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‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

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Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#111

Post by Razengan »

QuikAccount wrote: post #4

Fully in favor of this. I recently had to cancel a subscription that had no "cancel subscription" button and instead forced you to contact customer service so they could try to sell you on discounts and etc. No, just let me cancel and get on with my day. Unfortunately, it seems health clubs(and I assume gyms?) are exempt from this when they are like 80% of the problem.

This imbalance between customers and corporations of how easily and quickly they can take your money but how long and difficult it is to get your money back (or stop giving them money) is one of the worst things in the world.

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#112

Post by grapeskin »

datadata wrote: post #37
kijin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state of Pennsylvania governs a much larger population than just a bunch of local jurisdictions acting in unison. Unless you mean entire countries by "local jurisdictions."

Pennsylvania is less than 4% of the US population. That's a really small piece and it wouldn't be sustainable if every jurisdiction that small enacted different rules

They do. Some other states already have easy cancel laws.

If a business is so small that this would be hard to manage, then they're probably not big enough to have MBAs rubbing their hands and implementing impossible to cancel systems. If a business is so big that it can afford to pay call centers to deal with their intentionally Kafkaesque cancellations, then they can afford to deal with the regulations. They can't as easily afford to lose 12 million customers.

Easy canceling is far, far easier to make than the stuff these regulations target. No honest mom and pop shop is losing sleep over this.

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#113

Post by reillyse »

pc86 wrote: post #41
reillyse wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously someone has bribed the lawmakers for that exemption. Simple.

It's not obvious unless you're more interested in scoring political points online than actually figuring it out. Gyms don't have a huge lobbying presence. I used to live in Pennsylvania and I used to work very close to the lobbying industry. Nobody from Planet Fitness or any fitness-related association is walking around the halls of the capitol twisting arms.

I mean a lazy google search shows this https://www.clubindustry.com/commercial-clubs/ihrsa-adds-lob...

Clearly there is plenty of big gym money bouncing around. Exceptions in laws don’t write themselves. I’m cynical but I’m also right.

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#114

Post by wtallis »

datadata wrote: post #52
bradly wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATT Wireless currently offers online cancellations only if you are in New York. These laws help.

The fact that you only get this if you are a resident of a single state is part of my point. The law is good, but having each state exert its own rules is a lot of regulatory friction.

There's only regulatory friction if a company is dragging their heels with regards to compliance and putting in extra effort to comply only with the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. For example, once you've implemented Click to Cancel for one state, it is less work to provide that capability to all of your customers than to keep track of who you are required to offer it to.

So when a company chooses the more complicated route to minimal compliance, that's strong evidence that the regulation in question is effective at reducing their illicit gains and would be effective elsewhere.

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#115

Post by Rebelgecko »

ResNet wrote: post #71

This sounds great. Devil's advocate: Would this (or existing states' legislation, like California's) have any means of protecting against e.g. a non-CA user just changing their location to CA and immediately canceling? It sounds like an easy loophole for non-CA folks.

I saw on HN that someone changed their address to CA for a day to cancel their NYT subscription. But ideally those sorts of loopholes won't be necessary if more states add the same requirement

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#116

Post by CSSer »

hackernewds wrote: post #87
klabb3 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit cards have worse privacy than bank accounts, and not everyone can or want to get one. They're also very popular for fraudsters. But yes virtual ones are a lot better.

What is a virtual card?

Another comment gave you the gist, but it's also worth noting they can give you control over how much can be debited, how often it can be debited, etc. You can even use them to make budgets for yourself. The leading provider that I know of for this is https://privacy.com/

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#117

Post by Shank »

escapedmoose wrote: post #103
tshaddox wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, this generally doesn't work. A few years ago I attempted to cancel a gym membership, and after 15 minutes on hold on the phone I hung up and tried looking into banning a certain transaction or vendor from making another transaction. As best I could tell with my bank at the time (Bank of America), there is absolutely no mechanism to do this. The only similar thing they provide is contesting transacti…

I was able to get out of a similar situation by threatening to contest the transaction. Basically told them “alright, have fun duking it out with my credit card company” and they immediately backed down.

I'm not sure how it works with all processors, but at least many of the ones I'm familiar with have a flat fee that's assessed for each chargeback. Stripe, for example, charges a $15 dispute fee (https://stripe.com/docs/disputes). For many companies, incurring disputes is something to be avoided, and threat of one is enough to warrant bypassing many normal process that exist to stop cancellations / keep people committed.

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#118

Post by tintor »

srcreigh wrote: post #81
zja wrote: post #19

Not to excuse companies that make you jump through hoops to unsubscribe, but is there any reason you can't just call your credit card/bank and cut off transactions to a company that's giving you a hard time? I've heard horror stories about people trying to cancel gym memberships, and wondered why they don't just stop paying, and let the gym figure it out.

One local gym chain in my area doesn't accept credit card for monthly membership. You have to give them direct access to your bank account EDIT: Fit4Less is southern Ontario

And does anyone give them bank account access?

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#119

Post by jjeaff »

dataflow wrote: post #59
tshaddox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately in most of the Bay Area, even just the floor space to have anything remotely usable as a home gym would cost many hundreds of dollars per month.

I think the point here was "see if you might already have enough space to spare", not "get extra space for the sake of a home gym".

And the next commenter's point is that space is so expensive in SF, that no one just has an extra room on hand that they don't already use.

Re: ‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

#120

Post by balls187 »

I've done a lot of work with gym owners (mostly boutique gyms 1 maybe 2 locations).

It's an interesting industry for certain.

I can say that making it hard to cancel for most small gyms isn't because they want to engage in shady business practices, it's just making it easy to cancel takes work, and it's a very low priority for a gym owner.

The easiest solution for an owner to implement is to "contact for cancellation."

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