Every so often, you hear about a class-action lawsuit that’s been won or settled. Usually the payout is something stupidly trivial, like a $20 gift certificate to the same company that wronged you, or a free pastry or 15% off a future purchase or such. The whole system seems like a scam that unscrupulous lawyers use to take advantage of wronged consumers.
Has there ever been a class-action lawsuit that actually provided meaningful restitution to the victims? I understand they can be used to “punish” corporations and disincentivize future bad behavior, but that’s not the same thing as helping the people who were screwed the first time around.
I was a beneficiary of a class action lawsuit against VW for defective coil packs, window regulators, or something like that. I elected to take my compensation in the form of credit for service or sales at any VW dealership. I ended up getting $500 (or so) in coupons, which paid for oil changes and maintenance for years. The coupons were pretty good, in that I don’t think they expired, and could be used anywhere. The only catch was no cash back, so I might use three $25 coupons for an $90 service, then pay the rest in cash.
Anyway, my feeling was that the settlement I received was adequate compensation for the inconvenience of having to get my coil packs replaced under warranty, and then again due to recall.
In most cases class action law suits are going to give each member of a the class a small pay out, because each class member has only had a small amount of damage. Of course the lawyers get paid lots. Where is the line between too small a pay out and too much for the lawyers? I think that has to be called on a case by case basis. Without class action law suits, each class member would have to sue on their own, which is hardly going to be worth it for very small amounts of damage. So, the choice might be a $20 payout or nothing at all.
Some of the settlements have seemed pretty offensive though. The Ticketmaster one comes to mind as particularly bad. Pay hundreds in extra fees over a decade? Here are a few discount codes for the next time you want to pay some fees.
A while back, maybe 15 years ago, a class action lawsuit against some credit card processors netted me about $3000. Last year, there was a class action suit against Sysco (the food service company) from which I ended up with $800.
I had no idea how big either of those would be, I was floored when the checks showed up. However, a class action lawsuit against, say, the manufacturer of a TV you bought 15 years ago over a warranty issue probably isn’t worth bothering with. IME, those are the ones where you end up with a $3.00 check.
I got a class-action check from AOL a few years ago for $100. I have no recollection of signing up for it.
I follow this website and periodically see things for which I’m eligible, and occasionally get checks, usually for $10 or less. Hey, that’s money I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
I buy a lot of e-books. There were a couple of class action suits regarding price fixing or something. I got a total of over $500 in Amazon credits over two settlements. They happened a couple of years apart. I think the credits were supposed to be good for e-books only, but I definitely know I used the credits from second settlement ( the larger by far of the two, almost $400 ) for other merchandise.
No that would be the the Ford Explorer settlement.
& as I remember, you only had something like six months or a year to use the voucher.
If you bought a product where the poor design caused injury &/or death would you trust that company to buy from them again?
Most people don’t buy a car in the timeframe that the vouchers were good for. If your current car was less that 2-3 years old, you wouldn’t be in the majority if you got a new one within the voucher period. They negotiated a settlement that cost them relatively little.
This, my parents were beneficiaries of a class action suit and were awarded just under a million dollars, but there were fatalities in the circumstances leading to the lawsuit and a very limited set of people qualified for the suit. At the other end of the spectrum, I was awarded $1.55 in a class action lawsuit against cooper tires (or the company that makes cooper tires)
When my wife was teaching, her union sued the school district, charging that their contract had a loophole and male teachers were being hired at higher starting salaries than female teachers with equivalent experience. When the union won she immediately jumped several steps on the salary scale.
I got a $5 check from Rockstar Games for purchasing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas at launch when apparently they snuck in sexual material that was completely inaccessible unless you modded the game. So I basically got a free $5 for absolutely no harm done to me from a $60 video game I loved to play.
Well, I’ll admit that this thread has been a lot more heartening that news reports. I guess we only hear about the ones where people get shafted, but it’s nice to know that once in a while good things happen to regular people too.
I got a small payout (like $25 or so) from a class action lawsuit about some shampoo that allegedly made some peoples’ hair fall out. It did not make my hair fall out and I’m hoping that, for someone whose hair did fall out, they got more. The $25 just about paid for the two bottles of that shampoo that I actually bought. I don’t remember how I heard about it, but I think I bought one bottle over the internet and the other one at Sephora. I think somewhere along the line there was a questionnaire asking how much of the product I had used.
We also got some kind of payout from a class action suit against a realty company. I don’t even know what the beef was but in our deaings with that company it came off pretty shady. Whatever it was doing, I hope the lawsuit caused it to stop (it’s still around, I think–although come to think of it I haven’t seen any of its signs lately).
Yes. I received a check for a few hundred dollars from Volkswagen for a class action suit about the oil sludge problem with the VW Passat. It wasn’t the full amount I had to pay, but it was better than the usual trivial amount I’d received from other such class action suits.
There were a number of class action lawsuits in California a few years ago: many companies were classifying IT workers as Exempt employees (salaried, no overtime), when state law dictated that they should be Non-Exempt (hourly, with overtime). I was a beneficiary of two such lawsuits (against two different companies), and received several thousand dollars in unpaid overtime as a result.
Not sure if you call it a class action lawsuit, but I took a complaint to the Virginia Dept of Labor about an employer, and after they investigated I got a moderately nice sum [$1800 US] and as I recall every employee for 7 years had been found and paid discrepancies in time keeping, falsified ‘penalties’ and such like. My priginal complaint was the time keeping issue combined with them refusing to pay me the final paycheck because of mistakes I made while training [that were not even my mistakes, it was someone at a different franchised branch that checked in the vehicle and miscalculated the rates, and a couple other irregularities. I posited that if I was in official training, then my trainer was responsible for not catching the errors.]
I got $100 from Lenovo due to “fraudulent web store pricing”; the sort of thing where the item is MSRP $299 but you have the store reading “Reg: $399, Sale $100 Off! $299!”
The funny thing is that I price compared anyway (obviously) and knew that $299 was the regular price but Lenovo had it in stock and Amazon didn’t, plus no one had it legitimately on sale. So I wasn’t actually deceived but I got a hundred bucks out of it.
I also got a rebate from 23andMe around a couple of testing kits I purchased in 2013. I believe that by default, the rebate was a coupon for a free or reduced price kit. However there was a way to request cash instead. $25 is the number that comes to mind but I don’t remember if that was per kit or my total for both kits.
I got an e-mail explaining how to receive the cash rebate. I’m very lucky that I saw it because it was delivered to my spam folder. Which was interesting, because I had my spam filters set to OFF. NOTHING ever ended up in my spam folder, this was the only “spam” email I got in three years. So I am pretty certain that e-mail was deliberately tagged somehow so it would be marked as spam.
Luckily I saw it. I applied for and received the cash rebate.
I just got a sweet $0.23 class-action lawsuit payout check. I don’t even know what it was for.
That company paid more for the printing and mailing of the checks than the actual payout. And I would guess a high percentage of those checks go straight in the trash, like mine did.