261–270 of 793 posts
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Amazon is the worst in this regard.
You should try cancelling the New York Times, Bon Appetite, or Planet Fitness
Which is the entire reason I am not a subscriber at my current address. It's too bad, I'd pay for it otherwise.
It would be great to see the FTC go against predatory subscription services like Adobe. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but I think they promoted a yearly subscription that was meant to look like a monthly subscription, where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee. I'm not sure how these new rules affect them. One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services shou…
Man, I remember when Amazon Prime first started, I signed up for the free trial to get free shipping on something. Of course, I forgot about it and didn’t cancel, but then I got an email from Amazon saying, “hey, you didn’t cancel your prime subscription but you also haven’t used it at all, so we are going to not charge you and cancel it for now. Here is how you easily restart your subscription if you end up needing…
Hope the next dark pattern to be banned: buttons on a website should have consistent design!
So tired of having the opt-out (inconvenient to provider) buttons disguised as text.
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fwiw JD Vance has voiced support a few times for keeping Lina Khan who is pushing a lot of this agenda.
There is absolutely no chance Trump's donors, which include the A16Z clowns, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and a lot of anti-regulation people in Silicon Valley, are going to allow Lina Khan to stick around. Vice presidents have no power, and Vance is not on the ticket because Trump is interested in his opinion on the FTC. He's on the ticket because he said he wouldn't have peacefully transferred power like Pence did, an…
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…
The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.
They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.
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For plane that's pretty unfair. If you don't get any ancillary fees, the price you see is almost exactly up to the cent what you pay. Now if you get any extra, sure. But that's a different problem from Airbnb hiding 100% of the cost in mandatory cleaning fees.
The trouble is, without some overriding authority defining what it means to "have a plane ticket", what counts as "included"? Because anything that doesn't can then be considered an "add-on". Carry-on luggage. Meal/snack and beverage service. A pillow and blanket. A seat that's not a middle seat. Even the ability to choose your seat at all. Airlines that want to tighten the screws on their passengers can, in theory,…
If I need luggage, I can do my own legwork to make sure that I factor that in.
It seems like all this sketchiness actually hurts these companies. I do ten times more subscriptions when I can go through apple and know I can cancel in 5 seconds.
For every "you" avoiding subscriptions, there's an idiot like me who has had several $5-10/mo. subscriptions for years because I keep hitting the "call customer service to cancel" wall and procrastinating.
It is unfortunately more profitable for them in the end.
Which is precisely why we need these types of consumer protection laws.
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You should try cancelling the New York Times, Bon Appetite, or Planet Fitness
Cancelling The Economist was pretty terrible too.
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.
Now, let's institute an actual price rule. I can't rent an Airbnb or book a plane ticket without being lied to about what the actual prices is.
I wonder how this would work for gyms? 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.
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