A little lawyerly help on a consumer protection issue

Lavender Room
1

i dislike trial-by-internet and i’m not trying to backdoor one onto this forum by sharing this. it’s just that after many months of this i’m to the point where i need to go on offense and i don’t want to proceed unprepared.

this entire dispute is over $309 and it’s going to cost me thousands, most likely, but i’m just tired of large corporations putting me in a pincer and screwing it tighter and it seems to be quite prevalent these days (AT&T, sirius radio, and so on). as in, we won’t do business with you at all unless you let us do autorenewal with autopay. stuff like that. so i’ve decided not to take it anymore and i have a little more time on my hands these days. so to this issue…

we have residential propane service, and i rented a pair of tanks 20 years ago from a regional supplier. what certainly was NOT in the agreement is a fee to retrieve the tank once the customer terminated his contract.

amerigas was and perhaps still is rolling up these regional propane companies and is now the nation’s largest. they bought our supplier in the mid/late 20-teens. somewhere along the line amerigas slid into the deep bowels of its customer agreement that if you chose to terminate with amerigas then you must pay a $300 fee to have them retrieve the tank. last year they started requiring users of the online account to click a terms acceptance button to access the online account.

i clicked on that button because i’m on paperless billing and the only quick, convenient way to view an invoice, peruse it for correctness, change payment methods, change payment terms, look at the smart meter read on propane levels, and pay (or dispute) an invoice was to transact via the online account. i immediately called amerigas, waited online for the offshore call center to answer, and stated that no, i do not agree to terms of service, notwithstanding my clicking of that box required to transact via my online account. i made several such calls because every time i accessed the account that click was required.

this eventually led me to: 1) writing letters to an a corporate address i had to hunt around to find, as amerigas does not publish this, to object to this technique; and 2) to terminate my account as a result of this behavior, which I felt was beyond reasonable.

i have concluded my business with amerigas, except they are determined to collect the $309 for retrieval of the tank delivered to me more than a decade before they ever acquired the company that sent me the tank. they maintain that i accepted their terms of business on 12/28/23, notwithstanding my immediate objection to them and insistence that i did not accept their terms. many dozens of emails and letters have gone back and forth between amerigas and i in our attempt to resolve this, but resolution remains the same: they maintain i must pay the $309; i maintain that do not owe it. since then…

  1. i made a protest to the better business bureau. it sent me a correspondence this week saying, “As we haven’t received further feedback from the company, we have closed this case as “unresolved” and it will appear as such in the business’s BBB Reliability Report.”
  2. i filed a complaint to the CA state attorney general’s office, and i got from them today: This letter is to inform you that we have been unable to elicit any response from the company you named in your complaint to us. We had hoped that by writing to them and sending them your complaint that an agreeable resolution to your problem could be achieved."
  3. amerigas has continued to try to get me to pay and last month attached a $36 late fee. i emailed my contact at amerigas mid-July saying, "I am now informing you of the following: Because of your company’s continued harassment of me I’m going to investigate how much I can legally charge your company for continued harassment, beginning with the month of August upcoming. Every time your company sends me a late fee I consider that harassment because you well know that your claim against me is unsustainable and therefore constitutes bullying at the very least.” this morning i got another $36 late fee and, accordingly, i sent by email and snail mail a charge of $250 for harassment, which will escalate by $50 every month i receive another late fee or some other form of harassment.
  4. i’m filing a complaint with the Federal Bureau of Consumer Protection. i have reached out to consumerwatchdog.org. i’m not stopping.

eventually, when my invoices to amerigas reach perhaps 3 or 4 and the total is upward of $1,000, my intention is to sue them for non-payment in small claims court. my hope in suing them isn’t to get the money, as i have no idea whether my invoices to them are or will be legal and enforceable. it’s to force a kind of consent decree, where a judge just decides whether amerigas’s requirement for payment is valid or not.

my thesis is that it is not, because:

  1. the tank was delivered with no fee required for retrieval. i question the legality of assessing a fee to retrieve the tank after it’s already delivered on the basis of no fee required for retrieval.
  2. when parties enter into paperless billing that’s an explicit agreement that the online account is an integral part of business transactions in both directions. accordingly, requiring a party to agree to T&C as a condition of accessing the online account is illegal.
  3. of course a company can require acceptance of its terms. but a consumer can refuse those terms. at which point a company is under no obligation to continue service. but the option to refuse new T&C was not extended to me. so, i chose to discontinue service.

pardon the long screed. i’d be interested in knowing my legal vulnerability along with whatever legal strength i might have.

