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#tales from customer service
stevishabitat · 1 month
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Customer ordered at 11:30pm. Chose Next Day Air shipping. Then got mad that the shipment went out at 6:45am. "You didn't even give me a chance to change my shipping! I want a discount because I wanted cheaper shipping!"
Mr. First-Name Last-Name the Third, from expensive zip code in expensive state, attending a private university with class start date over two weeks ago...
When a customer orders Next Day Air, that package goes out first thing in the morning and gets on an airplane so that people Like You don't call us telling us that they paid $150 for overnight and didn't get it in time for school in the morning.
So no, after you click Review Your Order and then click Finalize Your Order, you do not have an option to change anything.
"But you weren't even open!"
Our call center operates 7am-10pm. Our warehouse operates 24 hours. And yep, that does mean that our first UPS pick-up happens before the phones are turned on.
"But I'm used to being able to change things after I finalize an order."
I really don't care what you are used to. Probably people bending over backwards for you and covering stupid mistakes like Shipping Option Buyers Remorse. That's not really what I'm here for.
Our policies are not unusual for a mid-size textbook distributer.
We're not Amazon. And honestly, Amazon has warnings on their check out page alerting you that you may not be able to make changes after the order is placed. If you chose Next Day on an Amazon shipment, it would probably be handled exactly the same way. Out the door ASAP, no chance to make any changes.
Because most people who choose expedited shipping do so because they want the item to arrive quickly. Go figure 🤷‍♀️
There is no way to make all the people happy all the time. And my patience with people who think they are the exception to everything... let's just say it's not very robust.
I have been doing this for 10 years now and I have Heard It All.
Mr. The Third you are not that special.
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homiro · 2 months
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Just a note on whoever helped me before I try to make the possibility of commissioning stuff from me a little less crappy and can add it to my pinned. I love you and hope you're doing amazing in life and that are surrounded by people who love you and make you feel safe. Bless you a million times.
And to have all the stuff I want to talk about in one text post, even though this is my blog and I do what I like, I feel like talking about this insane thing I heard today.
So, I went to this phone shop because my phone is acting up and well it's still working and the guy just said 'well, it's still working, thinking about a new one in the future'. It is working, the phantom touch thing is just weird and annoying and is basically the phone being like 'I am possessed me, get a new one lol boo'. But that doesn't matter since even if this shit dies, I have an analogue phone that would serve me fine. And this guy there was drowning in work with old people and their stupid phone issues and he saw that I, someone within his age range was there and knew what I wanted and wouldn't give him a hard time, he vented a little. Apparently this guy is reaching customer service burnout (shocker, who isn't? Been there experienced that) and he told me about a customer who went there asking him to set up a facebook account for her and then insulted him when he said he wouldn't do that because that wasn't his job and it would be a violation of her privacy. But the most insane was one who berated him because he wouldn't pass 126 phone numbers she had written on PAPER to her phone.
I really do believe everyone should experience working customer service/hospitality just for maybe a fortnight. It's a humbling experience and builds character.
That's all.
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tachypodion · 1 month
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just a little psa: if a big part of your job is calling people, especially if you work in the healthcare industry, it's generally good manners to not chew something incredibly sticky right next to the microphone the entire time you're on a call
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dyslexiccherry · 2 years
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The part i hate the most about customer service is how clients are constantly talking to you like you’re worth nothing. The ones who yell and act crazy aren’t the worst ones, it’s when they act like you’re incompetent, stupid and worthless.
And the worst part is? You can’t say anything back, you just have to sit there and take it. Feeling like you’re not respecting yourself because you’re not standing up for yourself.
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elenion-cosplay · 2 years
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Customer service is barely holding in your hysterical laughter while a Karen™️ yells at you that she'll never visit this establishment again.
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biodegradablebisexual · 5 months
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Translating what your coworker in the customer service department said to you:
They said: (Customer) is dedicated to making sure this is resolved quickly.
They meant: (Customer) will not allow me to disconnect this call until we have an answer for them, so I need you to figure this out.
