Posted on 04/20/2014 10:57:20 AM PDT by Olog-hai
General Mills is scrapping a controversial plan to strip consumers of their right to sue the food company.
The company, which owns Cheerios, Progresso and Yoplait, had posted a notice on its website notifying visitors of a change to its legal terms—visitors using its websites or engaging with it online in a variety of other ways meant they would have to give up their right to sue.
Instead, the new terms said, people would need to have disputes resolved through informal negotiation or arbitration. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
How is this different from, “Why yes you may visit my house, but you must agree to give up your right to sue me”.
???
Guess they don’t need our business, huh?
They can claim what they want.
Litigation and the ability to sue is another/ separate legal issue.
So many terms of service have become ludicrous, that some reasonable and witty corporations have been including silly things in them, just to see if any reads them. Fortunately it is done in jest.
open to the public— now what would you think of a company that as a condition to
open to the publicmade it conditional upon surrendering your right to legal action?
Moreover, websites usually contain contact information, which means that to access the information (from the first party) you would necessarily surrender your right to sue. (This would be almost like having a phone-system customer-support/-comment phonline that gave the message by speaking to our representative you promise never to bring a lawsuit against the company.
)
Because you don’t sell me a product that might have problems that affect me negatively, visiting isn’t selling me an item I consume. Further, a cereal company doesn’t have clients “over” visiting, they sell their products in a store someone else owns, that I frequent. Discussing their product with them doesn’t mean you give up your rights to sue them if the product damages you.
“If you phone our hotline or send us snail mail, you can sue. But if you contact us on our website, you can’t.”
Huh?? What’s next? “If you eat two bowls of Cheerios, you can sue; but you can’t if you eat only one bowl.” Or “You can only sue if you consume Yoplait and Cheerios every day for a month.”
Sometimes when the market punishes, it punishes brutally. And it punishes stupidity regardless of ideology or which politicians you’ve bought and paid for:-)
FWIW, the story is not as it’s being portrayed.
The company’s new terms prohibited people from suing them over some issue involving the websites they visit, not from purchase of physical products.
IOW, if the coupon I download from a GM website isn’t honored at the local Winn-Dixie, I can’t sue GM.
You have to wonder how stupid the execs & legal staff in these companies are. The internet that they want to use to punish or constrain people is the same internet that the people will use against them to start boycotts, post angry tirades, etc.
I teach info policy and use these kind of cases all the time. You’d think companies would learn from others’ mistakes and not make such idiotic policies.
When they went pro-sodomy on the Minnesota marriage vote a year or two ago, I began to purposefully avoid General Mills garbage.
Haven’t really missed them.
With their advocacy (not just embracing or support) of the homosexual agenda, they lost my business last year.
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