‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania | Hacker News Reader

‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania

pahouse.com

448 pointsbarlo248 comments

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.

During the pandemic, I built a home gym in a spare space at home for a couple hundred dollars. I'm never paying for a gym again.

during the pandemic a couple hundred dollars wouldn't even buy me enough weights for a bench press, let alone the rest of the necessary equipment.

I was going to say there is always used gym equipment available (used a handful of times), but then I never tested the market in the middle of the pandemic.

during the pandemic (and somewhat even now) the price of used equipment was extremely elevated. Even basic weights were expensive. Used plates in my area went from 50c/lb to $1/lb+. The prices of equipment similarly jumped. It was a bad time to build a gym, financially, but necessary.

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.

The Bay Area is way bigger than SF, and it said "space", not "dedicated room". Obviously not everybody will have any room whatsoever but some folks in the Bay will be able to spare a bit.

This takes creativity. Gymnast rings cost ~$10 which you can hang from a tree branch. Someone gave me a barbell, but I had no weights. So I screwed rings into some heavy logs and am now deadlifting ~400lbs. I get to do all this in my bikini in the sun while maintaining my garden between sets. I look like a fitness model and spent about $30 on my yard gym.

If you can afford to live there you can surely afford weights, but the space for storing logs (of all things) just isn't practical.

You can go pretty far with:

1. dumbbells

2. screw a pullup bar into the ceiling joists

3. burpees

> I'm never paying for a gym again.

I believe for most gymgoers, a primary purpose of going to the gym is to hang out with your gym friends.

If you just want exercise, you can do body weight exercises for free; a couple hundred dollars is overkill.

No, not the case.

I've been going to gyms for years. Have never spoken more than a single sentence to anyone there and 99.5% of the other people I see there are also training and not socializing. In fact I can specific remember one pair who were socializing in the gym once; I saw them about 10 months ago, it was very irritating and so unusual that I still remember it now.

Bodyweight workouts can't come close to the effectiveness or satisfaction of a proper set of weights.

This doesn't ring true to me; most people at the gyms I've been to don't talk to anyone. I think most people actually want the equipment, mainly the squat rack, bench press, and treadmills. I personally love bodyweight exercises but I still feel I'm missing something without heavyweight squats and deadlifts.

> treadmills

Just go out for a jog. Fresh air is far better for you anyway than stinky gym air.

Tell that to my allergies.

Being in or outdoors made no difference to my hay fever. It was miserable for 6 weeks of the year, the rest was fine.

I use the past tense, because getting older means my allergy has abated. It only gets bad if I mow the lawn, so now I wear a mask doing that.

I have broad spectrum allergies to lots of stuff (pollen, etc). I live in the southeast with pine trees everywhere so it isn’t really seasonal.

A mask does help, which I’ve been wearing for… obvious reasons but exercising in a N95 is rough.

Ugh. That sounds terrible.

I'm sure you've already considered it, but move north were there are seasons and no pine trees :-/ The rain in Seattle tends to wash the pollen out of the air, too.

For me its grass. Even walking in grass with shorts on is a no-no.

Oh yeah, grass’s too…

Luckily none of them are that severe, but it’s just so many things… I got allergy shots for a few years in my teens which helped a lot, so it isn’t normally that much of a problem, but I’m also a bit asthmatic so exercise outdoors is a big trigger.

Sorry about that. I'd never jog if I had to do it indoors on a treadmill. Tried it a couple times, blech. Outdoors is so much better. Like I often stop to chat with a neighbor. Just today I found out one on my route had a hidden 57 Chevy, so I had to give him a ride in my Dodge :-)

(The secrets people hide in their garages!)

Cost me $1000 for a rack and weights, but I’ve already saved it back in gym fees.

Same.

Also better music, relaxed dress code and light chores in between sets.

And the women are friendly.

I've had issues with gyms and also a cable internet provider where the employees say they've processed your cancellation but I found later that for some reason it hadn't worked and I was still subscribed.

A cable provider sent me a bill for $300 of equipment I had returned three months earlier and I was only lucky I kept the receipt from returning the equipment that I could prove I had done it. Since the items had been scanned into their systems on return I could only assume malice or complete incompetence.

Sounds like Comcast for sure. That’s their go to move to punish people for canceling.

