"The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs’ lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users. That move triggered a bill for tens of millions of dollars in filing fees, according to lawyers involved, payable by Amazon under its own policies."
> “No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration,” U.S. District Judge William Alsup wrote in an order last February. “Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers, to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed.”
I believe their podcast “The Daily” also had an episode on it, even got the original lawyer that discovered the trick. It’s a pretty good podcast for those who may not know about it
Not pretending to be in the same league as The Daily, but we have a more tech-focused interview with Teel Lidow (the guy I think you're talking about - he's the lawyer who founded FairShake, the company in that NYT article) for the Anvil podcast, along with their tech lead.
Fun fact - the entire thing was prototyped by the lawyers using no-code systems, then only rewritten with an actual Web framework when they had proven out the idea:
I participated in the arbitration swarm against IndieGoGo for tortious interference after they shut down and refunded a campaign after it had completed successfully. The details of the matter aren't public but the mechanics are.
In order to participate, consumers pay a one-time fee capped at $250 and they pick up the rest. "The rest" includes the balance of the arbitration fees ($1500). Companies used to ignore this and leave people in arbitration limbo but California changed their laws a couple years back and if the company fails to pay, it automatically goes into arbitration and they have to pay after.
More importantly, $1500 each isn't the big cost. The more expensive part is they have to individually respond and work them through the process. If you have 100 or 1000, the billable hours - or even just corp legal team's hours - start racking up quickly and it ties up and slows down all other matters.
And none of this considers the consequences of the arbitrations. Win or lose the first few, people can iterate and shift the outcome over time.
So yes, it becomes a legal DDOS.. and Amazon dealing with 75k of them is a staggering number and still only a fraction of what they could have faced.
Is there any more information available on which campaign was shut down or why they did it? Perhaps pre-settlement discussions on organizing the swarm? I'm really curious as to the backstory.
In Germany banks have to reimburse some fees after a court decision. But each customer has to write their own letter, the banks offer no forms or real help because it's not in their best interest. Still Deutsche Bank put aside 350 million Euro, only 100 of those is for fees, the rest I assume is the extra administrative hassle.
Just pulling some numbers out of a hat, if they are paying $250/hr for legal counsel, and each of these disputes is generating one 8-hour day's worth of billable time, then Amazon is looking at $1.5 billion in legal fees to individually arbitrate each of these disputes.
I hardly think they are paying $250/hr for external counsel on each and every of those 75 000 arbitration cases. Amazon can easily justify hiring in-house counsel, and regular employees of legal department don't make $500k/year. More likely, they are going to hire a bunch of paralegals at $40/hour, and have each spend 1 hour tops on arguing each case.
Hmm, that's not a first. Our legal systems (its AFAIK world-wide phenomenon) are flooded as it is, as its slooowwwww. In US, politicians use their time with amendments (?) to slow down the adoption of a law. Not sure how that exactly works as I'm not from US.
You can't outright spam the court. But you can fill the court with lots and lots of legitimate cases, and lots of people all filing suit against the same company for essentially the same thing is a real thing that does legitimately happen. The US courts have developed some mechanisms - class action, but also a thing called multidistrict litigation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidistrict_litigation) to help with these things.
I've never been personally involved in arbitration, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the arbitration firms have not developed any real equivalents. Heck, being for-profit organizations, I would think that they have every incentive to not develop anything like that.
In the US, arbitration HAS developed the equivalent of class action cases. However, most companies that require their customers to agree to mandatory arbitration also require them to agree not to utilize class action options.
My opinion on the matter is that plea bargain is a hack to work around a slow legal system. If it weren't for the slowness of the legal system, we would not need plea bargain.
Also, since there's no verdict by a judge, I find it not rather undemocratic.
Lower courts and court cost are also ways to put less stress on the legal system, but they can be balanced.
Not a specific law, to my knowledge, but a few court cases that have established over the years that arbitration agreements must make every effort to be reasonable and accessible for the consumer. Unreasonable or unconscionable agreements can and have been successfully challenged in the courts. The company footing the bill is a _de facto_ requirement.