2

I certainly know nothing of the law, however the thing that would bother me is the potential that the company may file a non payment against you and then place that onto your credit report… this will then become a new albatross around your neck.

3

I certainly know nothing of the law, however the thing that would bother me is the potential that the company may file a non payment against you and then place that onto your credit report… this will then become a new albatross around your neck.

my credit score is 841 and i have no debt, no car debt, no mortgage. (they want to lend you money when you don’t need to borrow it.) so, honestly, i don’t care about that. in a way i hope they do, because if they do that’ll become part of my small claims action.

4

Although I am not a lawyer your plight resonates with me.

Couple thoughts worth everything you have paid for them:

  1. I suspect most judges wouldn’t take kindly to your proposed suit as they wouldn’t view it as an appropriate use of their time.

  2. Morality aside, I view the fundamental negative outcome for you is when they presumably report your account to collections and trash your credit rating. Until then they have done minimal harm. If it were me, and I wasn’t planning a big upcoming credit purchase, I would monitor my credit for the collection activity to appear and then complain to the FTC and CFPB as well as file a dispute with the National Credit Reporting Agencies (Trans Union, Equifax, Experian). The NCRAs are obligated to follow up on your dispute.

  3. The credit reporting agency (presumably the collections company for Amerigas) can be held liable and sued if they broke the law in reporting your credit incorrectly. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/what-if-i-disagree-with-the-results-of-my-credit-report-dispute-en-1327/

TLDR: consider suing them after (presumably) they report the trade to collections as then you will likely have much better standing.

5

Not a lawyer either, but just getting to the facts from your post…

  • Online access to your account requires you to click an accept of T&C. And you did.
  • These T&C enabling online access are where the $309 fee is described/agreed to.
    So, it sounds like they do have a leg to stand on re: you accepting the terms and therefore being on the hook for the fee.

However

  • You have to accept these T&C each time (monthly) that you access the account?

  • So if you explicitly do not accept them (don’t click ‘Accept’ for that month) then you have the explicit argument that you do not accept the T&C.

  • There must be an alternative non-online access option at that point for customers. Postal mail?

  • As such, tell them you’ll get their propane tank back to them (via postal mail :wink: or other method that is not subject to a retrieval fee that you did not agree to.

Easy, no?

6

i dislike trial-by-internet and i’m not trying to backdoor one onto this forum by sharing this. it’s just that after many months of this i’m to the point where i need to go on offense and i don’t want to proceed unprepared.

this entire dispute is over $309 and it’s going to cost me thousands, most likely, but i’m just tired of large corporations putting me in a pincer and screwing it tighter and it seems to be quite prevalent these days (AT&T, sirius radio, and so on). as in, we won’t do business with you at all unless you let us do autorenewal with autopay. stuff like that. so i’ve decided not to take it anymore and i have a little more time on my hands these days. so to this issue…

we have residential propane service, and i rented a pair of tanks 20 years ago from a regional supplier. what certainly was NOT in the agreement is a fee to retrieve the tank once the customer terminated his contract.

amerigas was and perhaps still is rolling up these regional propane companies and is now the nation’s largest. they bought our supplier in the mid/late 20-teens. somewhere along the line amerigas slid into the deep bowels of its customer agreement that if you chose to terminate with amerigas then you must pay a $300 fee to have them retrieve the tank. last year they started requiring users of the online account to click a terms acceptance button to access the online account.

i clicked on that button because i’m on paperless billing and the only quick, convenient way to view an invoice, peruse it for correctness, change payment methods, change payment terms, look at the smart meter read on propane levels, and pay (or dispute) an invoice was to transact via the online account. i immediately called amerigas, waited online for the offshore call center to answer, and stated that no, i do not agree to terms of service, notwithstanding my clicking of that box required to transact via my online account. i made several such calls because every time i accessed the account that click was required.

this eventually led me to: 1) writing letters to an a corporate address i had to hunt around to find, as amerigas does not publish this, to object to this technique; and 2) to terminate my account as a result of this behavior, which I felt was beyond reasonable.

