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Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

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

#631

Post by omginternets »

crazygringo wrote: post #534
omginternets wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

The premise of this discussion is that another HN user has observed that companies routinely rely on people forgetting to unsubscribe. Again, the idea is that this is part of the core business model.

As I've already mentioned, we agree that personal responsibility is important. I believe we can also agree that some people are unable to be fully responsible for reasons that escape them (depression, severe ADHD, other more pressing responsibilities like children who aren't doing well, etc.)

I think it takes a special kind of misanthropy to suggest that it's fine for companies to base their business model on the fact that such people will pay for a service they aren't using. I am not arguing for legislature or anything of the sort, but I still think it's unambiguously unethical.

It is, in the most literal sense, exploitative.

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

#632

Post by eropple »

taffer wrote: post #598
skeaker wrote: post #451

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…

> What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions. Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others. To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogeth…

> Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.

If Netflix will let you pay $2 to buy something from them, they sure don't advertise it. So this assertion requires what the customer wants to buy to be fungible. It's a mindset that requires one to implicitly accept the idea of content-as-gruel, and I think most people don't do that.

It also implies that people are rational and responsive actors and habituation doesn't exist, which isn't true either.

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

#633

Post by wolverine876 »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #604
wolverine876 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you are taking money for nothing? How is that the right thing to do? > evil A bit of a strawperson

How do you know its doing nothing? I have a couple VPSes I have sitting idle for my disaster recovery scenario.

Yes, it depends on the situation - the service, what the vendor knows about usage, etc. Sometimes you know, sometimes you don't.

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

#634

Post by lwhi »

carlosjobim wrote: post #619
lwhi wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some companies only sell to people who are financially struggling. And a great deal of these companies rely on people not being financially literate to make huge amounts of money. There's no inevitability to these systems. People make choices to run companies these ways. They don't have to sell because the factories can't stop making products.

You're talking about individual companies, I'm talking about the systemic factors in general. > They don't have to sell because the factories can't stop making products. What are they supposed to do? Shut down the factories and fire their workers? Industrialised production relies on huge up-front investments and large operating cost, in exchange for enormous output and low per-unit cost of production. That's how it w…

We're talking about subscription services.

A huge number of these services won't actually even supply physical goods.

Your argument isn't relevant here.

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

#635

Post by interloxia »

Rackspace charged me $5 recently for the first time in a long time. It turned out to be a few bytes of a log file for a service that I had long since removed to the best of my knowledge.

Time to finally get rid of them. Unfortunately they require for me to make an international call at my expense to close my account.

Naming to shame.

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

#636

Post by robertlagrant »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #611
robertlagrant wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why did you make a point about it requiring work? Because a previous comment said it wouldn't require work. Now you also are saying they'd need to implement it. So we agree it needs work. > Just admit your argument made no sense Framing this as "admit" might make it seem like a fait accomplis, but I need a higher bar than that to be persuaded. Biased language only fools very basic readers. > they're just not compar…

Sigh. If you're not capable of admitting when you're wrong I feel bad for you. There's no shame in it you know. I'm wrong about stuff frequently, but at least I'll happily admit it. Life is too short to waste energy clinging onto bad arguments simply out of spite or poor self-esteem. Embrace cummingham's law. Have a good life.

Your sighing, nonspecific berating of me that I'm wrong, and assuming I must be spiteful or have poor self esteem are all nonsense, I'm afraid. Make an argument, and stop the ad hominem.

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

#637

Post by robertlagrant »

ozim wrote: post #577
robertlagrant wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that services should start unsubscribing people just in case they have ADHD, that seems a very odd way round to think. They're just businesses. I don't think it's reasonable to assume they can know what you want or intend.

They don’t have to unsubscribe automatically, they could refund the money but keep subscription if someone wasn’t even opening their page in like 3 months. I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely. But we know - no one will…

> But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.

Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require governments to get involved.

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

#638

Post by robertlagrant »

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".

Perhaps, but all I'm doing is reversing the equally unjustified claims in the parent. Ironically they've lamented unjustified claims in the sibling comment to this one, but their post is chock full of them.

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

#639

Post by gmd63 »

alexas wrote: post #602
gmd63 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should it be illegal?

Because accurately pricing sales around intended purchases makes the economy better

And it's more efficient for a company managing subscriptions to automate accurate pricing the right way than it is for each and every customer to sift through their payment history for anomalies

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

#640

Post by ozim »

robertlagrant wrote: post #637
ozim wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t have to unsubscribe automatically, they could refund the money but keep subscription if someone wasn’t even opening their page in like 3 months. I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely. But we know - no one will…

> But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce. Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require gov…

That was my idea from top of my mind for corporations to show they care for the customers.

Proposing that they refund money would be realistic if they would at least agree to send out email - which I do believe will never happen.

So refunding money is fantasy, sending out emails is realistic but since they won’t do it, that makes refunds even more unlikely.

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