Anyone ever try to renegotiate a standard form contract/contract of adhesion? E.g. walking into an electronics store, talking with the clerk about cell phone plans, then deciding on one, then being handed the standard contract that is many pages long and filled with gobbledygook, then taking a pen and crossing out sections and adding your own terms, signing, and handing it back?
Anyone ever succeed in renegotiating, or do they just laugh and tell you to go home or they’ll call security?
Vendors almost never have the authority to negotiate contracts, only offer you contracts based on their automatic system (so not Radio Shack).
On the other hand some AT&T or Verizon stores might have that authority, but they’re not going to be able to negotiate the terms of the contract, only give you sets of contracts that are pre-printed by their corporate sales/legal department.
Pretty much what Todderbob said. The people you’d work with at an electronics store don’t have the authorities to change the terms.
They might have terms in the standard in store contracts that say “these terms cannot be changed” and that if you sign the contract after striking out or adding terms you are still subject the the original terms.
Moved MPSIMS → IMHO.
Renegotiate that! 
When I bought my last car, I tried to strike out the arbitration clause but the dealer wouldn’t agree. The clause referred to a third party arbitration agreement (but didn’t include the specifics in the contract clause). I told them I needed to know the details of the arbitration agreement before I would sign. I waited the hour it took them to print out the 250 pages or so of the arbitration agreement. It didn’t sound like anyone had ever asked for it before. Never needed it (in fact never read it in detail) but if I did need to go into arbitration, I had the terms in writing.
So no to renegotiating, but yes to getting clarification.
Suppose you cross out and initial the “these terms cannot be changed” part?
Let’s consider this. If a court case arose regarding cell phone service, car rental, insurance, etc., in a situation where the presence of a specific clause or the wording of it is material, and the consumer demanded that the other side produce the actual contract signed, and it turns out that the actual physical contract has struck out sections and additions, properly initialed, and the form is signed, and it turns out that the company either didn’t notice the modifications (perhaps they only checked the signature line), ignored the modifications, etc. (quite possible if it was witnessed by a retail drone), what would the court rule was the actual agreement? Is the modified agreement valid because the company didn’t speak up and cancel service? Would the court void the entire contract and substitute a basic implied contract of “customer pays, company provides service”?
E.g., the customer cancels their account early and refuses to pay the company’s standard cancellation fee. The company sues, and the customer uses discovery to produce the actual physical form, and the court observes that the customer appears to have struck out the section where the customer agrees to the cancellation fee, and substituted a statement that the service contract could be ended early by the customer for no fee.
What do you think would happen? Has it ever happened?
I think the court would say the contract was valid, as printed, and the judge would order the client to pay the ETF.
More likely, that case would never see a court room, ETFs are 300 bucks at most, and it costs considerably more than that to sue someone, and if it was a corporate ETF then the provider and client would have a far more precise (backandforth) contract.
I’ve been involved with changing the terms of contracts, but only in the context of a sale worth hundreds of thousands of bucks for a giant corporation. If terms of a contract are changed, they’d have to be authorized by the appropriate people on both sides, and that does not include sales clerks or even store managers. The cost in management and legal time to look at your change is going to be way more than the revenue you’d be giving them, so the only reasonable thing for them to do is to tell you to get lost and bother a competitor.