A Couple Fights the Cost of a Crossing

[cpzilliacus]

N.Y. Times: A Couple Fights the Cost of a Crossing

As Barbara Jaffe-Rose drove up the West Side of Manhattan and approached the Henry Hudson Bridge last month, her mother, Hilde Jaffe, pulled out a few dollars to pay the toll. That, it turned out, was an impossibility. No one was in any of the booths. There were no baskets to drop money into.

A sign at the bridge read:

"Cashless Tolls

Keep Moving"

A few weeks after returning to California, Mr. Rose got a bill in the mail that said: "Toll Charge Notice."  It came not from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the Henry Hudson Bridge, but from Dollar.

The tolls amounted to $4.88, or $2.44 for crossing the bridge each way.

But the invoice was for $34.88.

Dollar had charged a $15 "administration fee"  for each of the tolls: that is, $30 to bill them $4.88.

[hotdogPi]

Maybe it was a scam notice?

[Zeffy]

"The bottom line,"  Mr. Rose said, "is that there is no way for a visitor in a rental car to avoid being charged 700 percent of the normal toll."

Remind me to never rent a car in a state where toll roads are a good option to get around then...

[corco]

“The bottom line,” Mr. Rose said, “is that there is no way for a visitor in a rental car to avoid being charged 700 percent of the normal toll.”

Remind me to never rent a car in a state where toll roads are a good option to get around then...

You can almost always rent an E-ZPass or equivalent from the rental agency with the car for a couple extra bucks  a day. Still sucks more than paying cash, but avoids the insane charges.

When I rented a car in NJ the day after the NYC meet, they offered me an E-ZPass at a reasonable price and warned me if I went through license plate tolling I'd have to pay an excessive fee. It was very clearly stated in the rental car contract. In this case, it sucks that all the manned booths were closed, but that's just a risk you take.

[oscar]

The article noted the driver was both a former New York resident and a current San Diego resident.  She should've been familiar from her New York days with how many toll bridges are there, and from her experience in San Diego, the trend toward cash-less tolling (which has arrived in the next county over from her, and also the I-15 express lanes nearer to her).

Also, if she'd noticed the E-ZPass transponder on the windshield, she could've asked about how she could pay cash tolls rather than have them charged to the transponder (even if she intended to use a cash lane, if E-ZPass were accepted in that lane the toll would've been charged to Dollar anyway).  Unless, of course, she lived in New York only in pre-E-ZPass days, and had no exposure to California's own toll road transponders.

Dollar's administrative fees seem on the high side, but IMO she also deserves some blame for not thinking through how to handle the tolls without going through Dollar and giving it another dive into her wallet.

[oscar]

You can almost always rent an E-ZPass or equivalent from the rental agency with the car for a couple extra bucks a day. Still sucks more than paying cash, but avoids the insane charges.

In this case, Dollar was charging $20 a day for use of its E-ZPass transponder, or $160 over an eight-day rental. 

Of course, she was renting her car from a place on Manhattan, not exactly an oasis of reasonable prices.

[Duke87]

To clear some points up here:

- the EZpass tags in rental cars (at least from Avis) come sealed in a no-read box, you have to deliberately slide it open in order to use it. If you don't slide it open, the tag won't read
- there is no way to pay cash at the bridge the couple crossed in their rental. It is New York's first AET facility and you either use EZpass or you get a bill in the mail
- it sounds from the story like the rental car ended up going through the bill-by-plate option, with no EZpass tag read. The toll in this case is $5 rather than $2.44 (since the MTA places a surcharge on it). So the actual rental agency fee here is $24.88, not $30.
- EZpass tags are not tied to a particular vehicle or plate number, so you can use your own in a rental car. Make sure it's working first, though, or you might rack up violations.


Moral of the story: if you're paying tolls in a rental car, get your own electronic tolling tag for the territory you're visiting and use it rather than using one from the rental agency. You can't get a fee-free NY EZpass to an out-of-state address without purchasing one directly from a cash toll lane, but you can get them from other jurisdictions. Which means you won't get the EZpass discount but that's better than paying the rental place's fees.

