Posted by rntn 10/23/2024
Stuff of the form
Claim A*
* Actually not A
Should be illegal. Someone buying a product isn't a lawyer and shouldn't need one. Fine print in take-it-or-leave-it contracts that don't encode a persons reasonable expectation of the purchase agreement should be thrown out and labeled deceptive advertising.
> Claim A*
> * Actually not A
> Should be illegal.
Sounds simple in theory, but not so simple in practice? You can't possibly encode all the legitimate exclusions into a big banner you can advertise, and nobody wants to read an essay to figure out the common case. You'd need to draw the line somewhere and I'm not sure that's an easy boundary to delineate.
So a company can profit from such claims, and then ultimately go bankrupt to protect those already-dispersed profits.
(IANAL, so I'm probably missing some major caveats.)
This is the reason I don't buy Nebula's $300 lifetime plan. I want the company to succeed and still be here in ten years, so I don't want to take that offer and contribute to their bankruptcy.
Just because lifetime guarantee does often mean "reasonable lifetime of the product", which does differ, and requires reasonable maintenance, doesn't mean you can just make shit up. Otherwise you put yourself in this very position where you need to argue and prove exactly what a reasonable person would conclude the contract meant.
Words don't suddenly become meaningless just because the "fine print" is ambiguous.
> "T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile One plan," the company said in a pledge that enticed many people to switch plans or even switch from another carrier to T-Mobile.
I don't think it's reasonable to use anything but regular definitions for the words in that particular quote.
Rather, they are pulling this off a completely different way:
> "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost."
So the price of the service is not changing during the reasonable lifetime of the service nor the lifetime of the consumer. Rather, the service is no longer being offered.
And this is probably permitted in the fine print of the offer. They did not just make this up in their marketing department without at least some consideration of the ways they could escape from it.
But to try to ditch their responsibility with a technicality is so scummy. I don't have T-Mobile, and with that one line of corp speak I never will
We seem to have reached a point where there is effectively no place you can get decent customer service as an ordinary consumer. It's either, have enough money to sue the crap out of companies, or shut your mouth and endure.
Decades of demonization of regulations has led to a point where the Govt's ability to enforce them is effectively null. With the regulators out of the picture, T-Mobile knows the only real recourse you have is the courts and that a vanishingly small percentage of customers will take that path.
If money maintained stable value over the long term, companies could honestly make promises about "lifetime" pricing. These promises were probably made during the "low 2%" inflation of the past, but basic economic understanding would point out that such a plan is doomed.
Better yet, in a deflationary monetary regime, a constant price would net the companies more profit over time. Users would probably clamor for lowered prices on these plans, and companies could advertise "Lifetime pricing plans are now cheaper! You get more for less!"