They said: (Customer) advised they are expecting a call back from you.
They meant: This person let you a voicemail a week ago, why the fuck haven’t you called them back?
They said: I advised the customer that you will have to assist them with this issue moving forward.
They meant: This is so far above my pay grade and I have neither the time nor the will to cover the fact that you messed up.
They said: (Customer) asked me to pass along the following suggestion about (thing we do here).
They meant: Here’s some utterly unfeasible and high-key insane “suggestions” from someone who does not understand the logistics of what we do here. I hope you laugh as hard as I wanted to.
They said: I do think it’s important that we bear in mind the timeline we’re working on.
They meant: You’re delusional if you think I’m going to have time to get that done before the deadline that you gave me.
They said: Just a heads up, you’re probably going to get a really weird email from (Customer) pretty soon.
They meant: I was unable to give this person everything they have ever wanted, plus my first born, and $7 billion, so they’re about to send you an email letting you know how Incompetent and Disrespectful I am 🙃
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lemonduckisnowawake · 1 month
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So a while back @floorbacon0621 was talking about a hallmark movie where a woman body hijacked a rich lady but then realized all she wanted was family for Christmas.
Cue @emarynn going "eh, sounds boring" and me going "WELL CHALLENGE ACCEPTED."
The below is the result, transcribed (copy/pasted) from Discord because I realized I wanted it somewhere I could find before it got buried (it's already been buried actually) from all our chatter....which means I need a new tag for my personal writing stuff. BUT ANYWAY
Woman- gets isekaid into rich lady ML - rich guy whom rich lady is engaged to Rich lady - gets isekaid into woman
Plot: rich lady sees this sad and hectic ADHD family that is just NOT managing holidays well and is giving stress upon stress to each other and is like "all right, imma straighten you all out cause i'm a doctor" and actually starts helping the woman's family cope. Woman's family is like "woah, daughter, college in the city really has changed you. maybe this was a good idea after all." Meanwhile, woman is not at ALL happy to be in rich lady's body and is annoyed with rich guy who is doing his uttermost to scare off rich lady to break off the engagement, but woman isn't gonna do that cause this isn't her life - and rich guy is confused cause it was about to succeed, so what the heck? Woman wasn't really looking forward to the holidays cause her family is SO chaotic and it drives her nuts, and she guesses that this is a great way to escape but…they were expecting her and she still LOVES them, so she's gonna check. Unfortunately, before she can do anything, she's pulled into rich people christmas stuff with rich guy as her confused date. She finds all the bluster and pomp way too annoying and almost worse than her family's chaos but, again, not her life so she doesn't say anything. She likes the food thought, but everything is so fake that it just pricks at her even more until she can't take it and just….leaves the party at one point to hide.
Rich guy comes after her and they have an emotional moment or idk, which now confuses HER cause where was the rude guy? To which he admits he was trying to break up the engagement cause there's someone he loves who is not as wealthy and thought the best way was to act mean. To which the woman, in utter bafflement, is like, "Dude. It's a free country. Just…..break it off? You're over the age? Is there like any formal contract?" "Uh…no" "??????????? Then why don't you just break it off?" "They'll disown me. I don't have any job experience!" "??? Are you serious? You're in training to be the CEO? And you have a college degree? Just….use that to get a job???" "Oh…." "Uh huh." Anyway, cue woman accidentally making things better without even meaning to in her comedic shenanigans to just CALL HOME and see how everyone's doing, interspersed with cuts from rich girl who is having a blast organizing everything but thinks she should probably find a way to get back to her body cause being an heiress is great.
Anyway, blah blah blah, magic of Christmas, switcheroo goes back to normal after they meet and tell them all the happenstances ("you broke off my engagement?" "NO! He broke off his engagement with YOU! I didn't say I'd accept or anything! And you actually made my family functional?" "Yeah, being a psych and med student is great" "…..i hate rich people" ":DDD") End movie
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moonlightsylph · 1 year
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Sometimes we get some cute things at work 💕
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melancholic-pigeon · 1 year
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OOF.
okay.
