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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

#581

Post by erickj »

CJefferson wrote: post #549
cryptozeus wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you want business to do ? See that customer is not active then go ahead and remove their subscription?? Lmao then you will have customers asking why did you stop my account. Clearly you have not faced customers before.

Why not send a message reminding them of the service, and giving an easy one-click way of cancelling? You could include some info on how they can use your service as well of course.

Imagine someone walked by your house every month and dropped a $5 bill on your lawn. The 1st of every month ... there it was.

Would you put up a sign reminding them to stop stop dropping $5 bills?

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

#582

Post by tomjakubowski »

bonton89 wrote: post #104
massysett wrote: post #12

"They recognized that getting a new card is one of the rare times you must actively renew your automatically renewing subscriptions, since you have to update the payment information on file with those companies." This isn't true: I've had subscriptions roll over to the new credit card number - and not just for a month or two. Apparently the bank will continue to process them (I'd rather they didn't.)

There's apparently some kind of service that automatically updates payment processors when you get a new card. Seems kind of stupid since one of the main reasons to get a new card is that is compromised and you might just end up sending the new card info to the same company that lost it or is refusing to cancel your subscription.

presumably if you report a card lost/stolen, the bank will report that to these services

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

#583

Post by freetanga »

PakG1 wrote: post #572
andrew_eu wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago I used to be a regular customer at a massage therapists office and paid dues into their sort of "subscription service" program. They charged a monthly fee about equal to a 1 hour massage, but would give a substantial discount when you actually get massages -- it broke even after about 2x per month which worked well enough for me. The incredible part was that they tracked whether you got a massage that month.…

I suppose the cynic would argue that if they didn't have this billing practice, they may have survived. Which the other cynic would say is the problem, are businesses being too subsidized by unethical billing?

Or would have created negative backlash with initial clients while still open, accelerating its demise?

Let’s chuck this one on the bin of “who knows? Who cares?” Mistery Bin.

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

#584

Post by pxc »

PakG1 wrote: post #572
andrew_eu wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long ago I used to be a regular customer at a massage therapists office and paid dues into their sort of "subscription service" program. They charged a monthly fee about equal to a 1 hour massage, but would give a substantial discount when you actually get massages -- it broke even after about 2x per month which worked well enough for me. The incredible part was that they tracked whether you got a massage that month.…

I suppose the cynic would argue that if they didn't have this billing practice, they may have survived. Which the other cynic would say is the problem, are businesses being too subsidized by unethical billing?

We also don't know that it closed because it failed. Small businesses like that can end up closing just because the owner moves away or something like that, if the owner is highly involved in operating the place.

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

#585

Post by xerox13ster »

lxgr wrote: post #552
bluedays wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just cancel my debit card instead. It’s quicker, and then when I have to add my card to sending that needs it again I have a much deeper understanding of where my money is going.

Canceling/reordering a credit or debit card is not guaranteed to actually end all subscriptions – some recurring payments can follow you across card reorders!

This is a "feature" of VISA, called Visa Account Updater [0]

[0]: https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau

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

#586

Post by Qwertious »

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?

Everyone uses their insurance - an insurance claim denotes when you get snake-eyes, not when you roll the dice.

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

#587

Post by gnicholas »

> It’s like when Netflix asks if you’re still watching when you’ve fallen asleep on the couch—except this policy actually saves you money.

I assumed this was because they pay for some content on a per-view basis, so they don't want to pay if you're not actually there/awake.

That said, I have found the autoplay-next-episode behavior to be strangely inconsistent, even for the same show. Some nights it automatically plays 4 in a row if we do nothing, and other nights it stops after each one. I've tried to figure out if it's based on time (sometimes we watch pretty late), but there seems to be no correlation.

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

#588

Post by croisillon »

nktrnk wrote: post #543
Loughla wrote: post #428

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.

Try FIP radio. Free, no ads, and really good music picks to my taste. Beats Spotify and everything else I’ve tried in terms of finding new music or listening to something in the background. TBH, I still have a Spotify subscription for listening on demand.

Or Radio Neptune! Classical during (European) day, jazz during the night, no talk, no ad https://radioneptune.fr/

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

#589

Post by PeterisP »

rixed wrote: post #536
MarkSweep wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is one asymmetry which can and should be corrected by legal means; markets which require unsubscribing to be as easy as subscribing get a bit more 'healthy' for subscriptions than those that don't.

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

#590

Post by CJefferson »

erickj wrote: post #581
CJefferson wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not send a message reminding them of the service, and giving an easy one-click way of cancelling? You could include some info on how they can use your service as well of course.

Imagine someone walked by your house every month and dropped a $5 bill on your lawn. The 1st of every month ... there it was. Would you put up a sign reminding them to stop stop dropping $5 bills?

No, which is why I think the government should force companies remind people they took out subscriptions, and make it easy to cancel them.
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