“We are experiencing a particularly heavy volume of calls. You are important to us, so please accept our apologies for the wait time. You will be connected to the next available operator.” Followed by bad music, upsell marketing materials… and when you connect, the “customer service representative” cannot help you and refers you to a different telephone number. Repeat above. If you choose the online “chat” alternative, prepare for 1. A referral to FAQs. 2. A chat-bot with preprogrammed ask-and-answer standards or a list of categories for further conversation (none of which fits your query). A chat-tech finally comes on… and they can’t help you… so next… Sound familiar?
Oh, and don’t forget the “accept” button you clicked, which may have given the relevant company ownership of your first born for all you know, at the inception of the relevant service. Yeah, THAT. See my January 30th I Agree and Accept blog for more on that nails-on-the-chalkboard moment. You may be one of those who hope for the day when artificial intelligence takes over, teaches itself how to respond to more detailed and nuanced questions and customer service, or like most of us, you may crave an intelligent warm body who actually has authority and knows what they are doing. But if that warm body is located in India, Costa Rica, the Philippines or, unknown to you, a state or federal prison where inmates make their twenty-five cents an hour/slave labor as “customer services representatives” …. Well, you get it.
To make matters worse, occasionally, when you are able to break through the logjam created to deter your actually getting through and imposing a burden on the relevant purveyor of goods and services, you find that the person on the other end of the line is actually angry at you for pressing your question or claim. You are constantly asked to “rate your transaction,” an annoyance for relatively minor purchase. Sometimes there are multiple follow-up texts, emails and even phone calls from… er… robots. The ubiquitous online availability of goods and services often comes with a price. Oh, there are properly responsive companies, but they are indeed rare. Is the “but that’s what the vast majority of American companies do” a viable excuse? Does a provider get off the hook because they are simply too big to give you what they promised on an individualized basis? Even when they know they are wrong?
But wait, there’s more like the little “add-ons” that the company you are dealing with hopes are too much trouble for you to dispute. Like “resort fees” on hotel bills. “Return fees” even for defective items. New “service fees” for stuff they used to do routinely for free from banks and credit card providers… now airlines. And God help you if your account was hacked and you are trying to fix the problem with the vendor, often a vendor you never dealt with! When you are pressed to the wall, even ready to take the vendor to court, you are reminded of the small print you accepted that shoves any such claim into a company-slanted arbitration process, one that overwhelmed courts tend to enforce at the expense of allowing you to access the civil justice system your tax dollars support.
There are people in the world fighting for consumers. Writing for the February 27th Los Angeles Times, op-ed contributor Michael Hiltzik tells us: “[Harvey] Rosenfield is one of our most effective consumer advocates. A former Nader’s Raider, he’s the founder of the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and was the author of California’s landmark Proposition 103 of 1988. That ballot measure rolled back auto, property and casualty insurance rates by 20%, created the position of an elected insurance commissioner, and gave the commissioner prior approval authority over those rates… ‘People know that the civil justice system is broken,’ says… Rosenfield. ‘In their daily pocketbook struggles they’re completely vulnerable. Most Americans have no rights or remedies.’”
Rosenfield is co-author of an examination of consumer rights over the past fifty years: “Reboot Required.” “What the report’s readers will most readily recognize are its catalog of consumer ripoffs — some familiar, and some so novel that they may be invisible to most consumers… In addition to those mentioned above, they include lying about list prices and overstating discounts; bogus claims that foods are ‘all-natural’; and automatic renewals of subscription services and obstacles to cancellations.” LA Times. The Trump era marked the defunding of already inadequate consumer protection agencies. With free spending to support political issues and candidates unleashed by the horrific 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the entire political system tilted instantly towards wealthy corporate contributors. “Deregulation” became another watchword for “screw the consumer.”
When they do get caught, the levels of corporate misappropriation and misdeeds can be staggering, although to the companies involved, the financial costs are a mere drop in the bucket… but companies often avoid even that. “Amazon, for instance, was fined $1.1 million by Canadian regulators in 2017 for inflating supposed customer savings by displaying inaccurate list prices, a practice exposed by Consumer Watchdog. In the U.S., customers sued, but Amazon was able to force them into arbitration and the lawsuits were dismissed… In 2015, Volkswagen was found to have programmed its diesel vehicles to produce deceptively clean emission test results, and was ordered to pay fines and penalties of $25 billion.
“Data breaches are legion, some involving the personal information of scores or hundreds of millions of consumers, because so many companies fail to make necessary investments to protect people’s data from hackers… The negligent companies customarily offer victims free identity theft protections, if only for limited periods, though the effectiveness of these offers is questionable.” LA Times.
Is there hope? Rosenfield and co-author Laura Antonini have drafted model legislation that can be passed by states that care (generally not the red ones). The Biden administration is also attempting to restore consumer agencies that Trump defunded or marginalized. “Under President Biden, consumers may be notching some victories. In an executive order last July, Biden took aim at a multitude of business practices that make life difficult for Americans, including high drug prices and proliferating airline fees.
“The order directs federal agencies to take a closer look at proposed mergers that could drive up consumer prices and reduce consumer choice; that would be a radical and overdue reshaping of government antitrust policy… Lina Khan, Biden’s appointee as chair of the FTC, has a strongly pro-consumer record — so much so that Amazon and Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) have sought to have her thrown off cases the FTC has brought against them.
“Under its new director, Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun to assemble a case against financial ‘junk fees’ such as ‘late fees, overdraft fees, non-sufficient funds (NSF) fees, convenience fees for processing payments, minimum balance fees, return item fees, stop payment fees, check image fees, fees for paper statements, fees to replace a card’ and so on.” LA Times.
When you realize that the consequences of letting corporate America get away with these practices often impacts your credit score, you many learn that your ability to get loans (mortgages and car loans included) or even to get a job become tainted. So, if you think your vote is irrelevant, that there is nothing you can do about a system devolving against ordinary people, remember, ordinary people still can vote (at least in most states).
I’m Peter Dekom, and while a market capitalistic system is what made America great, until recently there was an off-setting system of checks and balances to protect individual rights that must be restored and enhanced.
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