Uh.
Yeah I am not okay and I need to stop saying I am because I'm not.
This flare-up of depression since quitting nicotine has gotten extremely, extremely bad, and I'm basically either crying or lying in bed staring at the wall failing to sleep. I don't like to inflict myself on others when I feel like this, but that's actually somewhat counterproductive because it means I self-isolate which makes the depression worse etc etc.
So. Uh. Yeah. I'm really struggling and not doing well at all, and I'm not sure anymore if my stubbornness is enough that I'll be fine eventually. It's getting harder.
I don't want to scare anyone, I don't think I'm in danger and if I were I would go to the hospital, but uh. Yeah. Stuff that's going on with me. It's not great and I'm a lying liar who lies by constantly insisting I'm either totally okay or will be, and I'm trying to break myself of that habit.
It just...it's really, really bad tonight.
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goth-goro · 2 years
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I HAVE OFFICIALLY HAD THE NICEST HUMAN INTERACTION OF ALL TIME
ok sO. i work at a hotel at the front desk, and there’s a collection convention in town, so a bunch of vendors are staying with us since we’re right by the convention center. and one of the vendors was checking in the other day wearing a pokemon hat (specifically Ghastly) and i said i liked it and she said “oh we sell them! what’s your favorite pokémon, maybe we have one of them!” and i said like. probably not, my favorite is dugtrio because i think it’s just the dumbest little thing and the idea that a pokemon was so dumb that it’s evolution was just “fuck it there’s three of them” is super funny. (i also showed her that i keep a dugtrio card in my phone case for moral support.)
and then!! like a half hour or so later! her partner comes to the front desk and just!! hands me a dugtrio sticker like it’s a drug deal and goes “this is for you” like!! that’s so sweet!!! nothing else to the interaction they just wanted to give me a little sticker!!!
and i thought that was the end of it but then they came by the other day and asked what my favorite was again because they were opening decks, and i said i love diglett and dugtrio, and she basically said alright and walked away. and then TODAY, i come into work and my coworkers handed me an envelope with two diglett cards in it. and i just. god humans can be so nice sometimes. like these people were selling at a convention and were opening card packs and got a few they didn’t want and instead of just putting them in a box somewhere they thought hey. that kid at the front desk might want these. didn’t leave a card or a name, wasn’t trying to get me to buy their stuff. just wanted to make a stranger smile, and went out of their way to do that.
i know the world sucks sometimes but these are the moments i remember that i really do love people. i can be pretty nihilistic but i think that the things that give me the most hope are the little ways most people are always thinking about the people around them, and i think we’ll be okay if we just nurture that sort of kindness.
anyways. i hope you enjoy my waxing poetic about diglett cards.
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bluedawnflower · 2 months
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petiolata · 5 months
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This Karen hung up in the middle of me talking to her, because rather than work with me to help her, she'd rather just call back 20 minutes later and try to bully a different worker into breaking the rules for her.
My long-time followers know where this is going—there are no other workers on Saturday, so she got me again.
Me: I'm sorry Karen, but just like I told you when you called in earlier, I cannot do that for you because of the _____ rule. Now, if you need to—
Karen: Well you're not being very helpful!
Me: Yeah, I'm usually not very helpful to people who hang up on me in the middle of me talking.
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spaceydelusions · 6 months
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My coworker: what's the worst thing that's been thrown at you
Me: knife from my mom
Coworker: excuse me?
He was not expecting that lore drop
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Veterinary Story Time
I work in a veterinary hospital. I talk to no less than 100 different clients and other people each day. We process approximately 40 to 50 animals on any given day. Often, I am in a position to answer the phone.
In one such situation today, I answered the phone and an individual immediately started berating me and the veterinary technician who was caring for his animal because he had been told half an hour ago that the tech was busy, and would call him back as soon as she could, and she had not called him yet. Ironically, I had run to answer this phone call directly from holding down a fractious cat and assisting with the placement of an IV while the technician in question placed it and began to administer life-saving fluids.
