This was a hidden savior that helped some of the publishing industry delay what was already a precipitous decline. As soon as I became aware of recurring billing through Recurly, I switched all of the products of my employer at the time to a subscription based model. Yes, it takes a bit more work on the part of the customer service agents who deal with angry customers who do not want to be billed anymore, but on the flip side, it's usually many months before people who are not using the service realize that they have continued to be billed.
Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
351–360 of 677 posts
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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:…
> Not sure which discussions you call "petulant" but banks high-to-low ordering payments is predatory against people who lack liquidity.
Indeed, and as the article also mentions, banks will intentionally maximize the number of overdraft fees by reordering transactions in a way that causes most pain. This should not be legal.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#353It's disappointing but not surprising that no credit card company that I know of provides simple built-in summaries of past 12 month spend by merchant and merchant category. Edit: It looks like my bank has some basic view accessible through a submenu.
On the contrary, most big banks provide year end summaries that can be download ed as csv to analyze them in Excel.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#354It'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…
That's a lovely and idealistic view of humans. Unfortunately bad actors have realized that what we actually are is just meat computers with unpatchable security vulnerabilities, so demanding that people just stop having problems and fit your nebulous definition of competence with unlimited and unwavering performance, has predictably not panned out. What is the more moral solution then? Recognizing and placing systema…
You can have:
1) An “ethical” system in which a bunch of people are losing money and are surprised by this, unaware of it, or intend to stop it, haven’t yet, but absolutely would if it were as easy as thinking “stop that”. But they said yes somewhere along the line, so it’s all “ethical”.
2) A just-as-ethical system that… simply doesn’t do that bad stuff in 1, or at least does way less of it.
It’s weird to me that people defend situations akin to 1 when 2 is totally achievable, on the grounds that “well 1 isn’t technically unethical (as I define it)”. Ok? So what? 2 is better and isn’t less ethical. What is going through someone’s head when they defend 1 and dismiss or put down the notion of 2? If you could flip a switch to toggle between the two, would you really leave it on 1? I do not get it. Why not pick the version with better outcomes?
[edit] and, separately, I think it’s plainly unethical—to put it mildly—to add terms to a contract or steps to a process that you know with great certainty your counterparty will later regret or dislike, relying on their overlooking it or not having better options, purely for your own benefit at their expense. I don’t think their saying “yes” makes that ethically an ok thing to do—it’s straight-up predatory. But even if it does make it Ok, why prefer that over… not-that?
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#355I was recently appalled to discover how many of my subscriptions auto-updated the expiration date when my card expired.
I had hoped to use "ignore it until charges stop going through because jumping through their hoops is ridiculous" to cancel a few pesky subscriptions and it didn't even work!
I think this is a "feature" of using Stripe for billing? Or something? I couldn't find anything obvious that they had in common but that.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interviewed a bunch of "financial hardship" people a few years back for an app my company was working on. The lack of financial knowledge was pretty disappointing to me, but the big thing I remember is that all the people I talked to were good people. They all had decent, yet low-paying jobs (nurses, care-givers, teaching assistants, cashiers, etc.) I was expecting a bunch of jerks or bungling idiots, and there was…
Worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for awhile. We encountered a lot of these cases and there are a ton of dark patterns as well as just straight-up not honoring the 300 page contracts that they had written. For the most part you come to understand that people are actually trying really hard to get it right most of the time. The lack of knowledge is quite startling (but understandable, given how comple…
Intentional Obfuscation is difficult to convey to people who, for example, make enough money to hire someone to do their taxes for them.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> restaurant buffets Buffets have monthly subcriptions?
No, their entire model is based on the assumption that users could extract maximum value from the buffet (eating everything) but typically don't (have a normal- to large-sized meal, the supply cost of which is obviously far less than what the customer pays to get in). The parent commenter's point is that many businesses are run this way (eg. the gym is not equipped for 100% of subscribers to go to the gym every day,…
I mean I don't go to buffet to eat a lot, but just because I like what they serve and I can make my own plates. We exist.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#358Earlier 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…
These patterns work on adults and are economic inefficiencies whether you subscribe to strict personal accountability or not. Good policy improves individual and social outcomes.
Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely not. It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail. But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many. The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do th…
Maybe I'm unusually anal retentive about this, but I have every bank account, PayPal, Venmo, both credit cards, every brokerage, 401(k), HSA, IRA, mortgage, everything... in Quicken, which I check every single day. 1. Start Quicken, 2. Hit Update, 3. Get Coffee, 4. Review everything in boldface to make sure it's not a surprise. I have the next month worth of bills and paychecks "below the line" as future transactions…
I wish there was some way to do this without handing over the credentials for my entire financial life to a 3rd party—which I refuse to do.
Re: Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking all legal free money is wise, or even just non-idiotic?
If someone you know (a customer, in this case, with an existing relationship) wants to keep paying you, why go out of your way to say no? unless there is a specific reason you think they screwed up - like they say they want to cancel, but hit the wrong button or something. Or you know they’re dead and can’t cancel. Otherwise it just inconveniences them if they want it, since you cancelled it out from under them. Bad…
> If someone you know (a customer, in this case, with an existing relationship) wants to keep paying you, why go out of your way to say no?
Because I don't want to take people's money that I haven't earned. Why do I want to scam people? Blaming them doesn't make it less of a scam.
> unless there is a concrete reason you have to believe otherwise
Here we agree. You need a concrete reason. For example, if your service streams movies and they haven't streamed one in a year, that might be a concrete reason. Sometimes it's ambiguous, and then send them an email.