> (If there is a long term relationship based on trust this will usually kill it forever.)
That's what corporations want you to think. They hate lawsuits excessively. And you know, it was never really based on trust if you had to take them to court to pay and you were in the right.
Plus Fortune 500 companies set things up so fewer lawsuits reach higher sums. This is good for them, they pay less in total but get to complain and be bitchvictims much more.
Suppose Acme is selling dogfood made out of shellfish. Secretly puts a little bad shellfish in the dogfood, which could be out of sadism sometimes, or costs, but a combination. I guess they have contacts for cheap bad clams, do less cold-chain processing, less hygiene at the place, less protocols which also matter. All of these are money. Acme might be in bad debt, that's happening a lot right now, companies underwater.
It's gross and it kills ten of thousand of dogs. Now what would be fair is compensating each owner for about $20000, something of that magnitude, maybe more for a service dog, and with dogs it sucks but they're not valued exactly like humans, and the emotional bond might be worth more. So it can be argued in court, how much you cared about the dog, the breed the upkeep, the kids are heartbroken.
Now, instead of doing that, Acme does all these maneuvers, like selling the shellfish dogfood through an app with a sneakily-designed arbitration clause, dogfood-as-a-service, with a huge false advertising marketing push and a lot of subtly coercive funnel action. So you have these arbitration clauses, which is a total kangaroo court, and it's designed to be less expensive--which it is--but for the company. So then they kill a class-action lawsuit, and they use the legalistic equivalent of a growth hacker to work against the funnel for the lawsuits, so get people dropping out of their lawsuit. All but the most determined people. The most dogged dog owners, who just won't give up on justice for their dog.
Then, the Acme does appeal after appeal, expensive dilatory court maneuvers, legalistic abuses, like showing up with forty lawyers (some companies do this, talk about how many lawyers they have to intimidate people, plus it's a little mob in the courtroom which has a coercive physical presence. All these things in name of due process for instance (despite their funnel into the arbitration clause, which in my view is intent to avoid due process), because of the customers greed like the dead dog were a jackpot, all this shit. So finally after years and years of going back and forth--which the sadism element of Acme enjoys, especially watching plaintiffs get shunted out of the courtroom because of an eg eviction because they didn't get the money in time, or the lawyer sells them out to Acme (happened to me), well after all we're talking of a company that knowingly poisoned its dogfood--then at long last, there's a very skewed distribution of a very few expensive lawsuits. Like one for $6 million, one for $3, one for $2. Like a zipf distribution. And it cuts out after like $400000 because the suit has to make sense (ergodicity) if they can't get Acme to pay for their lawyers. But this is good for Acme, they can play the victim by pointing at those few expensive lawsuits, proving the customer's greed, and save a lot of money, because morally they owed $200M for poisonings. It's just multiplication.
Plus, the bitchvictim media then gives them moral authority to act super super paranoid and say "oh the lawsuits" with employees, with suppliers, with everybody, when they know full well those few lawsuits were their own work to distort the effect of the law. Again, sadism. They were always in business to cheat people, hence the dogfood-as-a-service app with the "firmatage", semi-coercive contract-signing funnel backed by huge marketing push with false advertising. Instead of just selling it at a supermarket, or on an online store WITHOUT that arbitration contract.
Plus, Acme is a shitty company[1]. Acme does not make a profit on their public-facing business model (the one in their ads after eg football games, about how good the quality is because they work so hard and do things so right, beautiful nature photos, model dogs actually eating a different food with food makeup), only on their internal-facing business model of selling poisoned dogfood. Adultering the dogfood. Shitting in other's mouths, and they're not surprised either, despite their customer support all saying "this is the first time we've heard of this." Their business model is poisoning dogs, it's not an accident their app has that arb clause.[2]
See this post I wrote, about a garbage company killing a toddler as part of its business model and the question of suing them or not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30768600
They can't stay in business as a virtuous company, if they even wanted to, they dump the risk of bad clams on their customers. But paying out suits requires real profits! America in general is much less profitable than it once was.
And it's a class thing, how dare you, you middle-class American, take money from me, a higher-class group of managers?
Blackballing, basically.
So if you want to blackball me, go right ahead, I don't want to deal with shitty companies, I'll pay the company that can be taken to court because it does have make a real profit, and can feel shame, and understands the need for regulation. Besides I'm a Roman Law hero, literally a champion on the street, you expect me to take it lying down when it's legal arguments instead of street fighting? I took landlords to court over defaulting on the deposit, I took a former employer to court over unpaid contracts, I take people to court. Let that be known. Especially due to intellectual property, the whole thing is intrinsically litigious, well like all property. But the bigger picture is, the profits are really really solid because my algorithms are so dominant (10x, 50x, 10000000000x speedups). Hey would you rather it be like ordinary property, asking for my wallet and seeing what I do about it?
And court is not a terrible place to talk things out. There's no violence, everyone is accountable for what they claim and say and do, if you ask exactly what you deserve and turn down any amount beyond that it changes the game, too. Just being righteous.
[1] Google I would say is not, but I heard of them not paying out eg Adwords, like that other guy had to take them to small claims say they couldn't discriminate just if he had brown eyes or blue eyes, where Google said they reserved the right to welch for any reason, and had made money on the plaintiff they didn't want to actually share.
[2] Businesses can run it in default mode, which is what LLC's are for, then you get some liability but like limited, and the law is basically designed to be fair. Especially because judges smell "oh this is a shitty company trying to game the system" and juries are wise a lot of the time. If on the other hand the business actually could profit from the public-facing business model, it would be a totally different story.