I almost never open letters involving class action lawsuits since in the end they never seem to be worth the effort. More often than not, the plaintiff lawyers get a nice stack of cash, the defendant gets off with a slap on the wrist–often by dumping worthless certificates on the settlement class or by donating worthless products to charity–and we who were supposedly the ones harmed get nothing of particular value.

For one reason or another my curiosity got the best of me when I saw that I had received a letter from lawyers involved with a class action lawsuit against EZ Lube who I had patronized last year.

The letter started off well enough. It told me that they had already reached a settlement with EZ Lube. Cool, Independent Sources could use a little money. And how much were we getting? A $2.00 certificate for my next oil change. Zipideefriggingdoo! How about just sending me the $2.00? Last time I checked, I paid EZ Lube with cash so why wouldn’t they just give me some of it back instead of a discount coupon? If these certificates are so valuable why don’t the plaintiff’s take their fee in them as well? We all know the answer, the plaintiff’s lawyers only care about their fee, once that is paid what do they care if anyone ever uses the coupons. EZ Lube is probably thrilled to be sending out certificates with no greater value than what one could get from clipping an EZ Lube ad in the weekly shopper. They’ve probably written it off as a marketing expense. Once again we’re the dupes and higher prices will no doubt be the only long-term effect of the entire exercise.

In an unrelated development, we have decided to provide you with this picture of two girls kissing:

…which is certainly worth more than the EZ Lube coupon.

technorati: lawsuit abuse

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 10:37 pm by Insider and is filed under How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.