Random observation:

Everything NBC / Universal / Comcast gives me an ick vibe...maybe its just me?

I used to have a gym membership that I only discovered later on could be canceled by mailing a letter to their HQ four states away.

Not an email. Not a phone call to some retention agent in a call center. A signed letter via postage.

From the tales I've read in my local city sub, I got lucky in that the billings did in fact stop quickly; others have had resort to threats of legal action after numerous letters, some even sent via certified mail to get the charges to stop.

> Not an email. Not a phone call to some retention agent in a call center. A signed letter via postage.

Like in the civil war! Did you go acquire stamps and paper so your children and grandchildren could also cancel their gym subscriptions?

(For anyone who can watch content from Netflix and likes comedy, do yourself a favor and watch Happy Face).

/pan in: grainy black and white pics of a gym

/play: soft bluegrass music

/narrate by Peter Coyote:

My Dearest Abigail,

For so long now, I have not seen your sweet face, nor any other at the gymnasium. I have tried mightily to dissolve the union of my membership, but to no avail. My biceps grow skinnier by the day from our long estrangement. Please, I pray for the day I can be released from this torment, this contract.

Most Sincerely Yours, Ephraim Hill

I've kept my reciept for the cable equipment that I returned when canceling my service. 6 years ago. I plan on keeping it until after I'm dead (don't know what my next of kin will have to deal with) just in case.

I don't feel that I'm being paranoid.

Or both.

One thing you can do is just tell them you're deaf, cannot do a voice call, and need to cancel by e-mail.

Sounds like an opportunity for a SaaS company to provide text to speech service for companies, so all the "deaf" people can be subjected to upsells as well!

Text relay is a thing in the UK, by the way. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice...

One thing I have wanted is a transcribing system so I can take voice calls in a chat interface.

Some systems e.g. doctors, banks often still insist on phone calls so if I can present as a phone call on their end but it is chat interface for me, that is ideal.

Or you can just say if you don't cancel by email you'll issue charge backs.

-1, this is ridiculous and shouldn't be necessary.

True, it's ridiculous and shouldn't be necessary. +1.

Unfortunately some of the nastier vendors (gyms are notorious for doing this) will then send the charge to collections, resulting in a worse outcome. Further, credit card companies will likely reject your chargeback before it even gets to this stage since they require evidence that one tried a good faith attempt to cancel.

For which you'll have a paper trail in email where they outright refused to cancel upon clear instructions to do so.

Sending the charge to collections and having you incur more stress and undue charges would be incredibly foolish on their end.

They'll say that you signed a contract agreeing to cancel by their preferred method, so your attempt to cancel over email is not in good faith.

Oh wow, didn't realise it was in the contract. That's really on you. Lmao. Don't sign stupid contracts people. Cross that shit out when you sign up or Walk away.

Comcast explicitly allows for termination by postal mail in section 9.b.1 or by e-mail in 9.b.2 [0] yet they kept trying to send me to their retention department by phone.

In fact most contracts I've seen allow for termination by writing.

[0] https://wifilogin.xfinity.com/wifiterms.php

I wonder if this will turn into the "Do Not Call" list situation, which advertisers seem to download and use as their "Call List" because it's just so easy and accessible.

Confirm your email is valid, and then add it to the list of "continue to spam" accounts.

I'm sure there's a better way to do it but I try to give each vendor (especially slimy ones) a unique email address:

Dailyburn@mylastname.io

When they start spamming I set up a filter to hard block anything going to that address.

Good lord! This is my second "opsec" reply on this - what a statement on how shitty it is to try and engage in commerce when you need to cover your tracks like you're committing a crime...barf.

ClassPass has a very lengthy flow for this, where you have to talk to a live agent after a long wait that tries to upsell you to stay. Poor those agents much have the worst interactions.

I had this same experience with For Hims. Super shady business practice that made me recommend against them ever since

They were shady to begin with by pushing finasteride.

Agreed. The number of people acting like an antiandrogen is something that should be taken casually to slow a cosmetic issue is ridiculous, especially with how much I've heard about post-finasteride syndrome.

I am surprised it still hasn't been added to the controlled substances list. My allergy drug (Allegra) had been recently as a result of the number of depression and suicides reported, while finasteride can still be bought over the counter, sigh.

Geico insurance is like this. You have to call to cancel the policy.