In the hospital today, we had several emergencies, unexpectedly complicated surgeries, and almost every single pet parent had been very late or very early for their appointment and pickup times that day. We were literally running between tasks.
His dog was a drop off, meant to stay all day. He insisted that he had plans tonight (we close at 6 PM and it was 4:30 when I answered the phone), and that his animal really needed our extra support and that we were currently failing at it. I had not even had the opportunity to get his pet’s name yet.
I told him that currently, there were several animals in the hospital that required immediate attention. He then told me not to be passive aggressive and asked me if he “needed to go full on karen with me and ask for my manager.”
I asked him what his pets name was and he interrupted me midsentence to ask for my name. I told him. I began to repeat my question so I could check on his animal and he then launched into a diatribe, “[my name], you should really institute a dropoff system that actually works if you’re going to have dropoff appointments…”
(btw- it works great when people pick up and drop off their pets on time and there are a limited number of emergencies, but we are a HOSPITAL. In general, please know that if the medical staff can give you a solid pick up time when they talk to you, they will because they don’t want your animal taking up space that could go to another animal any longer than you do.)
At this point he actually started screaming into the phone so loud that so that the person next to me winced. I said “Sir, you’re yelling. The technician will call you back as soon as they possibly can. They have not forgotten. That was inappropriate and I’m going to hang up the phone now.”
Half an hour later, I have informed the technician of what has transpired and am collecting my water bottle from the front desk before I clock out. They had told me to hurry up and get out of there before he got there because his ire had been transferred to me from the tech and they were afraid of what would happen if he saw me. She said he had been angry and hyperventilating when she called him back.
He busts through the crowd of people waiting for their pets (because of course everyone showed up at once) and leans on the desk over the scale to ask my coworker and I, “Which one of you is [my name]?” I replied that it was me. He told me that I “really needed to be more careful how I talk to people” because “he’s bipolar and I triggered him and…” at this point, I said, “OK, I’ll go let them know that you’re here.” And I walked into the back and let the crew know that it was too late and that I had not made it out before he got there.
It was way past time for me to leave, so I’m trying to get out of there as fast as possible and plan to use a side exit. I put on a hoodie and take off my glasses and walk out of a side exam room door, not even turning to glance at the lobby. He follows me out of the lobby and takes a picture of me with his phone. I told him that I was a private citizen and he didn’t have permission to take that picture. He ran away back inside, saying he could do what he wanted.
I turned around and walked away. One of our clients followed me and asked if I was OK because they had seen the whole interaction. I thanked them and told them I was OK and walked to my car and drove home.
This is a slightly more extreme example, but we deal with people who act in a similar manner quite frequently and it’s not mental illness, it’s entitlement. Anyone in any public-facing position will hear this and probably be reminded of a story or two of their own. That’s not ok, folks.
No one should ever treat people who serve the public in this way. Especially not the people who are scratched and bitten so that your dog’s overactive anal glands can be expressed regularly and who cry over your loved ones when it’s time to make a quality of life decision about your animals.
Sidenote, it’s also never OK to try to use a mental health diagnosis to intimidate other people into doing what you want or accepting their own mistreatment. they’re not accountable for your actions.
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lloyds-department · 1 year
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customer service is wild bc ill have like 40-60 good nice people who I can have a polite conversation and then I'll have one woman who is absolutely enraged at the idea of my coworker taking a break that she threw all of her items at me and acted like it was my fault that my coworker forgot to turn off her register light
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The Geico STD story is the new McDonald's Hot Coffee story
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Here’s a media literacy rule of thumb: any time you hear about how the courts have done something outrageous and absurd to some poor, long-suffering, gigantic, wildly profitable corporation…dig deeper. The canonical example is the “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Lawsuit” (aka Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants). You know, that time that an old lady got burned by her McDonald’s coffee and then sued for for $2.7 million?! Most people heard that story — and they heard it for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants
The Hot Coffee story was propaganda — specifically, it was propaganda for the idea that corporations should be shielded from legal liability when they maim or even kill the public through gross negligence. The real Hot Coffee story is a lot more complicated than the “lady gets millions because her coffee was too hot” tale that circulated widely.