[hbelkins]

- EZpass tags are not tied to a particular vehicle or plate number, so you can use your own in a rental car.

Well, not physically, but you are required to register your license plate number and vehicle. Some agencies don't allow you to transfer the transponder from one vehicle to another; others (like West Virginia, which is where mine is from ) does. However, you have to register the vehicle type and license plate number with them.

[jeffandnicole]

While you're required, it's basically to attach a license plate to your account.  If the tag isn't read, they'll look up the license plate #, find your account, and charge it.  In most cases, people don't even realize this happened.

If you take the EZ Pass into another vehicle, as long as it is read as you go thru the toll booth, everything's good.  Your account will be credited with the appropriate toll.

[cl94]

- EZpass tags are not tied to a particular vehicle or plate number, so you can use your own in a rental car.

Well, not physically, but you are required to register your license plate number and vehicle. Some agencies don't allow you to transfer the transponder from one vehicle to another; others (like West Virginia, which is where mine is from ) does. However, you have to register the vehicle type and license plate number with them.

New York allows transfers. As the site is used for NYSTA, TBTA, and PANYNJ, I'd assume that all three can be transferred. When I registered my NYSTA one, they gave the option of adding additional vehicles. It isn't that hard to add/remove a car (even a rental) to/from your account. That being said, if the tag is read, they more than likely won't care.

[Duke87]

I suppose other jurisdictions may do it differently. When I look at the EZpass account that I share with my parents (and have been tasked with managing since I know the most about this stuff ), I see a list of registered vehicles and a list of tags on the account, but there is no association between tag and vehicle, and the number of tags does not have to match the number of vehicles. Normally tolls show up on the statement by tag number but in the event that the system fails to read a tag it shows up as incurred by the license plate number instead.

But even if your account requires you associate the tag with a particular vehicle, it will still work in any vehicle and you won't see any consequence unless the tag fails to read. I have a SunPass Mini which is registered as being associated with a car I no longer own. In theory it is supposed to be physically impossible to transfer the tag between vehicles since once stuck on the winshield it won't be reusable after being peeled off. But it still works if scotch taped to the windshield rather than peeled and stuck, which I of course did so I could remove it after I left Florida rather than leaving it sitting there advertising my tendency to travel to random passers-by.
But another benefit is that now I can reuse the same tag in my new car which I'm not normally supposed to do. SunPass of course will not let me change the registered vehicle on my account without ordering a new tag and paying a fee for it, but since my new car is going to have the same license plate number as my old car once all the bureaucratic loopdy-loo is done with, I see no reason to care. The system will have no way of recognizing that it isn't the same vehicle.

[1995hoo]

Funny, I have a SunPass Mini (one device) scotch-taped to my windshield and I have two cars registered to my SunPass account (mine and my wife's; our third car will never be drive to Florida, so it's irrelevant). Obviously under their "rules" since I have the Mini, I should only have one car on the account, right, since they know I only have the one transponder, but they haven't made an issue of it. Of course, it doesn't hurt that we always take my car when we go down there; last time my wife took hers to Florida was 2007 and I didn't have a SunPass then anyway.

I don't worry about leaving the SunPass in the car because there a number of gated apartment complexes near here that use Transcore gate openers that look very similar to the SunPass Mini and I assume people will think that's what it is.

Our Virginia E-ZPass account has two transponders and three cars on it. Neither transponder is tied to a particular car because the way Virginia operates the program (and I suspect most other E-ZPass member agencies do the same) is that we have a single pool of money that both transponders draw from regardless of whether one of them is using more of it. In other words, you have to put up $35 per transponder, but rather than having $35 "assigned" to each transponder, such than when "transponder A" drops below "its $35" they charge you, they just treat the whole $70 as available to both and you're charged when the account balance drops below $10 (at least I think it's $10). I don't believe our statement shows which transponder incurred a particular toll, either, though I may be mistaken on that (I'd have to log into the account, and I don't remember what the password is–on my PC I have it saved, but my PC is off for the weekend).