I recently switched away from Geico and my new insurer offered to mail them a letter to cancel on my behalf.

A friend of mine has more or less developed a niche for his business on handling cancellations via verified digital signatures (Lawyers of the companies on the receiving end tried to put up roadblocks and deny this initially but all of them seems to have relented afaik).

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.

Health clubs rely on 90% of their members never showing up. If they all cancelled, there'd be no more health clubs.

Or they would be more expensive. Or the same price and dividends lower. Or they would see a price per session, or a price per session tier (0-2 sessions per month, 3-5, then 5-15, then 15+).

10x more expensive. I bet that'd do wonders to the willingness of customers to sign up.

I’m confused by this line of posts. Are you saying making it easier for people to cancel services they don’t need is a bad thing?

I'm not actually making a value judgement on that. Just pointing out the consequences maybe not what was intended.

The consequences would be that more people would be able to cancel services they didn’t want. I find it highly unlikely that those people would agree to continue paying for services they don’t need simply to subsidize other users of the services. So no I’m pretty sure that the result would be many clubs closing, the consequences would be exactly as intended.

Also I’d like to add that your claim that the gyms would be 10x more expensive and that most would close is baseless. In Sweden there are gyms everywhere even though their are consumer protections against exactly this sort of thing. The gyms in Sweden are generally cheaper than the IS as well. I’m not going to draw a general conclusion from this other than “it’s complicated”.

The fact is you don’t really know how gyms would be affected en masse by such a law. The only thing we really know for sure, is that people would have an easier time not using services that they don’t want to use. I don’t really understand who could argue against such a change. Arguing against it is like arguing for some weird mini welfare for gyms on the backs of random members of the population. If we want that, then maybe we should just pass laws giving gyms money from the general municipal/state budget. It would accomplish the same thing and be much more fair and honest.

My basis is that I was told by a couple gym owners that 90% never show up to use the gym, and their business model depended on that.

I haven't examined their books myself.

Like I wrote, I'm not making a value judgement here, just pointing out the consequences.

The business model may still be the same in Sweden. It's just that people are too lazy to cancel, not that they cannot cancel. I never had trouble canceling any of the several gyms I attended over the years.

You’re not pointing out the consequences. You’re speculating about the consequences. Frankly you should have seen the books before believing something like that. Furthermore it would be a stretch to believe that that situation extrapolates to all gyms.

If what they said was actually true, they _should_ go out of business. If their business depends on them exploiting the legal system to thwart their users’ clear will, they are immoral actors and deserve the economic difficulties that would be bestowed upon them.

Edit: to you edit

> The business model may still be the same in Sweden. It's just that people are too lazy to cancel, not that they cannot cancel. I never had trouble canceling any of the several gyms I attended over the years.

So basically what you’re tacitly admitting is that a law allowing cancelation might actually be _fine_. It might even turn out fine for your friends. I guess if that’s your position, then I don’t really have any more argument with you.

Your communication to WalterBright is coming across needlessly combative while you seem to be in agreement. Just an FYI.

> Your communication to WalterBright is coming across needlessly combative while you seem to be in agreement. Just an FYI.

How could you possibly have concluded we're in agreement? This was his initial post in this thread:

> 10x more expensive. I bet that'd do wonders to the willingness of customers to sign up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31068220

I fundamentally disagree with this and made it quite clear in the following posts. This disagreement is basically the whole premise on which this exchange was had.

I think it’s more that people are aspirational about going to the gym, so they don’t cancel. Some gyms also have fixed term contract as to within which you can’t cancel. But this is at least advertised up front so people know what they’re getting in to.

>Arguing against it is like arguing for some weird mini welfare for gyms on the backs of random members of the population.

Basically where a lot of education funding comes from. (Lotteries)

Or maybe there would be fewer of them, and the people who use them would pay a bit more.

While the rest would enjoy the freed up real estate and the money saved.

10x more.

It'd basically put the industry out of business.

Are gyms really that costly to run that they can't sustain on a moderate paying userbase? I'm talking basic cardio and weight gyms, not the mega gyms with a pool and massage. The property might be prime but a lot of that comes to the choice of LA Fitness, 24, etc. choosing to build their own custom building in prime areas. Smaller gyms like Planet Fitness tend to use otherwise empty storefronts.

