General Mills Reverses Itself on Consumers’ Right to Sue.

[elleng]

Anyone surprised???

General Mills, one of the country’s largest food companies, on Saturday night announced in a stunning about-face that it was withdrawing its controversial plans to make consumers give up their right to sue it.

In an email sent after 10 p.m. on Saturday, the company said that due to concerns that its plans to require consumers to agree to informal negotiation or arbitration had raised among the public, it was taking down the new terms it had posted on its website.

“Because our concerns and intentions were widely misunderstood, causing concerns among our consumers, we’ve decided to change them back to what they were,” Mike Siemienas, a company spokesman, wrote in the email. “As a result, the recently updated legal terms are being removed from our websites, and we are announcing today that we have reverted back to our prior legal terms, which contain no mention of arbitration.”

The announcement was a stunning reversal for the company, which had quietly put up the new terms requiring consumers downloading coupons, “joining its online communities,” participating in sweepstakes and other promotions, and interacting with General Mills in a variety of other ways to agree to arbitration in lieu of suing the company in the event of a dispute.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/business/general-mills-reverses-itself-on-consumers-right-to-sue.html?hp&_r=0

[eridani]

1. Original notice

Raising holy hell on line surely helped.

http://crooksandliars.com/2014/04/general-mills-says-if-you-cheerios

General Mills Says If You 'Like' Cheerios On Facebook, You Can No Longer Sue

Three years ago when the Supreme Court ruled in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, basically allowing binding arbitration clauses in contracts to exclude class action suits, we noted that it was an unfortunate pitting of a broken class action system against a broken arbitration system. Both arbitration and class action lawsuits may have some good features -- and the concepts behind each sound good, but both have been abused to extreme levels. On the class action side, often these lawsuits have little to do with righting wrongs, and very much to do with big paydays for lawyers (and some companies even turn class action lawsuits into marketing opportunities).

On the arbitration side, while the theory of having a neutral third party settle the dispute without having to go through an expensive litigation process certainly sounds good, the reality is quite different. Since arbitrators are hired, and large companies are frequent employers, arbitrators have very strong incentives to side with those companies, in order to make sure they'll be hired in the future. When you have one party who is likely to be a frequent employer, and another who will only engage in the transaction once, guess where the bias is going to fall. And, indeed, multiple studies have shown that's exactly what happens. In one case 94% of rulings went against consumers. Another study showed that companies that regularly use arbitration get higher awards.

So neither side in that fight necessarily could be said to "represent the good guys." However, as we noted when the Supreme Court ruling came out, it seemed likely that this would lead to companies putting arbitration clauses absolutely everywhere. At the time, we suggested a simple fix: have Congress make it clear that you can't give up your right to go to court based on a non-negotiated contract. And that still seems to make sense, but of course, nothing has actually been done.

It should come as little surprise, then, that the prediction of seeing companies put arbitration clauses absolutely everywhere is happening -- and to ridiculous levels. The NY Times has an article about how General Mills, makers of Cheerios, Chex and lots of other cereals, has updated some legalese on their own website to basically say if you do absolutely anything related to its cereals -- including liking them on Facebook, or buying them -- you give up your right to go to court and are agreeing to arbitration:

[Iggo]

2. Misunderstood?