One of the best explorations of the Hot Coffee story is Adam Conover’s excellent “Adam Ruins The Hot Coffee Story” video from 2016. In that episode, Conover explains what really happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E
The coffee that burned Stella Liebeck in New Mexico in 1994 was served at 190°F. It caused third-degree burns that permanently disfigured Liebeck, required multiple skin grafts, and disabled her for two years. The surgery was so drastic that Liebeck lost 20% of her body-weight while she was recovering.
McDonald’s had a history of serving coffee that was dangerously hot. It had received 700 complaints about the matter, and had had to settle numerous claims from people who were horribly burned by its coffee. However, it declined to settle with Liebeck, who initially sought $20k to cover her medical expenses.
Denied a settlement, Liebeck sued. The jury did award $2.7m, but the judge clawed it back to $640k. Liebeck likely didn’t get that amount — she and McDonald’s reached a confidential settlement under threat of McDonald’s appealing.
So, the real story isn’t: “Old lady spills coffee and gets millions.”
It’s “McDonald’s ignores hundreds of dangerous incidents for years, then maims a customer for life and refuses to pay her medical bills or change its practices to avoid future incidents. A judge says she’s due a fraction of the jury award, but she doesn’t get it because McDonald’s uses its massive litigation war-chest to force her into a confidential settlement.”
So why did you hear so much about this story? And why was the moral of the story inevitably about how bloodsucking lawyers are victimizing poor l’il multinational corporations like Mickey Dees?
It was propaganda. The “bloodsucking lawyers preying on innocent corporations” story is a creation of the business lobby, which has, for decades, argued that it should be immune to legal consequences when it harms or kills the public. The cause of “tort reform” is, in actuality, a corporate charter of impunity.
It worked. Over the past four decades, corporations have steadily whittled away the public’s right to civil justice, no matter how egregiously a corporation behaves. The main mechanism for this was the expansion of binding arbitration, a 1920s-era law that initially allowed big companies to agree to have their contractual disputes worked out by a mediator, rather than going to court.
Since the 1980s, a series of Supreme Court decisions have steadily expanded binding arbitration, allowing corporations to add “arbitration waivers” to their terms of service, employment contracts and other non-negotiated boilerplates. Today, the mere act of removing some shrinkwrap or clicking a link can result in the permanent loss of your right to sue, no matter how badly a company treats you.
Instead, your grievances will be heard by a corporate arbitrator, a pretend judge who is paid by the company that wronged you. Your case must be heard in isolation, and not part of a class action. The proceedings are secret, and even if you win, you don’t set a precedent for others who are similarly wronged. It’s “a justice system just for corporations.”
http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations
American corporations pushed the expansion of binding arbitration waivers as a get-out-of-court-free card, and for many years, it worked. Remember when Wells Fargo forged millions of its customers’ signatures to fraudulently open high-fee accounts in their names? The company argued that because the forged agreements included arbitration waivers, those customers couldn’t sue over the fraud:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-ceo-of-wells-fargo-might-be-in-big-big-trouble/
Everybody got in on the act. If you’re a Pokemon Go player, you’re stuck in binding arbitration:
https://consumerist.com/2016/07/14/pokemon-go-strips-users-of-their-legal-rights-heres-how-to-opt-out/
Same with Airbnb customers:
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2908/terms-of-service
Unsurprisingly, Trump loved binding arbitration. One of his first acts as president was to strip nursing home residents of the right to sue, which was great news for the nursing homes that murdered patients by abandoning them to covid:
https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/trump-administration-will-allow-nursing-homes-to-strip-residents-of-legal-rights/
(Older voters love the GOP, but it sure as hell doesn’t love them back.)
