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Comment by uniq7 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what kind of life the author has in order to start 9 disputes worth $12k in just 7 months.

The only dispute I had in the last year is some $3 tweezers I ordered on Amazon that never shipped, and Amazon automatically reimbursed the money.

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If you leave off the IRS one, I run into little issues all the time. I tend to take the time to fill out the form on principal.

I recently switched car insurance carriers. My old carrier required a phone call to my agent, which I made, but then they never stopped billing me. It took more phone calls to sort it out, I was right in the end. I ended up with a check rather than a bill.

Maybe I'm old and jaded, no corporation is going to take advantage of me without a fight.

I despise this sort of tax on our time as consumers. It’s getting to the point that someone should run on the “if you wanna do business in the US and you’re not going to employee citizens as customer service reps you pay a 1% dividend on your revenue to all US residing citizens annually” platform - and then we use this to help fund single payer healthcare :)

This happens too often these days. Company fucks up some little thing and now it's all of a sudden your problem and you need to spend an hour on the phone here, an hour writing a letter there, and so on. Our institutions have been obliterated and there's no longer any regulatory agency or framework to come down on the practices.

Start a SaaS and you'll discover there are a lot of them leading this life.

Haha. And they’re your customers.

I feel so triggered right now… /begin rant/ VendorPay doesn’t summarize the total payment is a bug? Nope, working as intended. Put a vendor “on hold” still permits all new invoices to go into the payment queue a bug? Nope, working as intended. Want to test/prove an integration with your new ERP? Nope, got to buy and sign contracts. I could go on and on about all the annoyances of small business SaaS in the accounting space. Don’t even get me started about not responding to the actual question of an email—like if you went into a restaurant and asked for a steak medium-rare and the server said, ok. One steak well-done /rant

I get the topic—-abusing customer service. I’m just not feeling SaaS right now. There are conflicting incentives that I just don’t understand. I feel some SaaS are taking plays from the enshitification experts.

An American who interacts with health insurance can easily do that. Insurers will literally try not to pay just because some percentage of people give up.

I went to the dentist recently. They wanted to do a "deep cleaning". cost: somewhere between $0 (covered) and $5k (fully out of pocket). I asked the obvious: that's one hell of a range. "Depends on how much the insurer will pay." They weren't happy when I demanded to know that number before committing, as it takes them hours on the phone.

I've not had disputes worth that much in nearly 40 years on this earth. Makes me wonder whether this is just some exaggerated nonsense. The article is certainly written by an LLM.

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.

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.

That's an apt description of it.

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.

They're out there trying to make "laissez-faire" "caveat emptor" be the overriding principles of commerce in the USA.

Granted, the total is a bit of a reach as "disputes". The bulk of it was IRS + insurance claims. The rest were companies not giving me what I very clearly paid for.

A year with only a $3 problem in it sounds nice, honestly.

I mean…did you read it? Half was pre-exiting debt owed to the IRS from before the seven month period, auto repair, and medical bills for their wife are the big ones, all of which are within normal for an average Joe

Think of how bad the average big company is, and realize half of them are worse than that

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