Live data from Hacker News

Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

wsj.com

471–480 of 677 posts

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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandora is my favorite subscription. I have paid $3.99 a month for years, for all the music I could ever listen to. It is literally always on in my house or office.

Any advantage over Spotify or Youtube Music that you know about?

Well, for one it is much cheaper.

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

#472
post #336

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…

Most of them could be solved by our CC system putting people in control. Wanna cancel NYT, stop payment and let them come to you if they want to bother. The fact that people can just take money from our accounts on a whim and we have to beg them to get it back or stop is a ridiculous system. I would much rather deal with invoices. The only system where they just charge you I like is the usage model. I get a bill from…

This is how UPI-based subscriptions work in India. You open your UPI app, go to the autopay section, and see all your subscriptions, whether it is one-time mandates or as-presented recurring ones. You can just cancel there and it's done.

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

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not my intent to claim equivalence. The comparison just shows that it's possible and in fact very reasonable for a company to take some level of responsibility on behalf of their customers. I guess the difference in stakes do factor in somewhat: If car companies can do it when it's life or death and requires tons of R&D and manufacturing, why can't Netflix do it for something as mundane as charging their users that can be done with only software?

Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.

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

#474
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

[flagged]

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And you can eat a whole plate of snitzels or cake without anyone looking at you like you are crazy.

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

#476
post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By OP you mean the article? Or someone else?

The article is a typical editorial. And behind a paywall, near as I can tell.

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

#477
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrialisation means that most consumer goods are mass produced. That means these companies need to make their money from wide sales instead of tall sales. Wide as in getting as many individual customers as possible, instead of tall as in selling bespoke products for an expensive price to few customers. Very few people need more than one washing machine. Well off people already own washing machines. So if you're s…

What's your point? That the system is just fine thank you Sir, move along?

My point is that is logical and not that bizarre that companies will do anything they can to broaden their customer base. Once you've sold your product to the rich and the middle class, you have to target the poor. Because your factory keeps spitting out product and you need customers.

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I completely understand the original point and also agree with it wholeheartedly, but you misunderstand the reason for my comment. The user I responded to made a separate comment elsewhere in this thread, and I highlighted their comment in this chain we're in as evidence that they should be well aware of why the point in their other comment doesn't always work out the way they would like.

The fundamental business model in this discussion is different, yes, but if you understand that business model then you're likely also well aware of the other side of their business around membership cancellations.

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

#479

> Their average response was $62. When they were given more time to guess again, they increased their estimate to $96. They were still way off. The correct answer was $273. I have been in rooms at SaaS companies where the fact that people forget to cancel the subscription was described as an important benefit of the subscription model, and a reason to set the price at something easily overlooked. People are terrible…

Yeah, was just going to say this is Planet Fitness' whole value prop .. Cheap enough that the lie you tell yourself that you will go more next month is easily worth $10 / month.

That's part of all Gym's model really. They gleefully under-provision their facilities, knowing that on a given day, almost nobody will show up relative to the number of people who will pay.
Post reply on HN