Going back to the original post, though, the question is, did the rental agreement address the toll charges somewhere? If so, he loses. It's longstanding black-letter law in all fifty states that you are charged with knowledge of a contract's contents if you accept the contract, regardless of whether you read it. The reporter who wrote that article clearly adopts the position a lot of 20-somethings take these days along the lines of, "Well, nobody reads that stuff, so they can't be expected to know." Too bad! It doesn't work that way. There are plenty of reported cases prior to the Internet of people signing paper contracts, not reading them, and getting burned by the terms they didn't bother to read. The only real difference in the Internet era is that a lot more people bind themselves to those sorts of agreements without reading them (consider things like the iTunes terms of service or a mobile-phone provider's service contract).

The tone of the article struck me as rather whiny on the whole.

[formulanone]

Since Florida charges a $2.50 admin fee, New York must be four times better.

Rental car agencies levy an entirely different charge, but in absence of paying for the toll with cash, it does amount to a Screw You Fee.

[vdeane]

When I took a Law and Society elective in college, contracts were introduced as an agreement created by negotiation between two people who had a meeting of the minds.  The contracts talked about here aren't like that - the business is basically saying "agree to this or get lost".  IMO that type of contract should be banned.  Similarly, the idea behind fees is to cover the cost of something extra.  Profiting from a fee (or using them to hide the true cost of something in fine print) should be banned.  I would also ban the use of legalese and font sizes lower than 10pt.  IMO, anything legally binding should be negotiated between two individuals of equal influence, written in plain English (5th grade reading level), and be as clear and brief as possible.

[oscar]

When I took a Law and Society elective in college, contracts were introduced as an agreement created by negotiation between two people who had a meeting of the minds.  The contracts talked about here aren't like that - the business is basically saying "agree to this or get lost".  IMO that type of contract should be banned.  Similarly, the idea behind fees is to cover the cost of something extra.  Profiting from a fee (or using them to hide the true cost of something in fine print) should be banned.  I would also ban the use of legalese and font sizes lower than 10pt.  IMO, anything legally binding should be negotiated between two individuals of equal influence, written in plain English (5th grade reading level), and be as clear and brief as possible.

Requiring transactions to be "negotiable" would jack up the cost of offering services, perhaps to the point of making things like car rentals prohibitively expensive.  Among other issues, if you have the right to haggle over terms, exactly who will have the legal authority to make the changes you want?  For a car rental company, certainly not the guy behind the counter, who gets just enough training to operate the company's computer, do what it says on variable terms such as price, and try to bulldoze you into getting a bigger car than you need or purchase unnecessary insurance coverages (so customers have to "just say no" a lot), but isn't trained well enough to keep his company from getting exploited by crafty customers with bad intentions if he has broad latitude to alter the company's standard rental contract.  Maybe you can haggle with somebody in the company's corporate hierarchy or legal department, who will probably be "in the bathroom" or otherwise unavailable when you need to cut a deal, and in any case will have received advanced "just say no" training to make it as hard as possible for consumers to extract concessions.

Companies have competitive incentives to develop reputations for avoiding unnecessary fine print, to attract fine-print-hating customers.  If you object to part of the fine print, or think there's too much of it, try to find a better deal elsewhere.  I'd rather rely on that, than requiring all contracts to be customizable. 

Same for legal or government micromanagement of ancillary fees.  We have benefited enormously by largely doing away with that for airline prices.

