Standard Agreements and the Protection of Consumers: A Critical Analysis

In upholding the principle of consumerism, which illustrates the desire to protect or promote the interest of consumers, there is the likelihood that within standard form contracts, the consumer is at a weaker position in terms of bargaining strength and prospects of safeguarding their rights under such contracts. Standard agreements are generally considered to be contracts of adhesion where one party drafts the entire contract and the other party merely accepts or confirms what has been arrived at by the other party. Thus, the aim of this paper is to show how the rights of consumers are sometimes violated with the prevalence of standard form contracts/standard agreements. In achieving the said objective, the content analysis approach was adopted. Our findings reveal that consumers are sometimes at risk when concluding standard agreements with sellers or service providers, since they are hardly conversant with the terms of the contract and given that they have little or no means to make propositions therein before accepting. This gives a lee-way for some authors of such contracts to defraud consumers through the use of excluding and limiting terms. This is mostly compounded by the fact that there is often little or no time given to consumers to acquaint themselves with the terms before contracting. It is therefore submitted inter alia that consumers should be given the latitude or reasonable time to properly read through or get conversant with the terms of these agreements before expressing consent to them.