Taking a Consumer Complaint to Small Claims Court, and Winning
When the nice new major brand flatscreen TV you buy goes kaput in three months and they endlessly try without success to fix it, when your cable service seems to dip into your credit card for no reason and won't answer your calls, when the airline you bought a ticket on kicks you off the flight because they overbooked and theyrefuse to get you an alternative flight for another 16 hours, how is it that you react? Do you rush and tell all your friends about how terrible the company is and then make sure you never give them your business again? Or do you do more? There are a few among us who have the patience and the spirit to launch a consumer complaint and to take it to small claims court.
That's what happened to my friend Ruth who took Chevrolet to small claims court because they weren't fixing her old truck properly. Certainly she was mad and wanted to see a little justice done; but she was also unhappy about how hard it was for her to get to work every day and what she was losing in real money to repair the car every time it malfunctioned. Her consumer complaint actually won; they offered her a refurbished transmission and only charged her $1400 - a third of what they would charge otherwise. She was ecstatic that she had stuck it to corporate America, and made them see that it wasn't okay when they were careless with their customers.
For the ordinary person who doesn't have contacts and who isn't a big shot, small claims court is an inexpensive last resort when every attempt at a reasonable approach has failed. To people like my friend who have been through the process, the experience makes them feel empowered. The costs can be really low, the forms are simple, and there are almost no court delays or unnecessary adjournments. If you have been long been ignored by the major corporation, to have your consumer complaint run through the legal process feel like a wonderful salve.
You would think that with the way indignities are handed to you nonstop dealing with large corporations, small claims courts would be choked up and made nearly useless; but that isn't really true. If anything, the process that a consumer complaint passes through appears tthese days to have been made even smoother than before. You can bring $15,000 claims to small claims court. There are all kinds of easy-to-read help guides on the Internet on how to go about mounting a consumer complaint, and they are really flexible on what kind of cases they will hear - even cases against spammers and telemarketers, recently.
Not that consumer complaints are easy to deal with. To be successful, you need to free up hours and days of your life to look into the law, collect proof, find witnesses and practice how best to mount your defense. The way you mount your defense often comes to matter more than the technical merits of the case too. The judge has a lot more latitude in interpreting the law in small claims courts than in real courts. If you do your job well the day you get heard, you could actually win officially and extract your damages; otherwise things could go in any one of several ways - you could go along with the company and settle in private so that the company won't see its reputation sullied in the press; or your opponents could just fail to show up and you could win by default.
Since it is a good deal of trouble dealing with consumer complaints, no one must bring one on willy-nilly. You need to make sure that you have a case, that you can prove everything you charge, that you can actually place the blame squarely on someone, and that you have tried every other way possible. If you're interested in bringing on a consumer complaint, you need to read up at the library about small claims court and consumer complaints (try Nolo Press' Everybody's Guide to Small Claims Court). You'll have to make sure you know which district court you have to approach, and you need to follow all the rules. Most times, it's the consumer that wins.
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