For context, if the plaintiff needs to personally cover $150 of the arbitration fee, that puts their cost in line with what it would typically cost them to pursue a case in small claims court.
It's a condition of the arbitration firm. Uber tried to switch to an arbitration firm with cheaper fees after a flood of driver disputes, but the drivers won their right to use the original firm.
Interesting. I guess then in that case the question would be why do the firms have such conditions to begin with? Isn't it better for all the companies to just make people pay the costs too?
A cursory read suggests that having arbitration fees paid by the customer opens the door for them to ask the courts to throw out the arbitration clause; so it's safer to assume responsibility for the costs to ensure the clause remains enforceable.
Whoever pays the cost becomes the customer, with all the incentives that entails. The point of arbitration is keeping the decision makers incentivized towards the companies in a way that judges and juries would never be.
Why works it matter who's actually making the payment? I would've thought what matters is who is bringing them business & causing them to earn money, not who is actually paying them? It's not like customers can take their businesses to another arbitrator.
Sorry I still don't get it. Couldn't the same thing happen even if consumers were paying? It's still the business that's bringing them the fees (even if consumers are paying them), so it seems like they would still be incentivized to side with the businesses rather than with the consumers. The consumers have no choice here, so I don't see what incentive they have to rule in favor of consumers even if they're the ones making the payments.
For the choices that matter to the arbitration firm, they absolutely do. Without a customer who is willing to initiate arbitration proceedings, there are no fees to be collected.
If there is a huge upfront financial burden to the customers, the customers are much more likely to just drop the whole matter. And while the businesses would absolutely consider consumers not pursuing grievances to be a win, the arbitration firm does have an incentive to actually have there be some arbitration.
As far as I can tell, the actual point of arbitration is more to dodge the extensive discovery and subpoena powers of actual courts. If you're suing Amazon in small claims court, if you can convince the judge that Jeff Bezos' testimony meets the legal bar, you can compel him to testify in court. Or you can compel Amazon to turn over broad swathes of potentially damaging information. You can even force third parties to come in and testify, if it should be relevant.
In arbitration, you do not have a judge, so there isn't subpoena power, and discovery is extremely curtailed.
That would make sense if it's the case, but in that case, is it really worth it for Amazon to give up that protection for the tens of millions of dollars at stake here? I would've thought they'd still prefer to pay that.
The way to dispute it would be to look at actual statistics to figure out if the arbitrators appear to be more biased than regular courts. I think some studies have actually done that and found that there is no inherent bias towards the corporate defendant in arbitration, but I don't have a ready cite in front of me.
On the contrary, every study I know of shows substantial bias towards the corporate side in these sorts of disputes. That's why they're attractive to the corporation in the first place. This link explains how even a "fair" system (arbitrator chosen from a random list) is gamed:
It's simple. The optimum situation from Amazon's point of view is a system that gives almost enough justice to avoid public outcry, and no more. The most outrageous cases should get paid a modest amount, average cases should get paid a tiny amount, and no stretch cases should get paid. Amazon anticipated that by paying for the arbitration process, they'd end up with a set of pro-Amazon arbitrators and that, in itself, would keep the number of cases filed to a minimum. What they didn't anticipate was enough people angry enough to file cases even in a biased system just to mess with the company.
If you were going to court would you rather be the one paying the judge or the other side? Even if the arbitration board is supposed to be neutral they know on which side the bread is buttered.
You can A/B test. Company A awards your firm wins in 50% of your arbitration cases. Company B awards you wins in 65% of your arbitration cases. Which contract should you renew next year?
Maybe silly question and probably OT but do sellers have any rights to sell on Amazon's platform? I had been selling for years and seem to have some benign error which has caused my seller account to be deactivated (Yes literally a benign error, I think it's because I accidentally used my personal email (rather than business email which was my main seller account) to register a seperate seller account years ago and according to Seller TOS you can't have two accounts—so even though I never used the accidental account, I still got deactivated). Further, Amazon has an appeal system for exactly this offense but for whatever reason they never respond to my inquiries.