I think the idea is that if they had to build for their actual peak capacity, i.e. everyone showing up at once, they would not be economical. Of course, this is a silly hypothetical - the legislation is about making it more convenient to cancel your membership, not a guaranteed set of barbells whenever you decide to come in.

This could be fixed by "prime time" membership fees, vs off hour fees.

Lots of ways to work it. EG 1/2 price for off hours membership! Act now!

This is one of those problems with liquidity. You are buying a subscription plan that tells you can come at any time. The business can't plan ahead because you haven't committed to a fixed schedule. If your subscription plan was locked to specific time slots the gym could do much better capacity planning. However, such a subscription model is less liquid which means customers want to be compensated for giving up their freedom to pick an arbitrary time slot with a discount.

It's kind of weird how liquidity is such a general concept that goes way beyond money.

There are already gyms that do not cater to the people who buy memberships and don't show up. Bodybuilding and powerlifting gyms, for instance. They cost about 2 to 3 times more from what I've seen.

How will taxis survive?? Their business model depends on scarcity. If anyone could give anyone a ride, there'd be no more rides.

Am I properly capturing the nuance of your argument? Feel free to re-echo another round of hearsay into the chamber.

Maybe you can dig more into the philosophy you have where securing profitability entitles you to the protection of those profits via legislation.

Simple, if market doesn't want them, they should probably enter in other field. In long run, it is inevitable? I do acknowledge there is problem in switching careers.

That shouldn't give them a pass to provide scummy cancellation practices. Most people I know who don't use their gym membership have also never tried to cancel.

I'm guessing people who pay for a gym subscription but don't use it are similar to people who smoke but intend to quit some time very soon?

They existed when people paid for most things with cash. Though I suspect their business model was less lucrative.

I'll only join non-chain gyms, and pay for the year in full.

That's probably how they made it through the pandemic. Piles of cash from yearly subscriptions and no labour costs since nearly all the gym workers were laid off.

My gym is a bit ... different - part of a larger hospital chain/brand. Pandemic hit them hard, and I (along with many others) 'froze' our accounts. Still a member, just non-paying for X months. I froze for months during lockdown because the requirements were too onerous - must wear a mask while on treadmill, for example. Needed to schedule a swimming lane days in advance. It was too cumbersome, so I froze. Unfroze last month and am going a bit more regularly now, as they've relaxed some of the restrictions.

BUT... when I came back, I noticed a new wall in the hallway. They'd blocked off a hallway, and essentially sold (probably just long term leased?) about 20% of the building to a different entity (health related). They just had too much open space and no use for it. Was a bit of a shame, but it helped them keep their books afloat.

FWIW, I've always heard horror stories of gyms locking people in to unending payments. This place, while an extra few $ compared to some others in the area, is always month to month, and I've cancelled in the past, then came back. Never had an issue with billing/overbilling/etc, which seems... both trivial (of course that's how it should work) and impressive (seems to be in a minority of gyms) at the same time.

Health clubs don’t appear exempt. They are exempt from section 4 of the bill, not the entirety of the bill.

Section 4 deals with changes to terms of service.

https://legiscan.com/PA/text/HB2511/id/2569740/Pennsylvania-...

There's a pretty easy lesson here: don't sign up for services. Or more realistically, sign up for as few services as possible, and treat every service with suspicion until proven otherwise. If you can't obtain a company's goods without signing up for a service, then seek an alternative.

Services generally have two business models:

- Spread a large cost over monthly payments so that customers will spend more than they otherwise would.

- Trap a customer, either via coercion or convenience into keeping a service they don't really want.

For the business, the benefit to service offerings is clear: regular, reliable income. To the customer, there is often no benefit.

SaaS is an absolute cancer. I know a lot of those fat six figure salaries are contingent on people paying $9.99/mo for a grocery shopping list app, but its getting out of hand. Sorry HN.

Who are you apologising to?

You're being more than a bit hyperbolic & disingenuous. I pay $15/year for a grocery list app that solves several problems for me. That is, I pay money for concurrent access, web-scraping that works, and an organisational system to help me feed my family.

This is a great value to me: the $1.25 a month that I pay for my grocery list app has made my life easier.

I'm not sure whether this a joke or not?

If it saves you 2 hours per year it will be worth it even if you are paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

If it takes 2 hours to cancel it, it could definitively be a net negative though.

> SaaS is an absolute cancer.

