American corporations have no decency, but somehow what they do is legal

I was scheduled to return to the US from Italy to visit my husband in the end of February, but my body wouldn’t physically allow me to depart this wonderful country to go back to the US, even for a visit.

Since my husband was able to come and visit me in Italy, I tried to change my return ticket on United for later date. Even though the round-trip coach ticket already cost $1500, in order to rebook my ticket a minimum of an additional $500 was required to make up the difference in fare change, no matter the date. This added up to $2000 for a round trip coach ticket from Washington, DC to Italy in low season.

This is a lot of money and much more than this trip used to cost.

Since I didn’t know exactly when or if I would return, I decided to cancel the ticket and just use the credit to buy a ticket when I knew what I was doing.

How much do you think United credited me?

I can tell you I did not expect it to be $300.

They did this even though there was not a single one-way ticket back to Washington, DC for less than $1400 for the entire year.

This is indecent.

It should be illegal, but there is no accountability for American companies who screw over their customers all while making record profits.

Perhaps other US airlines behave better than this. I can’t say because until now I’ve been loyal to United for decades because I like to rack up the frequent flier miles to redeem for travel.1

Something that has become abundantly clear in the last few decades is that there are all sorts of things major US companies can do to rip people off and pay no real price for it because all of their behavior is completely legal, and there is no consumer protection in the US.

Before I asked to have my trip rescheduled, United canceled my connecting flight to Munich with no explanation and never notified me of it. I only realized this when I went to change the flight, and there was no connecting flight. United couldn’t explain why this happened, and it took two hours for them to recover it so I could make a change. Had I not been changing my flight, I wouldn’t have found out that my connecting flight had been canceled until I went to check in the night before.

I have a dozen more stories like this about United, but I’ll spare you.

This isn’t really about United per se. It’s about the phenomenon of so-called reputable companies that operate like criminal enterprises. They are held to no rules that guarantee their customers will be treated fairly.

They don’t even need to operate in reality.

United can pretend that you can fly across the Atlantic Ocean for $300, and there is nothing you can do.

People who like to invoke the “free market” claim that if a company is doing bad things, then you can just take your dollar somewhere else. This ignores the fact that many companies have close to or outright monopoly control in their industries, so you actually don’t have a lot of options in terms of finding another company that sells, say, eggs or chicken.

In the case of United, I can find another airline to use once I deplete the miles I saved up on frequent flyer miles, though it won’t be as convenient in terms of routes. But at this point, I’m willing to be inconvenienced by not continuing to support a company that behaves so badly.

But that doesn’t solve the broader problem of unaccountable American corporations and the limited options you have if you operate in or adjacent to the US. Food conglomerates have been ripping Americans off in the post-COVID era, and the government has done nothing to stop it. Currently, it’s happening with eggs, and the US media refuses to call it what it is: price gouging.

It doesn’t help Americans who can’t get reimbursed by their health insurance companies for basic medical care even though they are paying through the nose to have that coverage.

Then there is also the fact that you don’t even need to be using some of the companies to pay a price for their greed and malfeasance. I never was a customer of any of the major US investment banks that destroyed the world economy in 2008, but their behavior still affected me and a lot of people who had nothing to do with them.

I was inspired to step away from United by an article I read about how Gen Z women are withholding their dollars from companies that don’t align with their values and are embracing “under-spending” as a way to protest the unjust economic system in the US.

It’s not really a boycott, because it doesn’t involve organizing other people against particular companies, but rather being very intentional about how you spend your dollars in this extremely fraught time period.

One could argue that we should always be doing this, and I suppose that’s right. But it feels even more important now, when we are at a true crossroads in terms of the future of the country, to use whatever small amount of power we have to send a message to specific companies but also about the larger economic system that allows companies to act with impunity in their drive to make more money.

There should be a cost for bad behavior, and if the government won’t be the one to hold companies accountable, then it is left to us to do the job they refuse to do.