No sympathy, are you implying that the victim here is somehow to blame, or is instigating this behavior? If so, this is analogous to victim blaming. If you decide not to waste your resources to combat someone who has wronged you, you are not ‘to blame’ for that wrong doing. It is shitty that the company can take advantage of a person like this in the first place, don’t make the situation worse by taking this sociopathic stance.
There is the case of ignorance, where a person might not know about small claims court, let alone how it works and what it does. Then there is the case of an increasing number of forced arbitration clauses. Then there is the fact that companies wishing to not get swept up in a wave of small claims will reach out and try to fix the problem if they do actually have a case they think they might lose, further preventing more people from talking about it. And small claims court may ‘only take minutes to resolve,’ but that small length of time would only happen once you are actually seen in court. Before that, you’d need to
- file with a clerk (meaning, spend time learning what you need to file, where you need to file it, etc.),
- serve the defendant (which costs money and time),
- arrive at the court in the morning for roll call,
- wait a few hours until you and the defendant are actually called (if they showed up…, which if not expect to come back after serving them again).
This is not a ‘trivial’ task, and all the while the company that scammed you already had your money. As a large company, you can arbitrage the profit of this shady behavior against the risk of someone actually going through all of the steps.