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Comment by foxylad | Hacker News Reader

The last example is the best - that making your service hard to cancel means your customer's enduring memory is of pain. And it validates the customer's decision to leave, because there must be other better options if you are so desperate to stop them going.

When a customer phones up to cancel, we do it immediately and make sure they know there are no hard feelings on our side. We ask if there was anything we could have done better, and tell them we'll still be here if they ever need us again. We get a significant number of customers return.

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And especially for tools for professionals.

I have a terrible experience with your product, I don't want to repeat it. I'm going to try everything I can to keep my new coworkers from repeating that experience.

But there's something to be said for reversible decisions. Any decision that's cheap to change, you shouldn't make it expensive by putting a bunch of energy into. Just pick a fucking color for the shed. It's not important.

I hated your product but I can drop it like a rock, maybe I let my coworkers decide for themselves. And who knows, maybe you fixed the thing that drove me nuts, or this company has a different problem set that doesn't bump into the same things. Or maybe there's some poorly documented solution to the problem that people here know that we didn't.

Not exactly the same, but it's one of the prime reasons that I don't have a Costco membership: I hate when I go with members and after they pay you are treated like a criminal as they scan your receipt and check all the items in the cart. I also avoid Fry's Electronics for the same reason.

I take the more charitable perspective that the receipt checkers are validating the cashiers' work, and that it is part of the "membership" bargain.

I worked at costco during college. The receipt checking stops a significant amount of shrinkage. At these warehouse stores it's surprisingly easy to walk out the door with large items you wouldn't be able to take at places like Best Buy. We caught people stealing washing machines, tvs, 4-packs of tires, etc. It helps keep costs down to have a quick verification check.

As a member I love it. I want it to be as hard as possible to steal from them, because ultimately I will be paying the cost for theft from them, so it saves me money.

I mostly agree, but my personal pet peeve are stores that treat small backpacks as somehow distinct and more of an indicator of theft than giant purses.

If you want to ban bags, do like, say, the Pearl Harbor Memorial and explicitly ban any bags over some certain set of dimensions.

I’ve never had a problem bringing a shoulder bag or small backpack into a store. I’ll infrequently ride a bicycle to Target, Home Depot, Walmart, a gas station or the local grocery store and put everything in my bag after I check out.

At stores with self checkouts, I don’t really see the difference because they’re already placing trust in you anyways.

I don't get it often, but my local Costco had an overzealous receipt checker who'd always ask to check my visibly near-empty small backpack.

They do a simple count of items you have against what's on the receipt. If the count is off, I may have left something at the register. As well, if I have something large they offer assistance to get it loaded. I have no issues with this check and find it helpful.

And yet you like sneaking into a members only club.

Costco is a membership store so they have the right to condition your membership on showing the receipt at the door, but at Fry's you can walk right past the door checker if you wish and they have no right to detain you as long as you haven't done anything illegal (like steal an item) since private citizens (like store security) has no right to detain you.

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