If the damage is actually as bad as it sounds, Samsung is probably talking with their lawyers and is being instructed to maintain radio silence so as to better prepare for the class-action lawsuit.
I 100% guarantee everyone who uses one of these was railroaded into mandatory arbitration.
Nobody involved in the decision making cares about the customers. They only care about the potential hit to the bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they don't care. Unless, of course, they decide that appearing to care and being responsive results in less of a hit.
Silences like these are strategic and dependably predictable - engaging with customers on average costs more than remaining silent for whatever metric they've applied to the fix. If it takes longer than they thought, they might feel compelled to speak out, or they could just depend on the issue to fade into the 24 hour news cycle. Engaging with a customer runs the risk of them interacting with some threshold of people that will keep the negative story in the headlines for longer than it might otherwise be.
I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot... just not about the consumers. People care about themselves - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first, their orgs second, maybe consumers third.
For example, little life pro-tip, never directly pay for a loan that you aren't liable for. Proxy it through the debtor, or not at all and get a lawyer if the debtor is deceased.
They knew they should have announced a recall, but they didn't. What they did was... They simply replace the TV panel, even outside the warranty, just to avoid lawsuits (After the person first try to contact them).
Yes, outside the warranty.
But one with one detail: They replace it with the same defective panel.
Unfortunately, I was the lucky one who ended up buying this TV, and I've already replaced the panel about three times in less than five years.
Even the Samsung repair technicians that came to my house to fix the TV already told "The model just have this issue, nothing we can do about it. If it happens again, report it again to fix"
It’s not a secret that arbitration agreements are intended to force the parties to arbitrate their disputes.
While I understand that not all companies are like this... most are, especially the big ones.
So when I say the "true purpose" is to stop you from being able to sue, I do not mean that it's somehow some closely-held secret that arbitration is an alternative to suing. It's just that the widely perpetuated façade of "oh you just agree to the more convenient arbitration" is a vast oversimplification and there are much deeper and far more malicious intents behind those clauses. It is not at all the win-win that companies would have you believe; I've even unironically seen at least one company say, essentially, "arbitration is much better, and filing a lawsuit is so inconvenient that you wouldn't want to do it anyway". Yeah. It's soo inconvenient for me to cause you so much trouble. For me. Inconvenient for me. It sure is. I'm definitely the one that wouldn't want it to happen. I definitely don't like when companies pay for intentional wrongs directed at me. Definitely not.
I've been wronged by companies a lot through the years and I have exactly zero patience for exactly these kinds of terrible, anti-consumer business practices. Access to arbitration as an option is great; forced arbitration however is a trap designed to protect the company at the expense of the consumer. In other words, forced arbitration has never actually been about arbitration at all, but rather exclusively getting out of lawsuits. That is what "true purpose" means. "Arbitration" is just their "get out of lawsuits free" card; they would use any other card that would have the same effect, because it is that effect that they're after.