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?
It sounds like you need a tenants union.
Local organization is a great option. Not everything needs the federal government to come in and smack people.
We surely can do both, but you personally can start a tenants Union today.
Capitalism. The answer for most societal problems we face.
We’re peasants and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Well, there are things that could be done about it, but it’s been made very difficult to do .
Yeah I am seeing this more and more. You even see it business to business. We need regulation, monopoly busting, and progressive taxation.
I don’t know if you’ve been following what Lina Khan’s been doing with the FTC but there’s some incredibly antitrust work which she’s been putting into play. They’ve been really going after monopolization and Biden’s been putting forth rules to make breaking subscriptions easier, which would help with OPs particular problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/us/us-government-unsubscribe-memberships.html.
To make major, sustained, positive change would require widespread violent revolution.
It’s the only thing we will have left pretty soon. Capitalism is pretty close to flatlining. Then we will have a Corporate Congress and the nation will become The United Corporation of America - in name as opposed to now where that’s what it is but it’s not yet called that.
I do anticipate fascism becoming overt after November, but the powers that be will market it well, like that time they turned Nazism into ‘White Nationalism’.
We already have corporate Congress.
Because we ordinary people do not possess extraordinary funds to buy that protection
What the hell is “pet rent”?
This is why we have commas.
It’s a real thing. It’s a fee every month for having a pet in a rental.
A monthly fee for having a pet in a rental
You have basically two options.
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vote for Democrats, and make sure your Democrat representatives know that you care a lot about consumer protections
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make a shit ton of money so you can fight these companies on more even footing
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Start organized movements to heavily push for ranked choice voting. If it becomes a national movement then maybe we’ll first start seeing it locally, then on a larger scale.
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
You got over $1000 in late fees from a single month of not having the full amount?
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Contact local counsel. There’s probably an attorney who practices in rental law near you that does free consultations.
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It’s not that we don’t have protections it’s that we have an access to justice issue.
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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?
everytime I start telling people how to make guillotines everyone gets upset and says that they really didn’t solutions they meant… like… bandaids
Have you seen the price of timber these days?
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.