i have concluded my business with amerigas, except they are determined to collect the $309 for retrieval of the tank delivered to me more than a decade before they ever acquired the company that sent me the tank. they maintain that i accepted their terms of business on 12/28/23, notwithstanding my immediate objection to them and insistence that i did not accept their terms. many dozens of emails and letters have gone back and forth between amerigas and i in our attempt to resolve this, but resolution remains the same: they maintain i must pay the $309; i maintain that do not owe it. since then…

  1. i made a protest to the better business bureau. it sent me a correspondence this week saying, “As we haven’t received further feedback from the company, we have closed this case as “unresolved” and it will appear as such in the business’s BBB Reliability Report.”
  2. i filed a complaint to the CA state attorney general’s office, and i got from them today: This letter is to inform you that we have been unable to elicit any response from the company you named in your complaint to us. We had hoped that by writing to them and sending them your complaint that an agreeable resolution to your problem could be achieved."
  3. amerigas has continued to try to get me to pay and last month attached a $36 late fee. i emailed my contact at amerigas mid-July saying, "I am now informing you of the following: Because of your company’s continued harassment of me I’m going to investigate how much I can legally charge your company for continued harassment, beginning with the month of August upcoming. Every time your company sends me a late fee I consider that harassment because you well know that your claim against me is unsustainable and therefore constitutes bullying at the very least.” this morning i got another $36 late fee and, accordingly, i sent by email and snail mail a charge of $250 for harassment, which will escalate by $50 every month i receive another late fee or some other form of harassment.
  4. i’m filing a complaint with the Federal Bureau of Consumer Protection. i have reached out to consumerwatchdog.org. i’m not stopping.

eventually, when my invoices to amerigas reach perhaps 3 or 4 and the total is upward of $1,000, my intention is to sue them for non-payment in small claims court. my hope in suing them isn’t to get the money, as i have no idea whether my invoices to them are or will be legal and enforceable. it’s to force a kind of consent decree, where a judge just decides whether amerigas’s requirement for payment is valid or not.

my thesis is that it is not, because:

  1. the tank was delivered with no fee required for retrieval. i question the legality of assessing a fee to retrieve the tank after it’s already delivered on the basis of no fee required for retrieval.
  2. when parties enter into paperless billing that’s an explicit agreement that the online account is an integral part of business transactions in both directions. accordingly, requiring a party to agree to T&C as a condition of accessing the online account is illegal.
  3. of course a company can require acceptance of its terms. but a consumer can refuse those terms. at which point a company is under no obligation to continue service. but the option to refuse new T&C was not extended to me. so, i chose to discontinue service.

pardon the long screed. i’d be interested in knowing my legal vulnerability along with whatever legal strength i might have.

I’m a tech lawyer who has written more of these kind of terms than I care to remember.

Practically speaking, you’re screwed. You’ve already made the decision to be practically screwed, because you’re going to war over $309 when your time is much more valuable than that.

Legally, you’re almost certainly screwed too.

clicked on that button because i’m on paperless billing and the only quick, convenient way to view an invoice, peruse it for correctness, change payment methods, change payment terms, look at the smart meter read on propane levels, and pay (or dispute) an invoice was to transact via the online account.

The argument is that all the quick convenient stuff you wanted was the consideration given by Amerigas for the change that included the removal fee. Nothing comes for free in this world. They offered you something you wanted, that wasn’t in the original agreement. In return, they got some stuff they wanted that wasn’t in the original agreement. Including the removal fee.

There is a concept of “contracts of adhesion” - which are all the contracts we all sign up for daily where we the individual consumer have no negotiating power. Things like credit card agreements, phone contracts, etc. Contracts of adhesion are both acknowledged to be inherently unfair, and also generally enforceable. Your choice is to not enter them if you don’t like them.

We, the evil software lawyers of the world ™, make you click I agree so that you have a much weaker argument that “you didn’t know that was the deal, didn’t agree to it”, etc. You had a chance to read, object, or choose not to agree - before you clicked “I agree”. Clicking “I agree” and then calling them to say “actually, I didn’t agree to the parts I didn’t like” - that generally doesn’t fly.

i emailed my contact at amerigas mid-July saying, "I am now informing you of the following: Because of your company’s continued harassment of me I’m going to investigate how much I can legally charge your company for continued harassment, beginning with the month of August upcoming. Every time your company sends me a late fee I consider that harassment because you well know that your claim against me is unsustainable and therefore constitutes bullying at the very least.”

