Neither had I, until the last few years when everybody decided to abandon all obligation to uphold their end of every contract because they thought they could get away with it.
In the last year alone I've sued my HOA, employer, and fired off a litany of demands for a cumulative total of 10x that amount.
This is the truth! I've had to do more credit card chargebacks and chase down more companies that owed me money or otherwise failed to live up to their side of a transaction, in the past 24 months than the total of the past 24 years. I think companies have realized that the current regulatory environment allows them to simply do whatever they want, commit fraud, take people's money and disappear, fail to provide service, and they know the onus is on the already tired and busy Average Joe to hold them all accountable. There is no more government willingness to go after companies anymore.
My own abstract is: there's been a collective understanding that the only terms a dominant party needs to adhere to are the ones that can be enforced by the little guy. If a rule can't be enforced by the little guy, the big guy can and will violate it with impunity.
It defies all fiduciary sense as well. Rather than let me go and pay the severance I'm owed, I've caught (with hard evidence, lawfully obtained) three different managers pretexting or executing steps toward my constructive dismissal. The most insulting part is that they think I'm too stupid to notice, or too weak to fight back. Now they're inviting EEOC investigations, DoD audits and worse as I complain and share a decade's worth of unrelated dirt to everyone with a public reporting hotline.
They could just settle and make me go away, but I'd sooner expect they'd send a hitman after me than concede a single dollar. It feels almost personal.
This also tracks with my recent experiences. It's possible it's a coincidence but I'm currently trying to get big, dumb, expensive errors made by Ikea and Costco sorted. I've been dealing with both of these companies for decades and never had issues with either.
As the post mentioned, I suspect it's going to get worse and harder to recoup losses as these companies remove more humans from the loop on all sides of their operations.
> Author here. For seven months I've been handing every consumer dispute to a Claude agent instead of eating the cost like I normally would. It builds the case file, pulls the warranty or policy text and the terms of service, works out who actually regulates the company, and plans a "campaign" with fallbacks. Ten unrelated fights (IRS penalties, a car warranty, two insurance denials, a robot mop, grocery stuff), yielded just over $12k back! The biggest single one was an IRS first-time penalty abatement I'd never heard of, $6.8k, eight years into an installment plan.
> To be honest, the agent's first-pass advice is usually bad ("file an FTC complaint"); what works is multi-prong approach until something moves. For the robo-mop it ended up all the way at their own arbitration clause, whose consumer fee rules cost them several times the refund. For the pet insurer it was the state regulator plus two exec emails, and they relented in hours after two months of stonewalling.
> Companies rely on a drop-off funnel, and an agent with infinite patience breaks it - thats the story.
It's flagged and dead but good advice. I've used it a lot for legal disputes (basic contracts).
It helps to make your argument, then have AI steelman a rebuttal, then modify your argument to smash their steelman. Then your initial outreach is your stage 2 argument that bypasses all plausible initial denials.
He hadn't weighed in when I quoted it. I thought it was just the community being petty. The OP being the first comment on their own post always gets flagged to oblivion.
The real elephant in the room is that 60% of our school shootings are streetside minority violence spilling into schools, not angry white incels mowing down classmates.
That describes aristocracy. Those have been economically and politically compromised, or were assassinated in the 1930s.
Modern elites do not belong to any particular country; this is the entire selling point of globalism. They have no stake in any country's success.
We may pride ourselves on distinctions but when you put a white guy, an African and an Indian through the grinder, the same pink slurry comes out the other end. We're all just mince to them. We aren't even ruled from within our own borders anymore.
Since then, not only have we lost autonomy, but there was no top-down direction to begin with. And there is none now.
Nobody knows what the next incentive to chase is, so they're liquidating headcount and engaging in fraud to appear profitable.
(re: fraud, I'm learning the hard way why my own employer's stock price dramatically improved-- ever since they switched to stack ranking, they just make shit up to PIP and deny severance ahead of layoffs.)
In the last year alone I've sued my HOA, employer, and fired off a litany of demands for a cumulative total of 10x that amount.
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