Quote:
Originally posted by Diane_Keaton
For some of these business arrangements, you only "play stupidly" and there's no such thing as "playing it smart". Take a look at many of the businesses you want to see thrive and not weighed down with government regulation. Their business model is to trap stoopid people into doing stoopid things. Why else wouldn't these companies be up front about their terms? Want to hose customers? Don't use .4 font size. Explain the deal accurately (disclosure) and if you get business - fine. Why would you object to disclosure rules? (Your post seems to say you'd be against disclosure rules too).
I see the protection argument differently. Take for instance a scam where a customer signs onto a credit card with zero interest for a year and so customer gets a 10,000 interest free loan for a year so he can fix up his house. The card terms say if he is late on a payment, he has to start paying interest and it is outrageously high. In a month or two, credit card company sends him his monthly bill late and when his payment is therefore "late", the company now gets to enjoy a really high interest rate from him and all the other customers they suckered (because it was in their business model all along that most customers sent late bills would make late payments). Company points to fine print that has a provision saying customer has to make payment every month even if he/she doesn't get a bill. If the customer doesn't know how much balance he has to pay, he should have called before the due date. You'd want all this to go on unregulated? Why? How about if the provision wasn't in the fine print, but the fine print simply said "if you want more details about payment terms, you have the right to contact us and we'll send more information."
Same bullshit applies when customers are tricked into buying insurance premiums they don't need when they can't see (just as the company planned) the reference that signing some other document (unrelated) means they are agreeing they want life insurance.
Think about the scams that could perpetrated on your grandmother, boy!
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Its like porn channels. You don't like it? You don't want it? Change the fucking channel.
Nobody is forcing anybody into these deals. People will always have the option to just say "no, thanks." You throw away about five or ten financing offers a week, right? Well, so can everyone else.
Sales is a game of trickery. You are being separated from your money. Fraud is one thing, but I see tons of people who say "Yeh, but I didn't know that" when someone tries to enforce a contract aginst them. And they're not just disadvantaged folks. Businessmen claims stupidity as a defense to signing integrated agreements all the time. "Fraud in the inducement" is so forgiving and so frequently used these days that a lot of contracts aren't worth their paper's value.
People need to learn they cannot go out and grab fast cash from a loan shark, then cry "I was robbed" later and go running to a class action lawyer or regulator. We've traiend a lot of society to believe they have no duty to perform any of their own due diligence. No wonder we're such a fucked up pack of people.