I've appealed everywhere I could, emailed jeff@amazon, but never get a response from anyone anymore; probably for being so annoying on the issue.
Do sellers have any rights? For the record this has basically ruined my business. I started selling online (on my own site) in 2015 and started selling on Amazon in around 2017 and around the time of the pandemic basically all of my sales volume shifted from my website to almost all of it on Amazon. What they've done here is great for consumers; but now they control the rails and people aren't doing as much ecommerce shopping if outside of Amazon's walls.
Obviously they have done nothing illegal by destroying my livelihood like this, but, it feels weird to have no recourse for a violation that has impacted my life so deeply. I wouldn't even ponder the idea of bringing the law in to help remediate my situation here but wonder if anyone may have any thoughts as to otherwise.
My seller account got banned because they retroactively added some <$1fee, and then automatically banned the account because the fee was "past due". I paid the fee, but that wasn't enough to get my account reactivated. All communications I sent seem to go into a black hole, tickets I opened were closed without any resolution, etc.
The thing that finally did it for me, was when I went to cancel my AWS account. The AWS get rep got involved, and my seller account magically got unbanned within a day.
Because I read the Amazon Business Services Agreement and was aware of the single account clause, I inquired about this very issue when both running my mom’s business on Amazon and setting up a different account for a friend. Seller Support was very polite and direct in saying it would only be a problem if the two accounts were selling the same or similar merchandise. My take is they don’t want sanctioned sellers sneaking back on the platform. Anyway, now they face the Smurf Attack of Chinese sellers with 5&6 letter names and apparently they can’t keep up with it.
I'm sure they are inundated with people trying to game the system and they can't keep up with it.
Still, they should have an escape hatch for sellers like me who are highly motivated to fix these issues and willing to go to great lengths to do so. I live in Seattle so I've played with the idea of barging into the HQ and start asking random strangers to help me. I know I am not the only one in this category and it seems ridiculous that they have recourse no matter their level of effort.
Couldn't thank you more. Unfortunately I am having a hard time finding your email. Do you think you could reach out to me instead? nikk at getfractals dot com
Yes; I would not be so adamant about supporting this idea if it weren't for my own personal experience.
I'm not sure if there are any serious proposals on the table on how they should be broken up; but I could imagine different companies that act as a gateway to selling on amazon. These companies would compete to offer the best experience to sellers. Someone more centralized higher up would regulate the companies that act as a gateway.
Amazon is so big that in my opinion it needs to have some incentivized structure that looks something like this. What they are doing right now is not fair and it is not working.
Yeah. I often call them actually. It's nice to finally be able to get someone on the phone, but they're really unhelpful unfortunately, even when asking to escalate. The general answer is "the team that handles these matters is a black box and we can't contact them; we can't write to them; we can't walk to their desks; we have no way of communicating with them".
Apparently the only way to get in touch with this team who's banned my account is through a form that they don't respond to.
The people on the phone are nice; I beg, bribe, offer to send chocolates; but their response is always the same. They really seem to have no way of contacting this team. The only other avenue is the jeff@amazon outlet which doesn't respond to my emails. I've emailed that address maybe 4 times total about this issue; the first time they did respond and seemed to get me pretty close to resolution; but then stopped responding half way through. The follow up attempts to jeff@amazon after the first stopped receiving replies.
Maddening! I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've felt stressed out in my life; but this is one of those rare occasions because I feel so powerless.
Wish you could have seen the product I was selling. It had an average of 4.8 star reviews; over 300 which had been submitted. All real customers. I was so proud of that.
I think soon, we're going to have to (sadly) get legislative for things such as this.
This path has been taken in some jurisdictions, for things like deleting customer data, accounts and more.
