Gotcha Capitalism
By Sullivan, Bob

Shrouding, Reverse Competition, and Other Corporate Tricks That Attack the American Way of Life

Some will rob you with a six-gun. Some with a fountain pen.

Woodie Guthrie

I. Paranoia?

Let me make a confession. I hate getting cheated. I mean, really, really, really hate getting cheated. I mean veins-pop-out-of-my- forehead, glad-I'm-not-getting-my-blood-pressure-checked-today hate getting cheated.

And yet, I feel like I'm getting cheated all the time.

I often open the mail with dread. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, as if I were some primal creature readying for a fight. I walk into a cell-phone store, check my online statements, or just turn on my television, and I feel like everyone is out to get me. I suffer from what a therapist might call low-level, background anxiety. I think someone is always trying to steal something from me.

Am I crazy?

When I was a child growing up just outside New York City during the 1970s, I learned to be afraid of getting mugged. But this is not that. The criminals I'm talking about don't bop anyone over the head and steal hundreds of dollars. These criminals slowly take $5, $10, and $20 from me, often with a smile. They pop a surcharge onto my monthly phone bill. They pad my TV bill with services I didn't ask for. They drain my bank account-drip, drip, drip-when I'm not watching. These hidden fees keep me up at night like the sound of a leaky faucet. I feel like I have to watch everything all the time because it's so easy to miss some statement on some form with some asterisk that means the company can take even more money from me. And when that happens, I suffer from what I call small-print rage.

Am I crazy? Or am I just paying attention? One thing I know for sure: I'm not alone.

I'm not a therapist, or a sociologist, but I feel on firm ground saying that small-print rage is a close second only to road rage as a source of stress in America today. As author of The Red Tape Chronicles on MSNBC.com, a twice-weekly column that exposes small print, corporate sneakiness, and other twenty-first-century headaches, I invite readers to share their woes with me. Tens of thousands have e-mailed and left comments on my blog as a desperate last attempt to get justice. I can see the exasperation in the amount of CAPITAL LETTERS that show up in their notes.

So I know: You suffer from small-print rage, too.

Sneaky fees peck away at us like a swarm of mosquitoes that ruin an otherwise beautiful summer evening. And like mosquitoes, an individual bite might seem trivial, barely more than a nuisance, but repeated bites can actually change the way you live. They chase you inside, make you build a screened porch, and in extreme cases make you sick.

As a too-sticky summer night breeds mosquitoes, today's business environment breeds sneakiness. Companies under pressure to keep advertised prices low have seized on trickery to pump profits up. The most successful firms are now the ones that hide their prices best: under asterisks, deep inside terms and conditions, in fees they call taxes, bills that come months after the fact, even around dark corners in auto dealerships where the manager's office is. Then, right when you think you just got a good deal, an unexpected bill comes, or a car salesman jumps out from behind the corner and yells:

Gotcha!

One Gotcha might be irrit