471–480 of 845 posts
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Which other paid news publications do you prefer over the NYT?
https://spectator.co.uk is decent
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I have encountered similar tactics from a popular VPS provider. Set up your account to auto-renew, send the invoice to collections if they can't charge you, instead of just canceling the service. Infuriating, to the point where you'd think they'd be more concerned about driving away future customers.
Can you name the VPS provider?
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I think it's a little more complicated than that. Back before prices got better, my parents used to call up the cable company every year to "cancel our service". Why? "It's too expensive." Eventually they would "give in" after shaving $20 off our monthly bill. This of course was their intent the whole time: they saved thousands of dollars over about 10 years as a result. Very few people actually determined to cancel…
> It constitutes a kind of wealth transfer to the people who have the free time, energy, and ability to play the game. It's price discrimination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination Usually, it's not worth the time to haggle over people to figure out the most they are willing to pay for low margin retail goods, so you don't see it at Walmart or the grocery store. But for high margin goods, such as cars…
Yes! I was going to mention that this is really a pretty universal feature of "pricing", but decided that was too controversial an angle on what was a rather simple point.
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Netflix is notoriously generous here. They allegedly auto-cancel accounts that don't use the service for too long! https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/net...
Im not native english speaker, so i'm curious is word "notoriously" is used here properly. What i know "notoriously" means "known for something bad".
Using it with an adjective to clarify the meaning here is fine.
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I've experienced the opposite with Amazon. If you complain about a product you've gotten they simply refund the full purchase price, no need to return the item or anything. I've even gotten months of prime refunded by telling them I forgot to cancel. I assume that eating the cost of a bad purchase is cheaper for them than upsetting a long-term customer.
I've never had that experience with Amazon UK, they've always demanded that the broken / damaged item be returned. On one occasion when I had to return an item I ended up £30 out of pocket because it had to go by courier instead of post, due to length. I had to argue with their customer support to obtain recompense despite it having been them who told me to send it courier. The item was only worth £80. Nowadays I jus…
The only thing I noticed is they hide the collection options under a button. By default they encourage you to drop off at a depot or post office.
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Incidents like this make me wonder why there isn't an appetite for better consumer rights in the US. If this had happened in the UK, you'd have the option to pro-actively block the payment, recover it, and legal standing to defend getting your money back. Letting companies redefine the rights of their customers seems bizarre to me.
Currently in the UK, I had a really bad experience with 3, where I tried to cancel, I was informed that I had my account cancelled and then they kept billing me (for months). I consulted with some lawyers and they told me since I had only done business on the phone (the only way the company does this business by the way) that was essentially my word against the companies. There was no way to email them and even when…
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There's a "credit score" in Europe???
From the UK here: Yes we all have a credit score - it's mainly used to measure your ability to borrow and repay debt and will influence whether a company loans to you and the interest rate on said loan. It's not (yet) as aggressive as the social scoring system in China if that is what you were alluding to... Do you not have a similar system where you are from? How would the above be decided for you?
Banks giving out loans will look at the data behind the score along with a bunch of other factors. It's very possible that if Experian say person A is average and person B is good, a bank may decide to give Person A a better rate on a loan based on different data, or different weighting of the data.
Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way? I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy. And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant…
I wonder if this isn't a profitable practice though. However much annoying these processes are (I had to suffer an identical Financial Times cancellation process last week) They know how much it costs to take cancelling users through an account specialist and presumably they get enough people to continue subscription to make it worth while. A continuing paying customer now is worth far more than someone who may subsc…
My guess is there are a lot of potential subscribers reading stories like this and deciding not to bother with a subscription.
I also just canceled my NYT subscription (or, more accurate: I am in the process of doing that) and it is just terrible. I am in Germany, and basically they do not accept your cancellation via writing to the customer support, but require you to call a callcenter, which is extremly hard to reach (either they do not pick up, or the connection quality is so bad that they don't understand what you're saying). In short, I…