But it has been proven again and again, that offering paid services with zero customer support, is seen as a plus for many corps. I presume the logic is, support costs big, better to lose a small percentage of clients, than support them all fully and reasonably.
Some cite Chinese sellers, fraud as the problem. No, that's not the problem, the problem is not dealing with cost, and this issue, in a reasonable way.
We have centuries of common law, and legislative backing which essentially states that consumers, clients, businesses must behave in a certain way with one another.
Amazon is trying to game the system, by ignoring these covenants, and creating process and conditions which purposefully denigrate these concepts.
So glad someone found a way to mess up their perfect little plan to keep consumers, and clients out of court.
Consumer rights are not something to be optimized, mitigated, reduced.
More thoughts ; we've been through this forever. Think of all the lemon laws for car dealers , manufacturers, as a result of just plain scummy behaviour.
It's all the same thing. Act scummy, and we'll make you stop.
Sorry but can you not just create another legal entity to sell? I mean creating a small business should be straight forward in USA right. Am I missing something?
Depends on your definition of "common". It is becoming more and more prevalent [1].
I've only seen it in print once, but then again, I'm not in a situation to sign contracts like that often. I refused, since I can't imagine a scenario where it benefits me.
It’s in everything and you rarely sign anything to waive. You check a box, click a button, buy something with a sticker on the box, or even walk past a sign.
What happens if I add a “terms of business relationships addendum” to my facebook account (or homepage) that claims to override various clauses in all terms of service I’ve agreed to?
I’m serious. If the expectation is that I can be bothered to check for updates to 1000’s of terms of service every morning, why shouldn’t they be expected to hire someone to check personal homepages and social media accounts for such things?
“Last writer wins” in US contract law (roughly speaking, IANAL), and I’m reasonably sure I can establish that my addendum “happens after” company terms of service updates.
I’m happy to agree to binding arbitration, or flying to Washington to have a (corrupt?) judge or whatever process my complaint for a meagre $10,000 per hour (plus expenses) for the duration of the dispute.
Edit: payable up front, regardless of the outcome of the dispute.
I mean, if you're serious, the answer is that Facebook didn't claim to have read your terms of service addendum, but you did say you read theirs, when you signed up.
I do agree with the sentiment though. IMO, if one party to a contract cannot have a reasonable expectation (!) that the contract was read by the other party, the contract should be considered invalid.
Except I didn't make that claim, I edited the DOM to make the button read, "I haven't read this agreement and waive no rights." Even if I did not, how do they expect to be able to prove that I did not?
I am well within my rights to modify the copy of a contract supplied to me, so it can hardly be said to be fraudulent to do such a thing. It isn't my fault that they don't want a copy of what I actually agreed to...
I really would like to see someone use this tactic in court. I am quite curious what the legal status of it would be and what the follow up arms race would look like if it a court sided with the user in such a case. I can imagine naive counters where they submit hashes of the agreed upon contents and suddenly typoes become legally binding when they refuse to accept such a modification.
You would go to court to sue Amazon. They would claim the suit should be dismissed because you had agreed to mandatory arbitration. You would claim you had NOT agreed to that clause, because you configured your browser to render different text before clicking on "I agree".
The court would then declare that since you had represented to Amazon that you were agreeing to it, they weren't responsible for what text you had changed in your browser, and the court would hold you to the contract that was supplied to you.
This isn't even a slight stretch. A stretch would be when Wells Fargo opened bank accounts for people without their permission -- then blocked a class action lawsuit arguing that the terms and conditions for the account (which the customers hadn't signed up for) required arbitration instead of class action lawsuits.[1]
Maybe, but if that is the case, why even pretend to get consent? I have clearly not consented to waiving my rights in this scenario despite it maybe having no legal effect, if Amazon can simply dictate the terms of our business without any negotiation, why bother pretending? They can just post the terms and conditions somewhere on their site and then not bother forcing people to pretend to read them.
I once registered to an event where the condition of attendance was to agree to have your personal data processed (that was many years before GDPR came and made such bullshit illegal). This was declared through a HTML form, with a bit of client-side JS that disabled the "Submit" button until you checked the "I agree to data processing" checkbox.
