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?
The unfortunate fact is it is a dog eat dog world, and corporations can and will fuck you over. Maintain a budget, maintain an emergency fund of $10k or 6 months living expenses (whichever is bigger) and be prepared to be screwed over so that when it does happen you don’t find yourself up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
On top of this, as an additional safety net, build a friend group and build a culture within your friend group of helping each other. One friend getting a surgery? Offer to cook for them, or bring them some precooked meals. A friend stuck on the side of the road, offer to come help, even if it’s just as emotional support.
I started this process a few months ago so I’m in a better position now that my work has announced that they’re relocating across the country and basically everyone is losing their jobs over the next 3-9 months. It would’ve been more convenient if this happened a year later, but it is what it is so now I have to shape my next steps and move forwards
The unfortunate fact is it is a dog eat dog world
No it’s not, that’s zero sum owner class propaganda designed to force us to waste energy competing with our peers instead of fighting the rich bastards
Humans have created a haven away from ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ where we DON’T have to compete with each other, and mutualism without profit is possible, it is literally the greatest achievement of our species, to short circuit natural selection.
In human culture, the weak and sick don’t have to be sacrificed for the good of the whole, and we can support a wide and diverse service and goods structure BECAUSE we have moved on from natural selection.
The problem is, predatory practices are often more rewarding short term than cooperative practices, and humans are geared for short term planning.
You get more food now for killing the farmer and taking his cattle, but you get more food for everyone forever if you let that farmer prosper.
Bandits kill the farmer, they are the ones telling you it is a dog eat dog world.
The farmer will tell you that the world is full of bounty if you put the effort in to cultivate it.
Yes a bandit uses less energy, and has more short term profit, but degrades the entire total outcome of the system by their greed.
This doesn’t change the fact that when no social safety net exists one must construct their own safety nets. That’s my point. We can talk all we want about how broken the systems are and how we would fix them if given the power to, but ultimately we have to live and survive. Use the good times to better prepare yourself to weather the bad, because good luck getting help from the government or corporations to do so
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The point of an emergency fund is it will get you through whatever unexpectable large expense without taking on debt. Car needed a repair and you had a health procedure plus your water heater went out all in the same year? 10k might not cover all of that but it will give you the options to manage those emergencies as they come up
Edit to add: banks also may carry more cash on hand than you might think. I worked IT at a bank fairly recently and I could see in the teller software as I remoted in to assist them that they’d have around 3-500 on their individual tills, and when I’d stop by branches to help out with things, sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of the stacks of cash kept in the on-site vault, or one time saw the teller pull out a $10k bundle of 100s to fulfill a customer request of a couple hundred bucks while I was assisting with something else. I don’t know exactly what goes into how a bank determines how much cash to keep at a given branch, but it’s certainly more than the couple thousand or so that people say branches only keep on hand
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.
Not that I would recommend this, but I feel like the shittiness of business correlates in inversely with the public’s opinion on molotov cocktails.
If your fucking business burns down weekly because you keep fucking people over, you’re not going to stay in business very long.
Capitalism.
European countries are also capitalist countries, but they have much better consumer protections and laws. It can be done.
I think such protections have to happen BEFORE the market capitalists are able to use their immense hoards of power, that’s what capital is at scale, to capture their own governments and regulators that were supposed to act as a firewall protecting regular citizens from them, as the market capitalists have in the United States for almost half a century.
Once that happens. Good fucking luck. Greed doesn’t let go of what it acquires.
Reactionary and minimal lawmaking. A cultural thing since wild west times, because of freedom-mindset. Lead to more and more influence of financial strong parties, lead to laws supporting said parties.
I’m not an expert in any of those areas and from europe, but that’s how i understand the USA.
I’d argue it’s because citizens have no voice. The media has there corporate narrative, but the public interest has very few organizations in advocacy of it.
Support local journalism (financially), work to break any media control on the narrative.
The first thing people could start doing is stop providing free labor to the media. It’s all over Lemmy.
Don’t link to a corporate news outlet. Link to an .edu or PBS or NPR or a quality international publicly funded news organization. Or better yet build your own narrative, your own opinions. Discuss your opinions respectfully on !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world . Build momentum and take away the corporate medias control.
Without a public voice advocating for the people, it will be very hard to change any legislation in the peoples favor.
There are laws against excessive fees like this. In my home state of Florida, a landlord cannot charge more than 20% the rent in late fees.
And trust me, Florida is not known for its consumer protections. So chances are your state has a similar law which is probably better.
So if I were you I would look up the law and not pay.
Assuming of course you are telling the full truth- your full rent payment was late for a short period of time.
Sorry I’m not american, but what is Pet Rent? never heard of that
It’s an extra monthly fee to cover the cost of extra cleaning and repairs needed due to tenants having pets and the damage they cause.
I assume it’s a surcharge on their rent for the fact that they have a pet.
I assumed that too but couldn’t believe
It’s exactly what it sounds like. Extra bullshit monthly rent tacked onto the regular rent in addition to a usually non-refundable pet deposit at time of move in or pet adoption.
Basically you’re a money faucet in the US, and wide open if you have pets or kids
Wait, Kids too?!! omg
I get the deposit, pets can be destructive, but pet rent is peak captalism. It’s like charging rent by the weight!
thank god I don’t have that here coz I have 2 dogs and 2 cats.
So that applies to any pet? Even hamsters and fish?
To be clear, rent is usually one value for however many humans will be living there, but everywhere has different rules for pets. For the most part you’re restricted to one or two dogs specifically if they’re allowed at all. Some places will charge the same for one or more, some will charge more for 2. It’s really variable. But with RealPage leading the way with the largest rental management companies, is getting pretty unified and difficult to not get fucked over by.
Smaller pets like fish or hamsters usually aren’t mentioned or charged for though that I’ve seen.
My lease explicitly prohibits fishtanks (and waterbeds IIRC). Pretty limited to just cats and dogs.
In a word. Lobbyists.
It turns out if you throw enough money at people then you can make them do anything you want.
Yep. Welcome to the hell that is corporate capitalism.
Because non-ordinary people make the rules.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices
Assuming you are in the USA, it’s fundamentally because our politics is fueled by private money. The “haves” spend lots of money to make rules that protect and enrich themselves at the expense of the “have nots”. The rich get richer, and the rest of us get a larger share of the burden.
The rich then spend more of their money convincing everyone else that some minority group of their fellow “have nots” are to blame and let us fight amongst ourselves. They starve us but leave us with just enough left to lose so that the price of doing something about it is too high (quitting, losing health insurance, getting arrested at a protest, etc) for most of us to bear.
how can we change this?
Get money out of politics. Get the public to stop blaming their fellow have nots and demand change from the haves.
How does one person even start to address these issues?
Have empathy for and help your neighbors if you can, especially when they take the risks required to push for actual change. Talk to people. Organize. Support/start unions or a mutual aid organization. Go to local government meetings and make your voice heard. Run for local office.
Its easy for a small group of wealthy organizations to tilt specific elections or politics in their favor. It’s much harder them to do that in 1,000+ small communities across the nation.
Excellent points and to add to that support local journalism, the smaller the better. The media is really the fourth branch of government when it comes to checks and balances. If media integrity was restored, they could use there influence to hold Congress accountable to the people.
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People don’t fear for their lives when they fuck people over any more. We need to bring that back somehow. Ratfuckers should be fearful after they ratfuck somebody that they’re going to get theirs.
Blood
Because we ordinary people do not possess extraordinary funds to buy that protection
