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Comment by bonchicbongenre | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related — does anyone know an easier way to cancel one's NYT subscription than going through the rigmarole of waiting for/talking with multiple "customer service" reps?

After NYT's all-too-credulous parroting of Barr's mischaracherization of the Mueller report I tried to cancel mine, but spent over an hour on the phone with no progress, and gave it up. I should have persisted — I don't want to give them my money any more, and this is all the more reason to cancel. At the same time, I don't have the time or patience to subject myself to phoning them again in the near future. Surely there must be an easier way? Certainly there should be.

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Switch your payment method to PayPal and then cancel from the PayPal side. I got burnt by trying to cancel the NYT a few years ago so I made sure not to give them any of my financial details this time around.

I decided to cancel last month due to the Tom Cotton Op-Ed and couldn't figure out an easy way to do it on-site so I just cancelled from the PayPal end. On a lark, I decided to try and cancel from the NYT end as well just to see how difficult it would be. I connected to the live chat and finally got connected to a representative after TWENTY FIVE HOURS on hold and was given 20 minutes to respond before being cut off.

Credit card chargebacks really hurt, and are the appropriate response to a situation where they continue to take your money.

This is the more punitive action, and I will note that a credit card company will side with you as long as you made a decent effort at canceling. I considered it when I waited 3 hours for a chat without a response, but ended up doing the PayPal way because it required less dealing with a bank in this time of Covid-19 delays.

Most companies pay about $15 per chargeback (independent of if they win or not).

Especially for low value things, even a few percent chargebacks will be really costly.

Source:. Was selling $1 physical items online... The business was profitable until a few percent of packages started going missing in the mail, and rather than contacting us, customers would just chargeback, forcing me to double the price of the service.

I had to (or it seemed like I had to) go through a web chat queue and beg multiple times to cancel my crosswords subscription (which was the only NYT subscription I’ve ever had, and there’s nothing wrong with the crossroads product, I just wasn’t able to dedicate enough time to it).

Scummy business practices like that make it very difficult for me to recommend any of that company’s products to anyone, even though I’m sure the people actually making the products have little or no influence on the people who control the transaction mechanics.

Switch to a Paypal method of payment, and then remove the card you chose to add. Your NYT subscription will fail to renew.

And you can cancel a PP based sub directly in PP, no waiting. NYT would get a we hook notice.

If you are residing in California, subscriptions are supposed to be cancel-able online by law.

Switch billing to PayPal, cancel the PayPal subscription.

I did that a week ago, worked great.

I think I replied to one of their daily roundups and asked for them to cancel it. If they can't even filter out deranged calls for violence from their opinion pages, I'm not going to pay them to publish anything.

I just tried the runaround with the chat assistant, then got tired of waiting and did the PayPal trick. I am supposed to be charged on the 29th, I'll see if it goes through (though I suspect it won't).

Created https://cancelnyt.net in case someone not aware of the Paypal trick (or not on HN/this thread) is still trying to figure this out

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