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?

  • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
    0·
    21 days ago

    You have basically two options.

    1. vote for Democrats, and make sure your Democrat representatives know that you care a lot about consumer protections

    2. make a shit ton of money so you can fight these companies on more even footing

  • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
    0·
    21 days ago

    Businesses have more money than individual citizens. You will get what you want from the U.S. government and local government when we get money out of politics -Full-stop.

  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
    0·
    21 days ago

    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.

  • How_do_I_computah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    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.

    • Buttflapper@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      21 days ago

      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

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
        0·
        21 days ago

        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.

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    21 days ago

    because private companies were never meant to big this big and powerful.

    They have so much power because they lobby and control the government, part of the problem is dems being generally unappealing and trying to focus more on less significant social issues rather than doing things like, taking away the rights that big corpos never should’ve had in the first place.

    It’s a give and take game, the less regulations you have, the more companies you have and the more capital you have moving through you, the more you have the less regulations you have and the less capital you have moving through you.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
    0·
    20 days ago

    When corpotations are allowed to buy out politicians, this is the end result. Corporations have no responsibility, they know they will not be held accountable.

  • capital_sniff@lemmy.world
    0·
    21 days ago

    Corporations tried out binding arbitration and the people just took it with very little complaining. So why not keep eroding consumer protections or the other rights citizens fought for in the before times?

  • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    21 days ago

    I just started listening to a new podcast series called Master Plan that talks about how this happened deliberately and systematically over decades. It followed the Powell Doctrine. You can hear a conversation between the primary host, David Sirota, and Brianna Joy Gray (she’s not one of my favorites, but I tuned in because it was him) on Bad Faith podcast.

  • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
    0·
    21 days ago

    $1000 is likely small claims court. At least where I was, no lawyers are allowed for small claims so the landlord would have to come to deal with it himself or a representative of the payment company.

  • FireTower@lemmy.world
    0·
    21 days ago

    1. Contact local counsel. There’s probably an attorney who practices in rental law near you that does free consultations.

    2. It’s not that we don’t have protections it’s that we have an access to justice issue.