[J N Winkler]

Going back to the original post, though, the question is, did the rental agreement address the toll charges somewhere? If so, he loses. It's longstanding black-letter law in all fifty states that you are charged with knowledge of a contract's contents if you accept the contract, regardless of whether you read it. The reporter who wrote that article clearly adopts the position a lot of 20-somethings take these days along the lines of, "Well, nobody reads that stuff, so they can't be expected to know." Too bad! It doesn't work that way. There are plenty of reported cases prior to the Internet of people signing paper contracts, not reading them, and getting burned by the terms they didn't bother to read. The only real difference in the Internet era is that a lot more people bind themselves to those sorts of agreements without reading them (consider things like the iTunes terms of service or a mobile-phone provider's service contract).

Yes, the parol rule is part of the picture, but so is unconscionability and contra proferentem.  There have also been cases of contracts being ruled invalid when one of the contracting parties is not in a position to understand the terms.

I am actually happy the family complained.  In law there is probably nothing that can be done, but it highlights what seems to be a pretty abusive fee structure since the family would have had to pay $40 minimum (assuming the rental car company even allowed them to choose a validity period for EZ-Pass use that was less than the total length of the rental) to avoid $30 in processing charges.  Also, as more toll agencies abandon cash tolling, it becomes more burdensome to research the available payment methods for each toll facility, and the potential only increases for Catch-22 situations where people drive up to toll crossings without being told in advance that they cannot pay without being socked with heavy fees.  Those who repose their faith in the self-correction of the market can hardly object to a spotlight being shined on bad actors.

I also think the article raises a good point (though not one confined exclusively to toll pass-through clauses in car rental agreements) in the paragraph that discusses the "fantasies" of legal disclosure.  Personally, there is a lot of stuff I just don't do online or with Internet-enabled devices partly because I just don't have the time to research my legal position.  I don't have ebooks, for example, because I understand the contract between me and the public library when I check out an actual bound book, but I know I won't be able to get a book out of an ebook provider without being asked to wade through almost unreadable standard-form verbiage under time pressure.  And this is without getting into the problem that contracts associated with digital devices and Internet services tend to have open-ended provisions that disfavor the end user, as people have discovered recently with Facebook and its social-media research projects that would fail to meet ethical standards if they were carried out in an academic setting.

[oscar]

I am actually happy the family complained.  In law there is probably nothing that can be done, but it highlights what seems to be a pretty abusive fee structure since the family would have had to pay $40 minimum (assuming the rental car company even allowed them to choose a validity period for EZ-Pass use that was less than the total length of the rental) to avoid $30 in processing charges.  Also, as more toll agencies abandon cash tolling, it becomes more burdensome to research the available payment methods for each toll facility, and the potential only increases for Catch-22 situations where people drive up to toll crossings without being told in advance that they cannot pay without being socked with heavy fees.

Part of the solution resides with the toll agencies.  They can offer online "one-time toll payment" like the cashless toll roads in Orange County CA, where you have at least 48 hours to pay the toll yourself before the "pay-by-mail" system sends out a bill to the registered vehicle owner.  I had to use that option on my trip to southern California earlier this month, when I fell behind schedule and needed to use toll CA 73 as a shortcut to make up for lost time, even though I had sworn I would never resort to that.  I couldn't take down the URL shown on a sign where the toll booths once were, but I was able to find the toll agency's website, and pay the toll myself directly so it would not get charged to my car rental company.  That involved a processing fee, but well south of $10 let alone what the rental company would have charged.

It's possible the one-time-toll-payment option in Orange County, near the couple's San Diego home, might've led them to assume that was also an option in the New York City area.  Not true, but maybe it should be.

[hbelkins]

I've recounted my experience with ordering Peace Bridge E-ZPass tags before. (I had to order two, one for each vehicle as they were non-transferable, and they didn't arrive in time for my wife's trip, so I drove to Charleston and got a West Virginia tag, which is transferable between vehicles as long as said vehicles are registered to the account.)

So each agency does do it differently. Peace Bridge only allowed one vehicle per tag, while West Virginia allows more than one.

