I Think I Agree with Jason Alexander: Phone Companies Should not Yada Yada Contractual Boilerlate
T-Mobile has a new ad campaign for its Metro service. The theme is Nada Yada Yada. I’m not quite sure what it means. They explain that T-Mobile offers “no contracts, no price hikes, no surprises.”
This offends me as a contracts professor. Sure, contracts of adhesion can contain nasty terms, and the boilerplate component of them can seem like a lot of yada yada yada. But contracts are risk allocation devices. Without contracts, what you get is price hikes and surprises. There is going to be a lot of yada yada yada in any contract of adhesion, and no doubt T-Mobile uses contracts of adhesion just its competitors. But consumers need to be on notice of salient terms, and just saying there is nada yada yada does not provide consumers with those terms.
I am also offended as a Seinfeld fan. You don’t yada yada the surprising part. You yada yada the boring part that nobody cares about. In the relevant episode, Jerry and George (Jason Alexander) admire George’s yada yadaing girlfriend because she is succinct (although I quibble with their pronunciation of that word). But she takes things too far, whence the comedy. Seinfeld uses this basic social norm of linguistic usage to comic effect when George’s girlfiend yada yadas things, like sex and shoplifting, that one would not expect someone to yada yada.
At the end of the episode, George realigns the usage to the norm. Resigned to his girlfriend’s foibles, George narrates the demise of their relationship — “she went shopping for shoes for a wedding and yada yada yada, I’ll see her in six t0 eight months.” He skips over the part that we now can fill in for ourselves. T-Mobile yada yadas the part its customers need to know. It’s like they are making themselves into George’s girlfriend. She’s not a normative character.
The solution is clear contractual terms and no provision that permits the wireless carrier to change terms on a rolling basis. Well, take it from here, Jason
When a phone company tells you that there is nada yada yada, they are like George’s norm-breaking girlfriend — attractive, but perhaps a thief and probably cheating on you with her ex.