to know more on how to turn things around on this.
I spoke to a lawyer about something similar to this recently and he basically just laughed at me. Told me there is no way it’s worth it, would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fight it in court and would basically have no gain to me personally at all. Overturning such a small amount no matter how wrong or immoral it is would be extremely costly on both sides but they have way more money to throw at the issue than I do which I totally agree with honestly. So you can do something that’s totally immoral, just as long as you have tons of money behind you to pay for it
And this right here is one of the fundamental injustices of the American legal system. It’s completely fucked that some conglomerate can basically railroad an individual into poverty from a bullshit lawsuit and that private individuals without deep pockets essentially have zero recourse in the legal arena.
Capitalism. The answer for most societal problems we face.
it’s because money equals power and they have all the money and are able to build mechanisms to suck the money you have so that they have even more money. Can’t help with the landlord but for the pest control using something like virtual credit cards numbers. so if they won’t let you cancel. you just delete that card and they lose acess to your payment details. when they contact you for payment just cancel right then.
Well one big fix would be to make legal services free at point of services and instead make the government responsible for paying the salaries of lawyers.
Call it Justice for All like Medicare for All but more patriotic sounding and litigious.
Kills SLAP suits, and opens the gates for people who had legitimate grievances but were scared of the legal fees and costs to have access to their day in court.
The country was founded by slave owners. After that we had various “industry barons” like railroads, petroleum, automobiles, etc. Now we have multinational corporations (with larger budgets and more power than several countries) calling the shots in congress. It’s always been like this. Post-WWII provided a brief respite, but that limited run of the “American Dream” was temporary and no longer exists.
Part of the solution would be: worker cooperatives. We need a lot more of those. It won’t solve everything, but it’s a really good start.
Ill add a worker cooperative might be even better than a union because a union can easily be corrupt
Basically we got all our rights in the post war period. Baby boomers and their parents had an excellent time, got theirs, then pulled up the ladder behind them. Zoomers will probably fix this but it’ll be interesting to see if it sticks this time.
We need a kind of everybody union.
I had this conversation with lots of people if everyone saw a company is doing things or taking advantage of people imagine if on the exact same day, one million customers canceled their accounts. That kind of unity can give all the power needed to the regular people. But you can’t get people to cooperate or even to have enough self-discipline to go along with something that isn’t for their immediate and measurable benefit. And so the big players know they can abuse and exploit.
In Australia ACCC takes care of abusive businesses, surely there must be something like that? Even 3rd world countries like Brazil has something like it.
Nope. America is OWNED by rich people. It’s a corporation and they make the laws so all the laws are to help them have more power.
I haven’t been to Brazil but as far as its politics goes I don’t think it’s that 3rd world
We have the Federal Trade Comission but it needs to have the balls to really protect us.
Even when they step up its usually a small fine the offender just writes off as the cost of doing business.
Corp breaks a law. Makes $100m profit. Gets $10m fine. All good for the books!!
One big union? For all the industrial workers in the world? I wonder if anyone has thought of that before.
Isn’t that ideally what the government is supposed to be? We can’t all individually fight for ourselves, so we vote for people to represent us and work to protect our interests. That is, if politicians actual represented their constituents and not the highest bidder.
We need a kind of everybody union.
In a democracy, that’s called a government.
U.S.A. is not a democracy, it’s an oligarchy. Has been for decades, but more so now than ever before. Corporations have begun to openly ignore law and have no fear of punishment. Because they own the government they write the laws and they decide what happens everywhere.
As I said in a different comment, it’s a painful thing to hear, but the sad simple truth is, the bad guys won.
The country was founded by slave owners.
Thanks for starting your argument with this, so I know I can ignore the rest.
So you don’t understand basic American history or what the word ignore means. Got it.