[Brandon]

I am actually happy the family complained.  In law there is probably nothing that can be done, but it highlights what seems to be a pretty abusive fee structure since the family would have had to pay $40 minimum (assuming the rental car company even allowed them to choose a validity period for EZ-Pass use that was less than the total length of the rental) to avoid $30 in processing charges.  Also, as more toll agencies abandon cash tolling, it becomes more burdensome to research the available payment methods for each toll facility, and the potential only increases for Catch-22 situations where people drive up to toll crossings without being told in advance that they cannot pay without being socked with heavy fees.

Part of the solution resides with the toll agencies.  They can offer online "one-time toll payment" like the cashless toll roads in Orange County CA, where you have at least 48 hours to pay the toll yourself before the "pay-by-mail" system sends out a bill to the registered vehicle owner.  I had to use that option on my trip to southern California earlier this month, when I fell behind schedule and needed to use toll CA 73 as a shortcut to make up for lost time, even though I had sworn I would never resort to that.  I couldn't take down the URL shown on a sign where the toll booths once were, but I was able to find the toll agency's website, and pay the toll myself directly so it would not get charged to my car rental company.  That involved a processing fee, but well south of $10 let alone what the rental company would have charged.

It's possible the one-time-toll-payment option in Orange County, near the couple's San Diego home, might've led them to assume that was also an option in the New York City area.  Not true, but maybe it should be.

Or like ISTHA which gives you a full 7 days to pay.  A full week.  You just remember your plate number, car make/model, and toll plaza you went through.  No extra admin fees, just the cash toll (twice the I-Pass toll).

There is no reason why, which cashless tolling, that an agency cannot give a grace period for an oops.

[vdeane]

When I took a Law and Society elective in college, contracts were introduced as an agreement created by negotiation between two people who had a meeting of the minds.  The contracts talked about here aren't like that - the business is basically saying "agree to this or get lost".  IMO that type of contract should be banned.  Similarly, the idea behind fees is to cover the cost of something extra.  Profiting from a fee (or using them to hide the true cost of something in fine print) should be banned.  I would also ban the use of legalese and font sizes lower than 10pt.  IMO, anything legally binding should be negotiated between two individuals of equal influence, written in plain English (5th grade reading level), and be as clear and brief as possible.

Requiring transactions to be "negotiable" would jack up the cost of offering services, perhaps to the point of making things like car rentals prohibitively expensive.  Among other issues, if you have the right to haggle over terms, exactly who will have the legal authority to make the changes you want?  For a car rental company, certainly not the guy behind the counter, who gets just enough training to operate the company's computer, do what it says on variable terms such as price, and try to bulldoze you into getting a bigger car than you need or purchase unnecessary insurance coverages (so customers have to "just say no" a lot), but isn't trained well enough to keep his company from getting exploited by crafty customers with bad intentions if he has broad latitude to alter the company's standard rental contract.  Maybe you can haggle with somebody in the company's corporate hierarchy or legal department, who will probably be "in the bathroom" or otherwise unavailable when you need to cut a deal, and in any case will have received advanced "just say no" training to make it as hard as possible for consumers to extract concessions.

Companies have competitive incentives to develop reputations for avoiding unnecessary fine print, to attract fine-print-hating customers.  If you object to part of the fine print, or think there's too much of it, try to find a better deal elsewhere.  I'd rather rely on that, than requiring all contracts to be customizable. 

Same for legal or government micromanagement of ancillary fees.  We have benefited enormously by largely doing away with that for airline prices.

Personally, I'd take most transactions out of the contract infrastructure.  Individuals and businesses aren't on even footing for negotiation anyways.

No, companies don't have incentives to not charge exorbitant fees.  Absent a major publicity case, most consumers just ignore them, and companies take full advantage of this fact.  Plus there are psychological effects if the split something off to deflate the "base" price, similar to how all prices end in 95 or 99 and why gas prices include 9/10 of a cent at the end.  It's to make something look cheaper than it is.

