101–110 of 793 posts
They should clean up their act anyway. If other customers are like me I’ve been putting off joining for over a year because they’re so scammy and I don’t want to get locked in.
I even went to sign up and walked out because the price ended up being double what they advertised with weird fees and the base plan not being useable once they explain it.
There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening. If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.
This feels like one of those things that could be solved on the payment end with something like a unique payment ID for each subscription, rather than giving a CC number. Then you just enable or disable payment IDs (perhaps for a limited time, e.g., "create a payment ID that works for Netflix for the next three months but not after that"), rather than relying on vendors to decide whether they feel like charging you o…
Honestly, this is the best thing if it changes the worst experience I've had cancelling something - Gyms. They make it crazy easy to sign up, but a pain in the ass to stop being a member (for example, if you move and forget to cancel good luck - they want you to come in and talk to the manager in a lot of cases)
There's at least some hope of decency and empathy in an individual person empowered to override process prescription even if there will never be any in the dark patterns dreamed up by the corporate-level customer retention team.
> will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. I am very curious what exactly this means? Is it the number of pages or forms you had to fill out? People you had to talk too? So if for my internet I had to have someone come out to install it before service would start could they argue that they require someone to physically come out to turn off service? Or a ca…
They didn't require someone to come out to get you signed up for service. Litigation could resolve malicious attempts to "complicate" signups for the purposes of complicating cancellation.
I am struggling a bit to understand how Comcast could not argue that it is required?
I don't fully remember but I don't think I started paying anything for my service until someone came out to install when self install wasn't an option. (I could possibly see them justifying removing self install in the name of retention later, since how many people really have a choice in their ISP and will just not deal with waiting for someone to come?).
If service was unable to start until someone came out, to me that could be argued as part of the sign up process.
I am not necessarily agreeing that it is part of the signup process. But we know that these companies love their shady practices and will have their lawyers finding any loophole they can find.
There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening. If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.
This feels like one of those things that could be solved on the payment end with something like a unique payment ID for each subscription, rather than giving a CC number. Then you just enable or disable payment IDs (perhaps for a limited time, e.g., "create a payment ID that works for Netflix for the next three months but not after that"), rather than relying on vendors to decide whether they feel like charging you o…
There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening. If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.
This feels like one of those things that could be solved on the payment end with something like a unique payment ID for each subscription, rather than giving a CC number. Then you just enable or disable payment IDs (perhaps for a limited time, e.g., "create a payment ID that works for Netflix for the next three months but not after that"), rather than relying on vendors to decide whether they feel like charging you o…
The marginal cost to a gym/ISP of the remaining duration of your contract is basically zero, especially if you're not going to use it, and they can get a few more dollars by being a jackass about it. In aggregate the incentives dominate.
> will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. I am very curious what exactly this means? Is it the number of pages or forms you had to fill out? People you had to talk too? So if for my internet I had to have someone come out to install it before service would start could they argue that they require someone to physically come out to turn off service? Or a ca…
In the case of in-person consent the rule requires that they also offer an online or telephone cancellation option.
> Could they make the signup and cancel process worse at the same time [...]
"must be at least as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to consent to the Negative Option Feature.". I read that it must hold true for every specific consumer based on how hard it was for them to consent.
The rules also sets general restrictions to the online and phone options in addition to the "at least as easy" restriction. For Online the cancellation option must be "easy to find" and explicitly bars forced interaction with representatives or chatbots during cancellation unless they were part of the sign-up process. For Telephone the cancellation must be prompt, the number must be answered or accept voice messages, must be available during normal business hours, and must not be more costly than a call used to sign up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that is how it was designed. The reason it doesn't work that way anymore is because of a continuous parade of states violating Americans' rights, each one so egregious that people said "yeah, it was designed the way macinjosh describes, but boy it turns out a lot of these state 'cultures' or 'identities' are producing despicable outcomes for our fellow Americans, and we should step up to prevent those abuses."
"I know better than the people that voted for their own state government so I am going to force my will upon them." Mindsets like this are actually why democracies fail.
In the context of this concrete discussion, allowing customers to cancel contracts they don't want - that's something which you object to because you want companies to be allowed to keep taking your money against your will, because consent matters to you? That is obviously self-inconsistent.
There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening. If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.
This feels like one of those things that could be solved on the payment end with something like a unique payment ID for each subscription, rather than giving a CC number. Then you just enable or disable payment IDs (perhaps for a limited time, e.g., "create a payment ID that works for Netflix for the next three months but not after that"), rather than relying on vendors to decide whether they feel like charging you o…