Seriously. My whole thought reading GP's post was "This person is coming across as a complete asshole by their own words, but in their mind they are thinking they are coming across as some kind of hero."
It's a brutal power move, but it targets the people actually responsible and it clearly gets results. I think this is way better for everybody involved.
Of course it does depend on the person escalating being correct about the issue, and good and reasonable about explaining it to the person in charge. And we all know that's not going to be true for your average customer. So use this power with discretion.
Corporations are conscience-lacking psychopaths, faceless cowards and abusers, and should be treated as such. They are cowards because they hide behind false appearances - the go-to method of dealing with their own shortcomings. And they are smart about it.
This point is beatifully driven home in a futuristic science-fiction novel "Accelerando" (which is free btw) where corporations based on smart contracts and AI threaten sentient beings uploaded into the net by publishing altered derivatives of public works to reposess unsuspecting readers's minds using copyright law.