This approach will almost certainly fail.

You’ve done the right things - atty general’s office, BBB, etc. If they’re not backing you up…good luck and godspeed.

I don’t mean to be a jerk here, and I live/practice in MA not CA, so perhaps there are state-specific consumer protection laws that might be useful. But my practical and legal advice is that you’re tilting at windmills.

7

i dislike trial-by-internet and i’m not trying to backdoor one onto this forum by sharing this. it’s just that after many months of this i’m to the point where i need to go on offense and i don’t want to proceed unprepared.

this entire dispute is over $309 and it’s going to cost me thousands, most likely, but i’m just tired of large corporations putting me in a pincer and screwing it tighter and it seems to be quite prevalent these days (AT&T, sirius radio, and so on). as in, we won’t do business with you at all unless you let us do autorenewal with autopay. stuff like that. so i’ve decided not to take it anymore and i have a little more time on my hands these days. so to this issue…

we have residential propane service, and i rented a pair of tanks 20 years ago from a regional supplier. what certainly was NOT in the agreement is a fee to retrieve the tank once the customer terminated his contract.

amerigas was and perhaps still is rolling up these regional propane companies and is now the nation’s largest. they bought our supplier in the mid/late 20-teens. somewhere along the line amerigas slid into the deep bowels of its customer agreement that if you chose to terminate with amerigas then you must pay a $300 fee to have them retrieve the tank. last year they started requiring users of the online account to click a terms acceptance button to access the online account.

i clicked on that button because i’m on paperless billing and the only quick, convenient way to view an invoice, peruse it for correctness, change payment methods, change payment terms, look at the smart meter read on propane levels, and pay (or dispute) an invoice was to transact via the online account. i immediately called amerigas, waited online for the offshore call center to answer, and stated that no, i do not agree to terms of service, notwithstanding my clicking of that box required to transact via my online account. i made several such calls because every time i accessed the account that click was required.

this eventually led me to: 1) writing letters to an a corporate address i had to hunt around to find, as amerigas does not publish this, to object to this technique; and 2) to terminate my account as a result of this behavior, which I felt was beyond reasonable.

i have concluded my business with amerigas, except they are determined to collect the $309 for retrieval of the tank delivered to me more than a decade before they ever acquired the company that sent me the tank. they maintain that i accepted their terms of business on 12/28/23, notwithstanding my immediate objection to them and insistence that i did not accept their terms. many dozens of emails and letters have gone back and forth between amerigas and i in our attempt to resolve this, but resolution remains the same: they maintain i must pay the $309; i maintain that do not owe it. since then…

  1. i made a protest to the better business bureau. it sent me a correspondence this week saying, “As we haven’t received further feedback from the company, we have closed this case as “unresolved” and it will appear as such in the business’s BBB Reliability Report.”
  2. i filed a complaint to the CA state attorney general’s office, and i got from them today: This letter is to inform you that we have been unable to elicit any response from the company you named in your complaint to us. We had hoped that by writing to them and sending them your complaint that an agreeable resolution to your problem could be achieved."
  3. amerigas has continued to try to get me to pay and last month attached a $36 late fee. i emailed my contact at amerigas mid-July saying, "I am now informing you of the following: Because of your company’s continued harassment of me I’m going to investigate how much I can legally charge your company for continued harassment, beginning with the month of August upcoming. Every time your company sends me a late fee I consider that harassment because you well know that your claim against me is unsustainable and therefore constitutes bullying at the very least.” this morning i got another $36 late fee and, accordingly, i sent by email and snail mail a charge of $250 for harassment, which will escalate by $50 every month i receive another late fee or some other form of harassment.
  4. i’m filing a complaint with the Federal Bureau of Consumer Protection. i have reached out to consumerwatchdog.org. i’m not stopping.

eventually, when my invoices to amerigas reach perhaps 3 or 4 and the total is upward of $1,000, my intention is to sue them for non-payment in small claims court. my hope in suing them isn’t to get the money, as i have no idea whether my invoices to them are or will be legal and enforceable. it’s to force a kind of consent decree, where a judge just decides whether amerigas’s requirement for payment is valid or not.

