It amazes me how successful consumer hostile strategies are in recent times. It sort of flies in the face of most economic models that claim markets self-regulate. This includes businesses in industries which aren't massive and monopolistic and even have competitors. When all your competitors decide to indirectly collude with one business's successful consumer hostile strategies, it becomes the norm and another barrier to entry for a competitor to come in with a better offering.

In theory, consumer hostile practices should exist at a discount so a reputable business that isn't consumer hostile should be able to offer better products/services at a higher price point and let consumers decide if they want a hostile or non-hostile market. Some may claim that consumers just want cheap above all else and the market regulates to that, hostile or not. I dismiss this and claim the issue is that a price point signal doesn't give me enough information to tell me if a business is consumer hostile or not. Paying more absolutely does not guratentee a better consumer experience, it could just be a business operating at higher margins and that seems to be the norm--a business disguised as offering higher quality products/services or better experience to justify the price point. This model seems to work just as well and captures a subset of people willing to risk paying more for a hopefully more consumer friendly experience.

The issue with all of this is, as a consumer, you can't know without trying, and are limited by anecdata of trial and error while businesses often have significantly larger pools of information and therefor leverage to work with and strategize against consumers on price points and margin padding. Reviews and that sort of shared information are already gamed with so much misinformation and disinformation that these consumer hostile strategies continue to hold well (and are legal). I can try limiting reviews to a trusted network by word of mouth so I know people aren't hustling me (mostly, for now) but that only helps when someone in my trust network has a recommendation. Often, they don't, and they too have limited selection so their anecdata is a small sample size as well, meaning a better consumer experience can exist at a better price point.

As such, I'm not sure how you resolve this asymmetry in information in free markets. Consumers almost never have leverage unless they collude together because they lack scale and information that come with the resources of owning a business. Here you have hundreds, thousands, millions of customers you can sample from and test different strategies against, optimizing for your margins. As a consumer, I don't have the resources to do this and since consumer information is largely disjoint, I'm always left at a disadvantage hoping some business won't screw me over as many frequently do.

What's worse is that if a consumer hostile business is successful enough to accumulate enough resources to play the continous rebrand/rename game, I can't possibly even build a reputation against something I consume. I'm instead encouraged to push to established businesses and further entrench the massive market share holders where we tend towards a different set of monopolistic anti-consumer strategies.