I disagree about the airlines.  It's very difficult to price compare (the very foundation of free market capitalism itself) when everything is hidden in the fees and there are so many of them that the base ticket cost is practically meaningless.  This is by design.  If you can split off enough fees to lower the base ticket price, then the lower ticket price is all the consumer will see when they are shopping on a travel agency website, and they will make a decision based off what is essentially a lie.  Banks and credit cards specifically design their fee structures in an attempt to get people to rack up as many as possible.  I've read about it in a very informative book called "Gotcha Capitalism", which IMO should be required reading for all Americans.

[oscar]

Personally, I'd take most transactions out of the contract infrastructure.  Individuals and businesses aren't on even footing for negotiation anyways.

Then what infrastructure would you put in its place?

No, companies don't have incentives to not charge exorbitant fees.  Absent a major publicity case, most consumers just ignore them, and companies take full advantage of this fact.  Plus there are psychological effects if the split something off to deflate the "base" price, similar to how all prices end in 95 or 99 and why gas prices include 9/10 of a cent at the end.  It's to make something look cheaper than it is.

I disagree about the airlines.  It's very difficult to price compare (the very foundation of free market capitalism itself) when everything is hidden in the fees and there are so many of them that the base ticket cost is practically meaningless.  This is by design.  If you can split off enough fees to lower the base ticket price, then the lower ticket price is all the consumer will see when they are shopping on a travel agency website, and they will make a decision based off what is essentially a lie.  Banks and credit cards specifically design their fee structures in an attempt to get people to rack up as many as possible.  I've read about it in a very informative book called "Gotcha Capitalism", which IMO should be required reading for all Americans.

So I guess Southwest is doing it all wrong, then, by folding the price of up to two checked bags into its base prices? And JetBlue too, for allowing one free bag? Not that they are pure as the driven snow, exactly (including Southwest's making direct price comparisons more difficult, by not pricing or selling its tickets except on its own site). But they have better reputations for non-sleazy pricing than, say, Spirit, and can command higher base prices and gain greater customer loyalty accordingly.

Competition doesn't have to be perfect to do us good, especially for consumers who shop around and look for gotchas in the fine print.

[jeffandnicole]

It doesn't matter what size the small print is; people still won't read it. Heck, store coupons, for example, contain small print. In large print is the product. There's even a picture of the product. And people constantly pick up the incorrect product. Many times, the small print has nothing to do with the issue. People just don't want to have any restrictions. In the case of this toll issue, the renters could have avoided the  tolls by driving just a few miles out of their way. And even if they claim they didn't know the first time, they still went thru the toll plaza a second time.

[cl94]

It doesn't matter what size the small print is; people still won't read it. Heck, store coupons, for example, contain small print. In large print is the product. There's even a picture of the product. And people constantly pick up the incorrect product. Many times, the small print has nothing to do with the issue. People just don't want to have any restrictions. In the case of this toll issue, the renters could have avoided the  tolls by driving just a few miles out of their way. And even if they claim they didn't know the first time, they still went thru the toll plaza a second time.

Also, if they're really from New York as they claim, they'd know that there is a free bridge less than a mile away. The fact that the tolls are cashless is pretty clear. Should the signs be before the last exit before instead of <400 feet after them? Certainly. But there is much warning about the tolls themselves and the fact that the bridge is cashless is well-publicized and signed between the last exit and the toll booths.

[J N Winkler]

Personally, I'd take most transactions out of the contract infrastructure.  Individuals and businesses aren't on even footing for negotiation anyways.

Strictly speaking, cash-and-carry transactions of the kind you describe are also forms of contract.  This is a fine point, though.

No, companies don't have incentives to not charge exorbitant fees.  Absent a major publicity case, most consumers just ignore them, and companies take full advantage of this fact.  Plus there are psychological effects if the split something off to deflate the "base" price, similar to how all prices end in 95 or 99 and why gas prices include 9/10 of a cent at the end.  It's to make something look cheaper than it is.

