Your call is important to us. — A recorded message, heard while the customer waits on hold.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. — A sign in many American shops and restaurants.
The right on the sign has limits. Under Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, places of public accommodation must serve everyone “without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”
In Pretty Woman (1990), Julia Roberts plays Vivian, who goes shopping on Rodeo Drive. Snobbish saleswomen turn her away because of the way she looks.
The next day she returns with shopping bags from other stores. “Big mistake,” she tells the saleswomen. “Big. Huge.”
A customer brought two tires to the Nordstrom store in Fairbanks, Alaska, and asked for his money back. The store associate, Craig Trounce, paid him for them and took the tires. Nordstrom never sold tires. In 1975 it had bought stores from Northern Commercial, a company that did.
Nordstrom tells the story on its own website. Other companies and motivational speakers use it to inspire employees. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner dates it to one winter day in 1979, and gives the refund as $25.
Employees at Chick-fil-A answer a customer’s thanks with “My pleasure.” The practice began in 2001, when the chain borrowed it from the Ritz-Carlton. Its founder, Truett Cathy, called it a “head-turner.”
His son Dan Cathy compared it to a small extra: “almost like two pickles on a sandwich.”
The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics has an opinion titled “Terminating a Patient-Physician Relationship.” It sets conditions for a physician who withdraws from a case.
When considering withdrawing, physicians must “Notify the patient (or authorized decision maker) long enough in advance to permit the patient to secure another physician.”
In 1986 Congress passed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. It responded to emergency rooms that “had refused to treat indigent and uninsured patients,” a practice known as “patient dumping.”
The law requires hospitals that take part in Medicare to screen patients who come to the emergency department “regardless of the individual’s ability to pay.”
In 2022 ConsumerAffairs reviewed Planet Fitness contracts. It found that they required members to cancel in person at the club where they had signed up, or by letter.
In March 2020, during the pandemic, Arizona’s attorney general wrote to Planet Fitness and two other gym chains: “Requiring in-person cancellation of services is problematic under normal circumstances.”
A California couple, the Concepcions, received cell phones free with their AT&T service contract and were then charged sales tax on the phones’ retail value. Their contract required arbitration of all disputes and did not permit class proceedings.
On April 27, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that federal arbitration law overrode a California rule against such waivers. The decision supported the growing use of arbitration clauses in consumer contracts.
In July 2014 Ryan Block, an AOL vice president, posted a recording of his call to Comcast to cancel his internet service. In the eight-minute recording, the representative keeps refusing to process the cancellation. “But how is that helping you though?” “Explain to me how that is helping you.” “I’m just trying to figure out here what it is about Comcast service that you’re not liking.”
Comcast said: “We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize.” The conduct, it added, was “not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.”
In the summer of 2007, Sprint ended its contracts with about a thousand customers. Its letter explained: “we’ve received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information.”
A company spokesperson said that some of these customers had been “calling in some cases hundreds of times a month for a period of six to 12 months on the same issues.”