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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

#521

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

> If you took monthly payment from your elderly neighbor to shovel their walk and it never snowed, it would be shameful to keep taking it - people's opinions of you would change negatively if they heard about it.

Except the neighbour did buy something. You being available to shovel their driveway. You having the equipment to shovel their driveway.

Which is why you pay for snow removal services even in months without snow.

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

#522

Post by igetspam »

kccqzy wrote: post #418
zachwdc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I need to cancel something that is hard to cancel, I get a free virtual card from Privacy (privacy.com), then switch my subscription to use the virtual card number, then pause or cancel the card in Privacy.

Then you have the risk of the vendor sending your account to collections and trashing your credit score.

I've done the same thing for years. I've never seen collections.

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

#523

Post by Izkata »

nytesky wrote: post #516
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…

Do you have a family, with 2-3 adult users of credit cards? We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends. I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month t…

Personal responsibility. The idea is those 2-3 adult users should all be monitoring their own statements. Not you monitoring everything for them.

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

#524

Post by Izkata »

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…

> Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?

They do, through safety tests and improving it over the decades.

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

#525

Post by demondemidi »

karaterobot wrote: post #228

> 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…

How do people not check their credit card statements every month against their receipts? That’s insane to me.

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

#526

Post by behringer »

lazide wrote: post #342
behringer wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This with dignity? Or do you also ask for handouts everywhere you go?

Taking free money isn’t asking for handouts. Taking free money is (in this case) someone you know handing you $100 and saying ‘merry Christmas’ or whatever. Sure, you could throw it on the ground and say ‘f you’. But these are existing customers who already give you money and are presumably happy with your service.

taking free money is in this case like your grandma living on a fixed government pension giving you 50 dollars even though you're 35 making 100 grand a year and keeping it because fuck her.

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

#527

Post by crazygringo »

omginternets wrote: post #403
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…

Surely it's unethical to take advantage of people, even the irresponsible ones? There's a significant minority of people out there who struggle with this kind of thing because of circumstances beyond their control. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were saying "they deserve it". It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.

But charging a subscription you signed up for isn't taking advantage of you.

Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice.

I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion.

But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children.

There's literally nothing but asking adults to be aware of their finances and to cancel subscriptions they don't want to pay for any longer. It's the absolute lowest bar I can possibly think of in terms of basic financial skills.

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

#528

Post by kortilla »

eropple wrote: post #326
themacguffinman wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It screws over other use cases because it changes the economics of these streaming services. Monthly subscriptions for media, especially ones like Netflix, account for bingeing followed by dead periods amortized into the monthly price. Only counting active periods will break that amortization and the monthly price increases as a result. If someone doesn't binge and their lifestyle includes watching things more consis…

You know, you're right, it would affect that use case. On the other hand, "I would have to pay a higher amount of money for my teevee if they stopped bleeding people for no services rendered" is a really funny thing to get on the the Personal Responsibility bicycle about. Like, you could've just said "I don't want to pay more" and I guess that'd be mildly unfortunate for you, maybe I could've found some sympathy for…

Should I get a refund for not using my insurance?

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

#529

Post by smogcutter »

themacguffinman wrote: post #485
smogcutter wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I described the reason in more detail in my previous comments up-thread: because I understand the cost is amortized and it's an intuitive billing system that supports two different watching habits: consistent watching as well as bingeing. Refusing to pay because I binge means prices increase for people who don't binge. Pricing issues like this are really killer for niche streaming sites that I want to support. I gene…

I mean, for starters this whole conversation is fantasy because streamers, or really, businesses in general, will never on their own initiative stop taking taking money from customers.

Auto-cancellation or whatever is never ever going to happen. Unless forced by regulation I suppose, which I don’t see a reason for. We’re not talking about fraud or deception, just the general day-to-day scumminess of capitalism.

All that said, I don’t think your argument carries the weight you think it does. “I’m happy my underutilization of a service subsidizes other users” isn’t a compelling story to me and doesn’t seem like a net benefit. To each their own.

(Anyway, a binger whose usage is equivalent to a non-binge watcher, except concentrated rather than diffuse, is not actually underutilizing the service and isn’t really who we’re talking about here. I think.)

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

#530

Post by omginternets »

crazygringo wrote: post #527
omginternets wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's unethical to take advantage of people, even the irresponsible ones? There's a significant minority of people out there who struggle with this kind of thing because of circumstances beyond their control. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were saying "they deserve it". It's not "personal responsibility" or "ethical business". It's both.

But charging a subscription you signed up for isn't taking advantage of you. Are there really people who struggle with not canceling subscriptions? It's genuinely hard for me to see how that's not a choice. I could understand if we're talking about something like gambling addiction, where there's a compulsion. But there's no addiction here. There's no scam. There's no taking advantage of children. There's literally n…

Knowingly optimizing your business to maximize my chances of forgetting, or making it difficult to unsubscribe, is absolutely unethical.
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