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Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

wsj.com

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Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#141

Post by daxfohl »

bruceb wrote: post #50

Alternative headline: People who actively use their subscriptions are being subsided buy those who don't. If you use the gym a lot be grateful people are paying that don't. If they did, the gym would have no room. While bits based subs are not quite the same, still holds that if people who don't need that sub any more cancelled then others would probably pay more.

IDK if that holds. If pricing is such that people would probably pay more, then the business will raise the price. The fact that they're getting free money from zombie subscriptions doesn't really change things.

Though perhaps you could say businesses then actively reduce pricing to keep things just under the zombie radar, but that's even more effed up: it means the pricing strategy is such that zombie accounts are actually the business's goal, not just a side effect.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#142

Post by gedy »

rectang wrote: post #127
paxys wrote: post #106

It's bizarre to me just how many people in this country ( especially the ones who can least afford it) simply do not take charge of their financial health. Even in this very thread you can see all kinds of excuses ("it's too hard to log in and check credit card statements every month", "they make you call or chat to cancel so I don't bother", "they should cancel subscriptions automatically if you don't use them", "it…

The rapacious corporations agree with you — no matter how deceptive or even illegal their practices are, no matter how much R&D money is brought to bear in designing innovative user interfaces and bureaucratic frameworks which systematically exploit human weaknesses (particularly those of vulnerable populations such as less-tech-savvy elders) to bleed the populace dry... it's all the fault of the individual victims w…

I think you are misrepresenting OPs point. We all know many people who are extremely sloppy with their personal finances, and sign up for things they can't afford, debt they are unlikely to pay back, etc.

Am I sad for companies who take in these people as customers? No, but let's not canonize people who are reckless with their spending, even when warned.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#143

Post by jjeaff »

blueridge wrote: post #5

I don't understand, do people not log in online to look at their credit card statements? It takes 5 minutes to skim your transactions, look for suspicious charges, get a quick read on where money is going. There are lots of challenges to actually canceling subscriptions, but not knowing that you're being charged for something every month? Seems absent-minded to me.

Most credit and debit cards have the option to get a text message for any transaction over a certain amount. all of my cards are set to send me a text for any transaction over $0.

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#144

Post by rectang »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #135
darth_avocado wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these are valid issues though. I'd consider myself in top 1% when it comes to financial health and I still pay for stuff I forgot to cancel. Some of the reasons: > They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm, and hold for hours to cancel, sometimes even disconnect forcing you to start over, while not offering a callback option. Sometimes there are weeks I absolutely cannot afford to do this because of work. > Yo…

> They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm This is customer service. A written notice of termination works for any consumer contract. > but you paid for the year Unpay for it. This is the utility of credit cards.

> Unpay for it. This is the utility of credit cards.

That's a facile answer. You're extremely well educated on this matter and know full well the downsides of "unpaying".

EDIT: see sibling comment from "notaustinpowers" for an explanation of the downsides (thanks!). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39060260

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#145

Post by slaymaker1907 »

Alupis wrote: post #115
wolverine876 wrote: post #64

The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and…

> The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. I disagree. I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled o…

As someone with ADHD, that's a lot to ask. However, in my opinion what we really need is a common standard for banks to handle recurring payments for subscriptions. Asking me to review every single thing on every account is a ton to ask, but it would be a lot more manageable if recurring stuff had its own section and that I could cancel stuff from my bank app directly.

Sure there are a lot of complexities, but it's not that horrendous as someone who literally worked on recurring payments for a bank. You just simplify things by making it a pull system. A recurring payment is just authorization from the bank to withdraw up to X dollars every Y days/months/year (you want a design like this to avoid dealing with holidays and weekends on the bank side which vary for every country).

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#146

Post by madars »

Alupis wrote: post #115
wolverine876 wrote: post #64

The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and…

> The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. I disagree. I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled o…

>This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.

Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity. (Simple example: if you have $500 in your account, and the following transactions happen in sequence in a day: a +$200 deposit and a -$600 rent deduction, some banks will specifically override chronological order and process -$600 first so that you get an overdraft charge, despite having positive balance all the way when processing chronologically.) This is might not be a common problem for a lot of users of this website (though see a sibling comment re: ADHD), but the problem is real, not "petulance". https://www.nber.org/digest/202103/bank-ordering-debit-charg...

Of course this only happens to you and me, whereas banks can and do use daylight overdraft and can easily go billions in overdraft: https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/psr_dlod.htm (There is a 50 basis points charge for uncollateralized overdrafts (and none for collaterized) but that is less meaningful in relative terms than $30 charge for people in above scenarios.)

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#147

Post by behringer »

lazide wrote: post #126
wolverine876 wrote: post #64

The blame falls also on businesses which take money for services they don't deliver. They often know, and otherwise often could know, when subscribers are not using the service. If you're a business, you should earn your revenue, otherwise you are frauds. This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service. Don't tell me it's unintentional - you know what's happening and…

[flagged]

This with dignity?

Or do you also ask for handouts everywhere you go?

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#148

Post by wrs »

jjeaff wrote: post #132
eropple wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as! The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and…

this is exactly what Slack does (or did, I don't know if they still do). they only charge you for employees that have used slack during the month. though I don't know what "use" entails.

Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? Slack was bought by Salesforce so they now do the standard enterprise pricing, annual contracts with user counts and “true-ups” (never “true-downs”).

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#149

Post by toomuchtodo »

Alupis wrote: post #128
eropple wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how this follows. A perfectly reasonable option that doesn't affect your use case at all would be "don't charge a customer who didn't use the service during that period." AWS doesn't charge me for an empty S3 bucket, Netflix shouldn't charge for zero minutes of video watched that month. Simple as! The downside, of course, is that this does mean you can't ride the Personal Responsibility bicycle and…

What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd. "Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible. If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you…

> What's wrong with people putting on their adulting pants and actually being responsible? Why outsource personal responsibility to a third party? That seems, absurd.

This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself.

(very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)

Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

#150

Post by bonton89 »

ksd482 wrote: post #14
mysterydip wrote: post #4

Forget to? Or involve so many dark patterns it's nearly impossible to?

I think it's both. To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.

Is it true you can use a fake name (and presumably address I guess) for privacy.com credit cards?

I have virtual cards through capital one but they seem much less feature rich.

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