It's just that when we're talking about consumer contracts for such small quantities of money it's hard for a consumer to justify fighting anything at all. In a lot of ways this is the primary problem, not the contracts themselves. You'll never stop companies from trying to do bad things, but the way they can siphon, say, 50 cents worth of annoyance and bad practices away from 100 million people is the relatively new thing that we have no way of handling in our currently super-heavyweight legal system. We don't have anything suitable for dealing with that. Even a class-action lawsuit is hard to justify in such a case, the lawyers would eat 250% of the winnings.
I would say that this is hardly even worth worrying about, if the biggest problem someone has is 50 cents extra to a company you are living a charmed life, except that it at times feels like it's every single company I deal with doing this to me, so it adds up to something quite large. Everybody is getting shaved like this by a large number of companies. But it's hard to deal with, there's no single large locus you can focus on.
a) much lower tolerance for this kind of thing - if a company does this, people will consider them scammers, so there is a high cost to repeatedly trying tricks like this
b) the Verbraucherzentralen, consumer rights organizations that can sue on behalf of all consumers (not in the sense of a class action suit, but in the sense of making a company stop an abusive practice). They also generate press releases, leading to the above-mentioned reputational damage.
I'm still disappointed that obvious scams (e.g. hiding a subscription that very few customers would knowingly agree to in the fine print) are handled through this system, instead of the criminal justice system. You still need the civil system for the less egregious cases, but if you send the obvious ones to jail, fewer will try to "dance around the line".
Edit: Completely forgot - your competitors can also sue you/get an injunction to stop you from engaging in unfair business practices.
Where I live now, Hong Kong, even oral contracts have value, if it's written you re gonna give your kidney, you better book a surgeon. We cant regret a contract even the first week (they tried to pass a bill on that, it was rejected because inconvenient for companies...).
Surprisingly though, it makes for much more careful people, who care for, and respect, contracts. In France, you dont even have to pay rent, in HK, it's a kick in the ass and your stuff thrown aways a day after the missed deadline.
Legislation should be written so that litigation wouldn't be required to uphold consumer rights.
Imagine similar concept to GDPR, but for consumer rights that must be adhered to, or be fined. You cannot sign away your rights under GDPR, and you automatically get those rights by virtue of being based in Europe.
Weirdly enough, this somewhat works in Germany. Sure, I know Lawyers who say that pretty much any T&C has terms that are invalid under this law but society has not collapsed, companies don't get sued constantly and the most egregious terms get ruled against. Sounds nice?
Of course, Germany/EU is a different legal environment than USA so this does not apply 1:1.