So of course I edited the page to let the submission through anyway, and the POST request had the appropriate consent boolean parameter to false instead of true. Since the registration completed successfully, they either ignored that parameter, or - what I was hoping would happen - their database had my row with a distinct FALSE on the consent column.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I decided to follow up on their data processing against my consent. Would I have a successful case? Or would they can me for working around their bit of client-side JS?
How did you edit it? I haven't ever had Facebook, but if I understand correctly you are saying that you edited the terms of service and then successfully hit the "submit" button?
You can edit the content of any web site via the browser's dev tools. It's not hard. This only changes it locally, although it can have effects on poorly designed sites.
I have used this to buy tickets to an event for $1.
No, it wasn't unfair to the vendor. The vendor had an issue on a web site where the sales window closed, presumably to give the vendor time to process sales and print/mail tickets, but this was enforced front-end only. I was mid-check-out when the window closed with no warning.
There were plenty of tickets left. There was plenty of time left too (the vendor had switched from paper to digital tickets for COVID19, so...).
I think there was an exploitable security bug in there too, but I don't think anyone will exploit it. It's a little shop.
I was acquainted with the person who ran the event and website and let them know about the vulnerability and bought the tickets at the appropriate price after.
He was also storing passwords as plain text (they would email your password when you clicked "lost password?")... which is pretty troubling for a site that was also taking credit card payments.
German / European courts have ruled many times that consumer TOS clauses which are "surprising" and/or "unusual" (e.g. "hidden" feed or waivers) are not enforceable.
Courts around the world have made similar rulings. The technical term is "contact of adhesion" and while exact rules vary from country to country, most courts will at a minimum strike out clauses which are considered to be "unexpected" on the basis that the customer is unlikely to have actually read the contract. (This is why clauses such as exclusions of liability are traditionally in all caps or bold -- on the theory that this draws attention to them and may help to save them.)
Generally they spam you with a letter or email or popup window or something when terms change. You make it sound kind of like keeping your software up to date, which is an interesting way to look at it.
Perhaps in the future legal aspects of life will be just another kind of software updating, with the govt rolling out emergency patches and big annual feature packs.
You have to have some plausible means of proving the company agreed to your terms. I don’t think a judge or jury would find that plausible. It’s just like how “silent” TOS changes are unenforceable.
A more colorable tactic is that you send a notice to their registered agent of addendums to the contract on your website, with possible future updates.
Certified mail to their registered agent is considered “received” by the corporation in most contexts.
Received does not imply "accepted". I can also mail you an agreement in which you point your job payroll to my bank account, but you're not obligated to actually do it, right?
The difference here may be that there's already a contract between a user and the company, so if they include something like "continuing to provide service to my account constitutes acceptance of these terms." in the updated contract, it might fly.
Or not. It could be that all the businesses doing that to their users are just BS'ing something unenforceable.
I prefer to have the sheriff do the civil process to the managers (or managing partner) home address.... that way it freaks them out and gets the best response.
Fairly common in civil contacts (pre-nups, acqui-hires, partnerships, etc)
As i understand it, in many states it does not preclude a jury trial, but serves as a gate for the trial ... should mediation fail, a jury trial will still happen.
It’s common in consumer contracts. It’s a Federal law that supersedes state law: The Federal Arbitration Act. It always precludes state law. Indeed, precedence is that issues of arbitrability are for arbitrators to decide.
When a jury ruled that Monsanto "caused" cancer, companies across the USA shuddered at the lunacy of the nonscientific verdict, and vowed never to allow a jury to rule on such decisions ever again.
Prevents those "lets stick it to that big company" decisions too.
Did they actually use those words? As far as I remember they convicted Monsanto mostly on messing with the "independent" studies that should have confirmed their weed killers safety, using various "friends" in key positions to shut down any study that went out of line before it could go anywhere. All documented in an internal email chain discussing various means in great detail.
