Consumers Take Action

Are you a consumer who has been adversely affected by standard form contracts or desires

to help make them fair, accessible, and understandable?

 

Steps you can take today:

1) Pull out your contracts and read them; Are they readable?  Why waste time doing this?  This is our point — we need to mobilize for fair, accessible and understandable contracts;

2) Send us contracts you have that you believe to be unfair or incomprehensible, minus the personal information, for our archive as we help others to collect and analyze industry contracts for unfair provisions to consumers; send us your stories too! Email your contract to mycontract [at] faircontracts.org.

3) Contact your state attorney general’s office and ask them to require that all businesses that do business with consumers through standard form contracts make those contracts publicly available before a consumer is required to engage in the underlying transaction;

4) Contact your members of Congress and ask them to eliminate fine print from standard form consumer contracts and replace it with terms and language that everyone can easily read and understand; they should also support with funding the work of the Federal Trade Commission to research the efficacy of current disclosures and to police unfair and deceptive practices;

5) Contact the Federal Trade Commission in Washington DC and ask them to act to get rid of unfair and deceptive fine print in standard form contracts;  they should also require all businesses that do business with standard form business-to-consumer contracts to make those contracts available on their website and at their places of business so that consumers (and third parties, such as the media, scholars, advocates and advocacy organizations) have access to the terms before they engage in any underlying consumer transaction;

5) Join our email list for updates and alerts on fair contracts.  Follow us on Twitter (@FairContracts) if you’d like; and

6) Support us and other initiatives working for fair contracts.  See our resources list.