my thesis is that it is not, because:

  1. the tank was delivered with no fee required for retrieval. i question the legality of assessing a fee to retrieve the tank after it’s already delivered on the basis of no fee required for retrieval.
  2. when parties enter into paperless billing that’s an explicit agreement that the online account is an integral part of business transactions in both directions. accordingly, requiring a party to agree to T&C as a condition of accessing the online account is illegal.
  3. of course a company can require acceptance of its terms. but a consumer can refuse those terms. at which point a company is under no obligation to continue service. but the option to refuse new T&C was not extended to me. so, i chose to discontinue service.

pardon the long screed. i’d be interested in knowing my legal vulnerability along with whatever legal strength i might have.

I’m a tech lawyer who has written more of these kind of terms than I care to remember.

Practically speaking, you’re screwed. You’ve already made the decision to be practically screwed, because you’re going to war over $309 when your time is much more valuable than that.

Legally, you’re almost certainly screwed too.

clicked on that button because i’m on paperless billing and the only quick, convenient way to view an invoice, peruse it for correctness, change payment methods, change payment terms, look at the smart meter read on propane levels, and pay (or dispute) an invoice was to transact via the online account.

The argument is that all the quick convenient stuff you wanted was the consideration given by Amerigas for the change that included the removal fee. Nothing comes for free in this world. They offered you something you wanted, that wasn’t in the original agreement. In return, they got some stuff they wanted that wasn’t in the original agreement. Including the removal fee.

There is a concept of “contracts of adhesion” - which are all the contracts we all sign up for daily where we the individual consumer have no negotiating power. Things like credit card agreements, phone contracts, etc. Contracts of adhesion are both acknowledged to be inherently unfair, and also generally enforceable. Your choice is to not enter them if you don’t like them.

We, the evil software lawyers of the world ™, make you click I agree so that you have a much weaker argument that “you didn’t know that was the deal, didn’t agree to it”, etc. You had a chance to read, object, or choose not to agree - before you clicked “I agree”. Clicking “I agree” and then calling them to say “actually, I didn’t agree to the parts I didn’t like” - that generally doesn’t fly.

i emailed my contact at amerigas mid-July saying, "I am now informing you of the following: Because of your company’s continued harassment of me I’m going to investigate how much I can legally charge your company for continued harassment, beginning with the month of August upcoming. Every time your company sends me a late fee I consider that harassment because you well know that your claim against me is unsustainable and therefore constitutes bullying at the very least.”

This approach will almost certainly fail.

You’ve done the right things - atty general’s office, BBB, etc. If they’re not backing you up…good luck and godspeed.

I don’t mean to be a jerk here, and I live/practice in MA not CA, so perhaps there are state-specific consumer protection laws that might be useful. But my practical and legal advice is that you’re tilting at windmills.

first off, you’re being the farthest thing from a jerk. this is exactly the expertise i was looking for. i would like to ask a couple of follow up points however because i fear i might have inartfully stated the facts.

A. i did not ask them to pick up the tank. this might be a technical and ineffectual point, but it’s their tank. i just chose not to rent it any longer. they could’ve left it, or, i could have delivered it. they refused both. they required that they pick up their tank and charge me for it.

B. i can’t swear to this, but i can swear to my recollection of this: there wasn’t a prompt to a link to read T&C. you just were forced to click a link assenting to their T&C as part of the mechanics of entering the portal.

C. i would just as you, who typically stands as an advocate for companies in cases like this. if this were before a judge and a judge asked you, as the attorney, how the customer is supposed to transact business that can only be done on an online portal, what would your answer be? how can that customer refuse to accept T&C while also - for example - checking tank volume, changing payment info and so on?

8
  • There must be an alternative non-online access option at that point for customers. Postal mail?

yes. i can put a check in the mail and send it to them. if i have an invoice and an address. which i don’t have because they encourage and i accepted paperless billing. amerigas has no printed address anywhere in its website. i can change to paper invoices, and then they’ll come in the mail and i can pay my bill. but i’d been on paperless for years, and the only way to get a paper bill is to go into the online portal and switch to paper. but i can’t get into the portal without clicking on accepting T&C.