> shuddered at the lunacy of the nonscientific verdict,
Science went out of the window the moment Monsanto started to actively taint the research through political means.
They ruled in one case that roundup caused a particular person's cancer. Even though medically 80% of cases of that type of cancer do not have an environmental cause (ie random mutation is responsible for 80% of cases).
So every fifth case has an environmental cause and Monsanto got caught pants down actively interfering with the legally required process^1 that was used to certify their weed killers as not being a environmental hazard, including being a cause for cancer.
^1 The results of independent studies are supposed to act as basis for government approval.
Considering how badly they disrespect peoples' time and pandemic safety in scheduling jury duty, most educated, busy, and capable people would want to get out of it, leaving very likely a bunch of less-educated people and anti-vaxxers to be on the jury.
I'd so much rather my case be heard by a group of qualified judges (that's right, group. Your case is heard by three judges, to make sure no one judge gets to manipulate a case on a whim) who got their job because they were appointed based on their career track, rather than because they were elected by an electorate who hasn't the slightest idea how insane that is. (lawyers need to be bar-qualified, but judges amazingly need zero qualification. Wtf, US?)
And that's before we actually look at the reliability of a jury trial: the letter of the law might claim it's a jury of peers, but that's never the case from the outset, and then lawyers get to demand that the only people who might actually do any reasonable thinking get replaced if they know a reasonable thinking person would conclude their client's guilty.
The system is so messed up, you could write multiple books about it. Which people have.
Have you seen courts in other countries? SCOTUS does a pretty good job. Even justices that I don’t like write logically consistent and sound arguments, and we have very recent evidence to show that they hold their ideals above favoritism.
Don’t mistake SCOTUS justices’ philosophical differences as partiality.
Yeah. A National hero / amazing community member gets busted growing some weed. The charge is 10 years in prison. I sure hope there’s a jury so they can throw it out / nullify out
No one is charged with a set amount of jail time. They’re charged with specific crimes which may have mandatory minimums (assuming the jury convicts on all charges).
Many legal jurisdictions declare that you cannot be coerced into signing away various rights by altering the legal code to remove your ability to do so. For example, California passed SB 707 shortly after Doordash was told by a judge to pay up on their overdue and unpaid $10mil of mandatory arbitration fees back in 2019:
Here's a couple of relevant paragraphs of the amended laws:
> In California, private contracts that violate public policy are unenforceable. Under Section 3513 of the Civil Code, contract terms that require a party to forgo unwaivable statutory rights are unenforceable. Similarly, Section 1668 of the Civil Code provides that contracts exempting parties from responsibility of their own violation of law are also unenforceable. Thus, under these and other contract defenses of general applicability, a mandatory arbitration agreement, like any other agreement, cannot undercut unwaivable state statutory rights by, for example, reducing the limitations period to commence an action or arbitration, eliminating certain statutory remedies, or erecting excessive cost barriers to obtaining them.
> In an employment or consumer arbitration that requires, either expressly or through application of state or federal law or the rules of the arbitration provider, that the drafting party pay certain fees and costs during the pendency of an arbitration proceeding, if the fees or costs required to continue the arbitration proceeding are not paid within 30 days after the due date, the drafting party is in material breach of the arbitration agreement, is in default of the arbitration, and waives its right to compel the employee or consumer to proceed with that arbitration as a result of the material breach.
(I am not your lawyer, social media comments are no substitute for legal counsel, etc.)
When I worked in commercial lending, reading operating agreements and bylaws taught me that. People can pretty much opt to be a slave if they want. The only time legal rights get involved is when it gets brought to the courts. Otherwise, you're free to have as much or as limited rights as youre willing to negotiate for.
Pretty much every contract with a large company has a similar clause in it where they require you to go to arbitration instead of through the courts for disputes. This site requires binding arbitration in it's TOS, to avoid it you basically cannot use any service that's not open source and self hosted. No power, internet, cable, etc either those also definitely have BA clauses, it's impossible to live in modern society without agreeing to it because everyone requires it.
