Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 677 posts

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

#531

Post by bruce511 »

kortilla wrote: post #528
eropple wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I know you're being somewhat flippant with this question, buy I'll bite.

So you -did- use your insurance this (and every) month. You didn't-claim- from insurance, but that's incidental.

Insurance exists to give you peace of mind (or more technically act as a hedge against your risk). You got that benefit/peace/hedge so you used your insurance.

Now, if we take this thought, you could argue that Netflix isn't there to provide "show x" which you may, or may not, watch. Rather its there yo provide you with the -option- to watch show x. Whether you watch it or not is up to you.

I feel this comparison is not equivalent though because risk is very real, while selling a "Netflix option" seems very contrived.

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

#532

Post by sakjur »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #152
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…

People don't cancel shit because they don't know it's charging, they don't cancel shit because businesses make it artificially hard to do so, oftentimes requiring you to connect with a representative over chat or phone and having them argue with you and try to re-sell you the product. Almost every subscription I have right now was started with a free trial with a few buttons, but canceling? Canceling is usually a 20+…

I basically only ever sign up for subscriptions that I can cancel from either App Store or through the national system where subscriptions are listed and cancelable in my bank statement these days.

My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider.

That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.

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

#533

Post by al_borland »

ghaff wrote: post #108
bombcar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My final calculus was adding up what I had spent on storage units, and realizing it was way more than the replacement cost of most of the crap, so I reduced it down to personal momentos only.

In general, based on various family/partner-related experiences, is that you either have a specific I need more room for a specific set of activities that I have a concrete plan to use OR I have a specific plan to have more space for this crap--which I want to keep. A lot of people pay for storage space with no real plan which is just going to be tossed at some point anyway.

A while ago I read something along the lines of, clutter is a delayed decision. That's what most storage units are. People don't want to make a decision today, so they stick it in a storage unit and pay on it monthly so they can make the decision later... or the decision gets made for them.

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

#534

Post by crazygringo »

omginternets wrote: post #530
crazygringo wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Difficulty in unsubscribing sure, but that's a totally separate issue. That has nothing to do with not being aware of your subscriptions.

But otherwise, what are businesses doing to "maximize your chance of forgetting"? That's not a thing. That's not something they have control over or can maximize. For monthly subscriptions, you see it every month on your credit card. For yearly subscriptions, companies generally send a notice a ~week before, reminding you that you'll be charged, and then you get a receipt emailed.

That seems entirely reasonable to me. The rest is called personal responsibility. When you sign up for a subscription, you know full well what you're doing. You know it will continue until you cancel. There's absolutely nothing unethical about it being your responsibility to cancel.

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

#536

Post by rixed »

MarkSweep wrote: post #508
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…

It’s asymmetrical. On one side you have the consumer who wants to save $10 by canceling a service they don’t use. On the other side you have highly paid software engineers, data scientists, and product managers who have tens of thousands of dollars riding on meeting their metrics for subscriber retention. For example, Amazon implemented their “Iliad flow” to make it hard to cancel Prime. https://arstechnica.com/tech-…

It's also asymmetrical because most often than not, subscribing is one click whereas unsubscribing is an obstacle course.

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

#537

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

paxys wrote: post #222
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I get a free trial of Prime, I immediately set a reminder on my phone to cancel it in a month. It's really not that hard.

You can also immediately go to settings and choose not to renew. It'll still be active for the rest of the month.

Gosh I've wasted so much time worrying about not cancelling on time

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

#539

Post by crummy »

gmd63 wrote: post #499
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…

It should be illegal to charge someone for a month of a service that they did not use. It's trivially easy to see that someone doesn't log in. Then you just pause their subscription after refunding that month. Next time they log in, you can prompt them to resubscribe with one click.

Gyms everywhere would go belly-up!

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

#540

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

JohnFen wrote: post #294
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I get a free trial of Prime, I immediately set a reminder on my phone to cancel it in a month. It's really not that hard.

It's even easier to reject all free trials of everything. That's what I do.

I'm already ordering stuff from Amazon, why would I refuse free shipping?
Post reply on HN