I disagree about the airlines.  It's very difficult to price compare (the very foundation of free market capitalism itself) when everything is hidden in the fees and there are so many of them that the base ticket cost is practically meaningless.  This is by design.  If you can split off enough fees to lower the base ticket price, then the lower ticket price is all the consumer will see when they are shopping on a travel agency website, and they will make a decision based off what is essentially a lie.  Banks and credit cards specifically design their fee structures in an attempt to get people to rack up as many as possible.  I've read about it in a very informative book called "Gotcha Capitalism", which IMO should be required reading for all Americans.

The underlying problem is information asymmetry.  George Akerlof wrote about this in a famous 1970 paper, "The Market for Lemons," which ultimately earned him the economics Nobel in 2001.  The key idea is that a company will nearly always have a more precise idea of the quality dimensions of its product or service than the consumer, and thus has an incentive to try to profit from that better knowledge, whether or not it actually chooses to do so.  In markets where there is no way for the consumer to know before buying whether he or she is getting a good deal, this leads to buyers and sellers adjusting their expectations accordingly, with the result that good products or services disappear from the marketplace.

Akerlof's paper identifies a number of factors that discourage businesses from trying to exploit consumers' ignorance and thus head off the "death spiral" of mediocrity that would otherwise result.  One consists of government regulations requiring disclosure.  Another is reputation:  no company wants to injure its long-term trading position for an immediate gain which is usually less than is lost in the long run.  We see this at work in James M. Cain's Double Indemnity (1943) (not its movie adaptation), where the senior executives of a life insurance company knowingly choose to pay out on a claim they correctly suspect is fraudulent (it having been engineered by a femme fatale working in cahoots with a crooked investigator), rather than risk losing business through developing a reputation for not paying out on good claims.  (The 1944 film adaptation is one of the great classics of forties film noir, but has a changed ending because the Hays code still held sway when it was produced.  The investigator and the femme fatale thus have to shoot each other rather than be seen to profit from their shared criminal enterprise.)  Ideas of what reputable companies do are in turn shaped by institutional norms, and these can in turn be influenced by a company taking unilateral action and being seen to profit by it.  This is why I don't necessarily take it as a given that airlines will try to continue gouging by unbundling, since there are already online booking sites that effectively "rebundle" by quoting fares with fees included.

The underlying reality is that contracts will always be with us, and not all contracts will be cash-and-carry with more or less complete information on both sides of the transaction.  We agree to many kinds of contracts that embody an ongoing relationship or otherwise involve time separation between payment and performance, because it is economically advantageous for both parties to do so.  Roads cannot be built in a day; you are unlikely to get good medical care or sound legal advice if the doctor or lawyer has to re-learn the particulars of your case every time he or she operates on your behalf; etc.  Standard-form contracts will continue to be used because they save time and money, not just for the party with greater bargaining power, and they are not inherently exploitative unless they are designed in bad faith.

We are still dealing with the fallout from the financialization of the economic system in the 1980's and the "greed is good" ethos that developed.  With the exception of some sectors such as professional services (law or medicine) where reputation is still important, consumers can no longer rely on such cues as they did from the 1930's up to the late 1970's.  Companies become unwilling to accept the extra costs associated with maintaining good reputations, because senior management and boards of directors tend to see them as unnecessary and dangerous obstacles to profitability, and in many sectors there is little if any competitive advantage to being (as it were) the lone nun in a whorehouse.  The result is a trading environment in which the potential for self-regulation (which is essentially what reputation relies on) is so underdeveloped that we rely heavily on external regulation from the government, which imposes heavy deadweight costs and is not necessarily enough to allow business to be transacted on a basis of trust.  Compare the convention of free banking in Britain (free checking, free check guarantee card, a small overdraft with no fees and a very low interest rate below a certain amount) with consumer banking in the US after Dodd-Frank:  you don't get any say in the fees that are charged, and you only know long after the fact that the banks were gouging you on previously undisclosed things like transaction fees for foreign ATMs.

[vdeane]

There's also the shift in society away from long-term planning to prioritizing short term quarterly gains, especially in publicly traded companies.