Forced arbitration wasn’t just a matter of civil justice — it was also a matter of economics. As Lina Khan and Deepak Gupta showed in their 2016 American Constitution Society paper “Arbitration As Wealth Transfer,” “Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich”:
https://www.acslaw.org/issue_brief/briefs-landing/arbitration-as-wealth-transfer/
But the business leaders who bankrolled the forced arbitration epidemic were — characteristically — overconfident. It turns out that arbitration has weaknesses. It’s possible to do mass arbitration — to automate filing arbitration claims by thousands of corporate victims, which triggers hundreds of millions of dollars in arbitration fees, which the company is on the hook for, win or lose.
Uber was one of the first companies to discover this, when thousands of drivers brought arbitration claims at once. Not only would Uber have to pay for arbitrators in each case, but because arbitration decisions do not constitute precedents, it would have to argue each case, over and over again, even if it won. The company surrendered and paid drivers $146m:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/uber-sues-aaa-block-100-million-fees-politically-motivated-arbitration-2021-09-20/
This spooked Amazon, which amended its terms of service for Alexa to remove binding arbitration:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard
Law-tech firms like Fairshake created automation systems to enable mass arbitration filings at scale and on a budget:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#justice-restored
Something wonderful and wild started to happen. The companies that had argued for decades that binding arbitration was, well, binding, began to argue that arbitration waivers were unconstitutional, despite the precedents that they, themselves had bankrolled, at enormous expense.
The poster child of arbitration buyer’s remorse is Intuit, a company that has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-prep fees from the poorest Americans by tricking them into fake “Free File” products using dark patterns on its website.
Intuit is now facing arbitration at scale — more than 100,000 claims — and a court has ordered them to hire arbitrators to hear each and every one of them. After all it was Intuit — not its customers — who put the arbitration clauses in its terms of service, claiming that court cases were a bad way to resolve their disputes:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#justice-restored
Which brings me back to McDonald’s, hot coffee, and juicy stories about giant corporations being abused by the courts.
Have you heard about the Geico STD judgment? A woman caught an STD from her then-boyfriend when they had sex in his car. She won a judgment against him for $5.2m. Geico insures his car. A court has ordered Geico to pay that judgment.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jackson-county-woman-says-she-222907031.html
But it’s more complicated than that!
It’s not a court that ordered Geico to pay the judgment — it’s an arbitrator. Geico is one of the companies that forces its customers into arbitration. Why would an insurance company want arbitrators to hear cases about its refusal to pay claims, rather than judges?
I mean, duh. Insurance companies have a long, dishonorable tradition of taking your premiums every month, then stranding you when you actually experience an “insured event,” arguing that the obscure, obfuscating language in their contract doesn’t cover your losses.
The real Geico STD story is this: Geico demanded that the case be heard by its arbitrator, who ruled against Geico, because Geico’s insurance terms did cover this event. Now, Geico is claiming that the arbitration it insisted upon “violates the company’s due process rights” and that its own arbitration agreement is unenforceable.
The case that’s being reported on isn’t about the $5.2m award for the STD. That happened way back in 2021. The case that’s in the news this week is a court telling Geico that when it forces its customers into arbitration, it has to abide by the arbitrator’s decision, even in those rare instances in which the arbitrator finds against the company who pays their fees.
But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage. All this stuff about arbitration is buried way down in the story. The headline is: $5.2m judgment for a venereal disease!
This is McDonald’s Hot Coffee 2.0. Someone pitched this story, and the pitch emphasized the poor, downtrodden corporation (Geico is owned by Warren Buffet and has $32b in assets) — not the fact that Geico is reaping what it sowed. The real story here is: “Corporation seeks to replace civil justice system with a kangaroo court, and gets kicked by its own kangaroo.”
Incidentally, if you miss Adam Conover’s “Adam Ruins Everything” and you have a Netflix password, check out “The G-Word,” his incredible new show about regulatory competence and the deadly threats it holds at bay:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81037116
[Image ID: The Adam Ruins Everything title card for 'The Hot Coffee Case.' It is a split panel with Adam Conover on the left at a judge's bench, banging a gavel, and a confused Hamburgler on the right, in the witness box. They are separated by the center of the 'M' in the McDonald's 'Golden Arches' logo. Superimposed over this separator is the Geico lizard.]
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