9

Dan

I’m a litigation lawyer, but not a US lawyer. I’ve been doing my gig for quite a while.

Honest take: I tuned out a third of a way through your screed. Before I did, this is what had the most impact:

“this entire dispute is over $309 and it’s going to cost me thousands, … i have a little more time on my hands these days.”

There is a big alarm bell ringing here. And it is saying “stubborn well off man looking for something to fill his time”.

This isn’t legal advice, it’s just advice: move on. Do not waste your time or your resources on this. You’re looking for a project, but find another one. This is the sort of thing that will lead to you turning up at court with a couple of well worn ring binders of documents, all differently hole punched so none of the edges or corners line up, taking increasingly mad points, because it’s a matter of principle.

Don’t be that guy, because that guy is never a happy guy.

And yeah, had I read your screed and had I been a qualified US lawyer maybe there is some grain of a good point somewhere in there. But I can’t be bothered because it just doesn’t smell nice. And a judge may well think the same, but they will be more tolerant and take in the detail. Then look at you with sympathetic pity and decide the matter.

10

I, too, want to be helpful but don’t want to seem like an a-hole. I’m a lawyer and while I don’t do this kind of work I do have clients who get wrapped up with things like this based on principle.

The one thing I’d highly recommend is dropping any “claims” for your “invoices,” especially when you make your complaints to various agencies. They’re entirely unenforceable and only weaken your real arguments.

11

A. i did not ask them to pick up the tank. this might be a technical and ineffectual point, but it’s their tank. i just chose not to rent it any longer. they could’ve left it, or, i could have delivered it. they refused both. they required that they pick up their tank and charge me for it.

From a purely legal classroom perspective, I understand the intellectual point you’re making here. I don’t think that line of argument will be successful. They will take the position that “they could have left it/you could have delivered it” was a conversation to be had before you opted into the new terms, and took advantage of the parts of the new terms that you found useful on your side (e.g., paperless billing, auto-checking of tank fill levels, etc.)

. i can’t swear to this, but i can swear to my recollection of this: there wasn’t a prompt to a link to read T&C. you just were forced to click a link assenting to their T&C as part of the mechanics of entering the portal.

Different companies approach this different ways. Settled law for several decades now has been that you need to have had an opportunity to look at the revised terms before you assent to them. Some companies include a hyperlink to the revised terms. Others put the terms in front of you, even to the point of making you scroll down through all the terms before the “I agree” button becomes click-able. But in all cases, the consumer generally needs the ability to see what they’re signing up for, in order for the agreement to be enforceable. I would be surprised if a company like Amerigas didn’t follow some sort of path like that.

A caveat to that is that many T&Cs say that the vendor can unilaterally update the terms from time to time, and your continued use of the service constitutes your agreement to the revised terms. Even then, ‘grown up’ companies will usually give you a heads-up about significant changes to the terms. That’s for both customer relationship reasons, and enforceability reasons. With someone as big as Amerigas, and something as relatively minor as a removal fee - I don’t know if they would have specifically called out a removal fee when they updated their terms. But they likely did alert you that there were some changes - and then left it on you to decide whether you wanted to go dig through the terms to see what had changed.

. i would just as you, who typically stands as an advocate for companies in cases like this. if this were before a judge and a judge asked you, as the attorney, how the customer is supposed to transact business that can only be done on an online portal, what would your answer be? how can that customer refuse to accept T&C while also - for example - checking tank volume, changing payment info and so on?

I don’t litigate, thank goodness, so I would probably cough nervously first :slight_smile:

But the general answer would be, Your Honor, nobody is forced to do business with Amerigas. slowman chose to do business with Amerigas. Amerigas cares about its customers, and in an increasingly online world, Amerigas chose to offer its customers the opportunity to transact online. That being said, Amerigas is a for-profit business, and the nature of how it makes its profit changes over time, just as customers expectations on how to transact business change over time.