True, but in this case I was specifically referring to Amazon, which you can pretty easily live without ordering on.
I have family that doesn’t have internet, never have and are doing fine. It’s quite possible. Just because you can’t handle it, doesn’t make it not possible.
You were making an argument about choice though when there's not really a choice to avoid binding arbitration clauses. It's not just an internet company thing most contracts include a BA clause because arbitration is generally favorable to businesses. Amazon is only removing it because someone figured out they could cost Amazon a lot of money in arbitration filing fees by taking essentially a whole class action suit into the arbitration system.
> Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail address: email-qa-blast+testing@amazon.com
Anyone else get this at the footer instead of their email address? I have no knowledge of how mail merges work in practice, but it does seem a bit odd.
Access to courts is a basic right in the civilized world. How did it get taken away in the first place? Mandatory arbitration clauses should be banned.
(For site context on why this is coming up today, Amazon is emailing their customer base today to notify them of this specific change to their legal terms.)
"the courts"? More like "in the state or Federal courts in King County, Washington". This probably isn't the equivalent of a patent troll insisting on a trial in East Texas, but they definitely cherry-picked a friendly jurisdiction.
Cherry-picked? That suggests they went out of their way to arbitrarily pick something just because it had the ideal set of judges or laws. It's simpler than that - it's where they're headquartered. Pretty much every contract ever drafted picks the home jurisdiction of the drafting party as the chosen venue (if not arbitration) and chosen law, absent some specific reason to do otherwise.
Sure, Amazon is a very big player there, but by no means the only big player (e.g. MS and Boeing are also based there), and all the full procedural and substantive protections of the US and Washington judicial systems apply, aside from the right to a jury. Everything is much more restricted in arbitration.
Two things. First, a venue selection clause is basically one of the most basic formalities that is done in a contract; a lawyer not putting it in would be seen as somewhat akin to a programmer who submitted code that didn't compile.
Secondly, and more importantly for you, even without a venue selection clause, you would still have to establish that the court you sued in has personal jurisdiction over Amazon anyways. That is trivial in the jurisdiction of Amazon's headquarters, and is more difficult in any other jurisdiction. Indeed, even if you try to sue Amazon in a different jurisdiction, there would be a decent chance that Amazon motions to move to a different jurisdiction anyways. So at the end of the day, even without this clause, you'd still likely end up suing in them in King County, Washington anyways.
Can you elaborate? Amazon’s headquarters is in King County, it seems perfectly reasonable that they’d fall into their local jurisdiction. How is that cherry picked?
It's not like I have a solution, but with a sufficiently large enough Big Employer Company in a town/city, it all but guarantees a plaintiff against won't get a fair trial when damn near everyone in town or the city is 2 or less degrees of separation from a job at that company.
In Boston the city employee to resident ratio was one of the lowest in the nation and while Thomas "Chuckles" Menino cultured an air of being a friendly grandpa patriarch who couldn't keep track of which team name corresponded to which sport...reality was that city workers were an ersatz campaign worker army, infamous for being fiercely loyal, and demanding loyalty from family and neighbors. "Are you voting for Not Menino? Because if you do, I'm gonna lose my job, Bill." There were newspaper stories about families nearly getting into fistfights over this stuff.
Menino stepped down, Marty Walsh stepped up (and promptly got involved in some scandals involving his staff pushing for union work on construction sites.) He's been appointed federal secretary of labor, so the deputy mayor suddenly was in charge. This current election cycle seems heavily focused on identity politics, social justice, etc.
It's a subject some politicians are more than happy to discuss because it sidesteps how massively wasteful and incompetent the city workforce is; nothing gets done unless you're on good terms with the "neighborhood liaison" or know someone. It's a miracle they manage to even keep their office chair seats warm. When nearby Somerville (which is basically the municipal version of the Italian mob) is more functional, that's not a good look...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-faced-75-000-arbitration...