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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

#461

Post by smogcutter »

themacguffinman wrote: post #442
_Algernon_ wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not signing in to a service you have a subscription to is a pretty clear signal that it is not being used. I'm not aware of any streaming service that automatically pauses a subscription if you don't sign in for a full month.

I strongly disagree, I have media subscriptions right now that I won't sign into for a month or even multiple months but I don't intend on giving it up. This is especially true for niche streaming content where production costs aren't exactly cheap but their niche nature means not everyone is consistently in the mood for that content.

Ok so why do you want to pay for that time? Why not have payments paused during the period of inactivity, and resume when you want to use it?

The point is that this is a choice by content businesses. Pausing and resuming payments could easily be frictionless, but it isn’t.

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

#462

Post by bee_rider »

skeaker wrote: post #451
Alupis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why s…

Does this analogy actually explain or clarify anything, or is it just an attempt to raise the stakes for rhetorical effect?

Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it.

It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.

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

#463

Post by wolverine876 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #454
wolverine876 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People need to have personal responsibility. Do people need to have personal responsibility when they operate a business? Why is responsibility any less there? I think it's irresponsible to exploit other people's mistakes (unless they are a competing business, and not always then either). It happens incidentally sometimes at minimal cost, but at high cost or when it can be avoided, it's the businessperson's respons…

> Why is responsibility any less there? It's not. They should be ensuring the service being paid for is available. That's their responsibility.

You really think it's responsible to knowingly take people's money for nothing? I think that's textbook irresponsibility - it's an assertion of irresponsibility as ok.

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

#464

Post by wolverine876 »

christophilus wrote: post #459
vimsee wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that you disagree with the parent comment. I would like to know why. Could you provide some details as well?

Not the op, but, if you pay me $5/month for a VPS, and you never do anything but let it sit idle because you forgot about it, and you don’t notice that you’re still paying me $5 / month… how exactly does that make me evil?

Because you are taking money for nothing? How is that the right thing to do?

> evil

A bit of a strawperson

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

#465

Post by bee_rider »

eropple wrote: post #120
Alupis wrote: post #115

Earlier 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…

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…

The deal they offer is basically unmetered use for subscribers. Why arbitrarily pick 0 for the metering unit? If I watch half as much TV as the average user, why don’t I get a discount?

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

#466

Post by wolverine876 »

Krasnol wrote: post #456
robertlagrant wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which take money for services they don't deliver They are delivering a service. > This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service No it's not. > No matter how awful or shameful, people say 'it's business' and those magic words absolve every evil No, they don't.

It is quite concerning that this comment is so high up. It is lazy, doesn't provide any additional explanation for their reasoning. It is useless and basically just says "no".

It's pretty common on the Internet and on HN too, and in public debate. Aggressive, confident assertions deny others the power to disagree.

Contempt and shame - super-popular rhetoric these days - achieve the same thing, and they are related (both kinds of rhetoric are an aggressive display of arrogance). They assert, implicitly, that there's no way to debate this person.

Anger is another similar tactic.

Then if you don't understand that it's tactical, you give up. So far, to my amazement, very few people seem to understand it; almost all take it at face value.

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

#467

Post by wolverine876 »

mtmail wrote: post #379
roland35 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't they just providing access to their service? Different companies provide different billing methods and that's fine! For example you could pay $20/month for ChatGPT and use it as much or little as you like, or pay $/per API call... But not every company needs to offer both.

Yes, sometimes you purchase capacity to be able to use something. The provider has to reserve that capacity.

Usually capacity is allocated based on past usage, either by the individual or by some group. It depends on what they are selling, of course.

But an easy way to relieve that capacity problem is to stop fleecing people for something they forgot to cancel.

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

#468

Post by themacguffinman »

jjulius wrote: post #365
paxys wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model. If everyone paying into it actually expected to extract their entire money's worth of value the whole industry would collapse.

>Gyms, cloud storage, restaurant buffets, insurance all follow this business model. I'm struggling to understand how you can lambaste people by saying "jUsT cAnCeL iT"[0] when you seem to be well aware of the business model of gyms, wherein cancelling a membership is widely-known to be a purposefully cumbersome and difficult experience. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39059793

That's misunderstanding the point, "this business model" doesn't mean hard-to-cancel. The comment specifically points to a model where customers with heavy usage are subsidizing customers with light usage (edit: I mixed it up, it's light users who subsidize heavy users). With maybe the exception of gyms which I've heard bad things about, cloud storage and buffets and insurance are usually not hard to cancel.

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

#469

Post by wolverine876 »

lazide wrote: post #410
wolverine876 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Good luck with that. Continuing to provide someone a service isn’t scamming them, even if they aren’t using it. Assuming you aren’t making it hard to cancel or anything. And doing all this work in the middle of a high inflation environment…. Do you have a death wish?

[flagged]

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

#470

Post by wolverine876 »

lazide wrote: post #412
wolverine876 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> presumably happy with your service The OP is about billions being spent by people who are not happy but haven't unsubscribed, so that seems like a bad presumption.

Seems like a bad presumption to assume they aren’t happy with the service. Or is taking the standard deduction morally reprehensible too?

> a bad presumption to assume they aren’t happy with the service.

The OP says they forgot to unsubscribe, which certainly implies they aren't 'happy' with it.

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