We here at Amerigas gave our valued customer slowman an opportunity to transact online, but the cost of doing that included agreeing to a removal fee. slowman wanted to take advantage of the good parts of the revised deal that we offered, and is now trying to renege on the parts that he didn’t like. slowman is a seasoned businessman who has successfully founded, operated and exited multiple businesses - including an internet website, with terms and conditions that he himself has cited to his own customers from time to time, and has clarified or modified over time as well. He has not been taken advantage of or been snookered into a deal that he didn’t have a chance to review. He just doesn’t like the deal that he signed up for anymore. We can all relate to that sentiment, Your Honor, but that’s not grounds to void an enforceable contract.

12

A. i did not ask them to pick up the tank. this might be a technical and ineffectual point, but it’s their tank. i just chose not to rent it any longer. they could’ve left it, or, i could have delivered it. they refused both. they required that they pick up their tank and charge me for it.

From a purely legal classroom perspective, I understand the intellectual point you’re making here. I don’t think that line of argument will be successful. They will take the position that “they could have left it/you could have delivered it” was a conversation to be had before you opted into the new terms, and took advantage of the parts of the new terms that you found useful on your side (e.g., paperless billing, auto-checking of tank fill levels, etc.)

. i can’t swear to this, but i can swear to my recollection of this: there wasn’t a prompt to a link to read T&C. you just were forced to click a link assenting to their T&C as part of the mechanics of entering the portal.

Different companies approach this different ways. Settled law for several decades now has been that you need to have had an opportunity to look at the revised terms before you assent to them. Some companies include a hyperlink to the revised terms. Others put the terms in front of you, even to the point of making you scroll down through all the terms before the “I agree” button becomes click-able. But in all cases, the consumer generally needs the ability to see what they’re signing up for, in order for the agreement to be enforceable. I would be surprised if a company like Amerigas didn’t follow some sort of path like that.

A caveat to that is that many T&Cs say that the vendor can unilaterally update the terms from time to time, and your continued use of the service constitutes your agreement to the revised terms. Even then, ‘grown up’ companies will usually give you a heads-up about significant changes to the terms. That’s for both customer relationship reasons, and enforceability reasons. With someone as big as Amerigas, and something as relatively minor as a removal fee - I don’t know if they would have specifically called out a removal fee when they updated their terms. But they likely did alert you that there were some changes - and then left it on you to decide whether you wanted to go dig through the terms to see what had changed.

. i would just as you, who typically stands as an advocate for companies in cases like this. if this were before a judge and a judge asked you, as the attorney, how the customer is supposed to transact business that can only be done on an online portal, what would your answer be? how can that customer refuse to accept T&C while also - for example - checking tank volume, changing payment info and so on?

I don’t litigate, thank goodness, so I would probably cough nervously first :slight_smile:

But the general answer would be, Your Honor, nobody is forced to do business with Amerigas. slowman chose to do business with Amerigas. Amerigas cares about its customers, and in an increasingly online world, Amerigas chose to offer its customers the opportunity to transact online. That being said, Amerigas is a for-profit business, and the nature of how it makes its profit changes over time, just as customers expectations on how to transact business change over time.

We here at Amerigas gave our valued customer slowman an opportunity to transact online, but the cost of doing that included agreeing to a removal fee. slowman wanted to take advantage of the good parts of the revised deal that we offered, and is now trying to renege on the parts that he didn’t like. slowman is a seasoned businessman who has successfully founded, operated and exited multiple businesses - including an internet website, with terms and conditions that he himself has cited to his own customers from time to time, and has clarified or modified over time as well. He has not been taken advantage of or been snookered into a deal that he didn’t have a chance to review. He just doesn’t like the deal that he signed up for anymore. We can all relate to that sentiment, Your Honor, but that’s not grounds to void an enforceable contract.

if i could just have one more bite at the litigation apple here. and i am getting invaluable help from you for no cost which is not unnoticed.

“your honor, electing not to do business with amerigas is precisely what i did. as soon as amerigas chose to engage in what i considered an unscrupulous business practice i ceased business with them and informed them of such. from that moment my only goal was to extricate myself from this company. how does one practically cease a business relationship in some way other than the way i did it?”

13

if i could just have one more bite at the litigation apple here. and i am getting invaluable help from you for no cost which is not unnoticed.

“your honor, electing not to do business with amerigas is precisely what i did. as soon as amerigas chose to engage in what i considered an unscrupulous business practice i ceased business with them and informed them of such. from that moment my only goal was to extricate myself from this company. how does one practically cease a business relationship in some way other than the way i did it?”

