In a good legal system many small claims should be bought and then somebody could sue the company for money. This would be a superior version of a class action lawsuit. A version that is actually practical and would scale.
Its also not a new idea, there are historical examples of this.
This exists, it's called small claims court.
A organisation can not buy millions of claims from consumers and the fight a full class action lawsuit without any of these people being involve.
If you want to sue CVS for selling you fake aloe go ahead, it costs less than $100 to file a small claims case in my state and CVS will very likely settle with you outside of court because it's cheaper than sending someone to court to defend the company.
There are many other problems with the courts that make the system I proposed currently impossible.
I'm not convinced. Scandals don't scale. How many scandals per year do people actually have the attention and outrage to push through into action? 10? 100?
It's my opinion that we need regulation to set the ground rules of our interactions with companies, which will always ALWAYS be tempted to deceive us. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't spent 2 minutes in any corporate marketing department.