The argument will go:

You had the chance to evaluate the business practice before entering into the deal. The fact that you only noticed it ex post facto is not Amerigas’ problem. And in the meantime, it appears that you availed yourself of the nice-to-have business practices before you elected to complain about the ones you don’t like. If anyone should be outraged, it’s Amerigas. Why should they go to the trouble of creating and administering a backend paperless payment and monitoring system that makes customers’ lives easier, only to have customers welsh on the deal after the customer has gotten what they wanted out of it?

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I believe the simplest solution to this situation is to not pay their invoice or late fees.

If they want their tanks back, they can come get them.

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I believe the simplest solution to this situation is to not pay their invoice or late fees.

If they want their tanks back, they can come get them.

Your invoices for being harrased are interesting, You live in the right state to make this fight.

Its the little guy who has had enough, and feels like nothing to lose, who stands up and ends up changing bad business.

I have thought for years its odd, on these click to accept terms features, the wide differences in them, and wondered if there is a legal standard or some companies just want to protect themselves from the eventual case that defines reasonable.

What if i see as the levels from wow this seems shaky, to okay they have done almost all they could.

  1. click this and you accept T&C
  2. click this and you accept T&C (T&C is a link to terms)
  3. click this and you accept. T&C (click option not active till you follow link to page)
  4. T&C shown as scroll, at bottom is box to check
  5. T&C shown you must scroll to bottom, to get Box to check

Sounds like your saying 1 is what you encountered which to me is the most challengeable to legality, especially if its to get into account, and there is no other way provided to get the T&C in a timely manner.

16

Thank you. You are a hero.

I’m with you. Sirius tried to sign me up without my permission or knowledge. And we didn’t even buy a new car recently! (Common issue when a new car is equipped with Sirius radio.)

17

I believe the simplest solution to this situation is to not pay their invoice or late fees.

If they want their tanks back, they can come get them.

just to be clear on this, i bought one off their tanks; they picked up the other. they are charging me for the privilege of allowing them to pick up their own equipment.

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I believe the simplest solution to this situation is to not pay their invoice or late fees.

If they want their tanks back, they can come get them.

just to be clear on this, i bought one off their tanks; they picked up the other. they are charging me for the privilege of allowing them to pick up their own equipment.

So, the tank that you have is owned by you.

The tank that you had been leasing was removed by the leasing company.

If they are sending you a bill for the removal, don’t pay it. It can’t do much to your credit rating.

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I believe the simplest solution to this situation is to not pay their invoice or late fees.

If they want their tanks back, they can come get them.

just to be clear on this, i bought one off their tanks; they picked up the other. they are charging me for the privilege of allowing them to pick up their own equipment.

So, the tank that you have is owned by you.

The tank that you had been leasing was removed by the leasing company.

If they are sending you a bill for the removal, don’t pay it. It can’t do much to your credit rating.

well, that’s where we are. they’re adding $36 a month. it’s much easier for me to just pay it. $300 and something dollars total. this is the most efficient way to go for me. just, when you search “amerigas” always among the top 4 search phrases are “how do i quit amerigas” or “how do i cancel amerigas”. bear this in mind: propane is really hard to quit. you have a tank rental anniversary. if you don’t time it exactly right you have a hundreds of dollars you own in propane that are going to get picked up when that tank gets picked up. so, you spend $300 to let them pick up their own tank and it’s got $300 of your propane in it. you can see how hard the decision is to “quit” any propane company but amerigas is making it even harder.

amerigas has in my view made it strategically hard to quit them. there’s a lot of people in my situation and when a company like that decides to become what appears to me predatory with its own customers that makes me angry and that’s why i’ve been fighting this.

20

Have you considered filing a complaint with the FERC? (https://www.ferc.gov/enforcement-legal/legal/complaints). They have a dispute resolution process and I would imagine Amerigas might be more inclined to respond to a federal oversight entity than an angry individual - and perhaps Amerigas has a series of complaints being filed. I’m not sure whether or not this agency has oversight responsibilities that include Amerigas but might be worth researching.

As you well know, companies are quite sensitive to their online reputation so some social media posts (outside of ST) and google reviews might get their attention as well. You may even find a group of folks with a similar issue/complaint and you can find others to join in on the campaign.

Best of luck.