I pay $40/year for Remember the Milk, a SaaS, and it's one of the most valuable ways that I spend my money - I easily get more than $40 a month in increased productivity (assuming a $20/hour personal time rate). Speak for yourself.

I think it's a signal to noise thing. There are definitely good services out there. There are just as many terrible, predatory ones. And sometimes, more insidiously, a good service slowly transitions into a predatory service.

I'm definitely not really suggesting that people should never use any services. Just that in general, these should be viewed with suspicion, and you should have an exit plan: you could find out nefarious things about your service, or the service could be modified leaving you high and dry.

This is a terrible solution to the problem. If there are services that make our lives easier and more pleasant we shuold absolutely be able to take advantage of them.

This is like saying don't buy food from restaurants because it may have prepared it unsafely or overpriced.

Overpriced is a real problem and the steps to make the price obvious to consumers is very difficult. But we solved the safety by mandating safety standards and labeling backed by real penalties. This law seems a lot like the latter and will make it easier for users to take advantages of services with the safety that they should be able to expect.

Can't you just opt to pay in cash (or Credit Card) for every month you want to have a gym subscription?

I don't know how it works in other countries but most bigger gyms in Estonia make you sign a contract with them when you join.

If you stop paying without cancelling the contract (which they have ridiculous terms around), they sell you off to a collection agency which then proceeds to harass you until you pay. A friend recently went through this experience and warned anyone against the big-name gyms. (Looking at you myFitness)

That sucks, in Bosnia in most gyms you pay up-front for the month you are intending to use the gym.

The NY Times is notoriously the worst at this. It's almost impossible to cancel without wasting a couple hours of your time. Interesting how I can subscribe with a click but can't cancel with one.

Privacy.com and delete the card when you want to cancel. Screw these people, I may not be able to cancel but I can sure stop paying.

I started signing up for privacy.com, right up until the point where they asked for my username and password for my bank. Why can't they just do electronic funds transfer like Paypal? Seems like a strange user experience.

WTF! ? How does anyone sign up for a service that asks for that, especially anyone here on HN? Are banks OK with this?

I use Mint.com to track my finances. I granted it read-access to all my bank accounts (access that I can revoke at any time from the bank's side). Yeah I'm the product, but it's free, saves me a ton of time, and actually syncs with literally all my accounts, from credit cards to my 401k to utilities. That's something I can't say for the privacy-focused options I tried before it.

Also I think HN and the technosphere in general is a little blind to the cost/benefit analysis of privacy for most consumers. People here have intimate knowledge of the technology and what can be done with information, so that's where they focus. Simple fact is there's a lot theoretical damage that could be done, but relatively little damage actually being done on an individual level for most consumers. Unless you're famous/important enough to be targeted by someone with resources, odds are even with zero privacy protections you'll get lost in the noise, or at most suffer trivial damage (having to cancel a stolen credit card or something)

I went through a phase where I tried to lock down my identity as much as possible, installed anti-fingerprinting browser extensions, forbade all cookies I didn't explicitly approve, individually selected sites to approve in NoScript, etc. It chewed up a ton of time, and when life happened and I was forced to re-prioritize my time and stopped maintaining it... nothing happened. It was the digital equivalent of installing steel shutters/doors and reinforced door frames so you can withstand a SWAT team with a no-knock warrant. Simple fact is the odds of encountering a SWAT team with a no-knock warrant are so low that it's statistically not worth the effort unless you're actually an outlaw.

Privacy is using Plaid[0] to connect to bank accounts. They also allow you to simply use a debit card so you can avoid using Plaid.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_(company)

Personally, I spun up an extra bank account specifically to deal with privacy integration. I push money from my main bank to the middle bank that Privacy can then pull from.

Same here. The whole point of my interest in privacy.com was privacy.

They accept PayPal for subscription payments (or at least did as of when I was a subscriber). Unsubscribing was as easy as clicking to de-authorize in PayPal.

Most of them have discontinued the service. I think there's one left, maybe Citi IIRC? I've hesitated on opening an account since it seems like only a matter of time before they discontinue as well.

Apple Card allows you to generate a new card number, but it replaces the existing number. And you either have to tie your bank account to them to pay, or use your card number (which you might change) on payment correspondence.

Absolutely! Once I tried to cancel SiriusXM for an old car it was a nightmare.I had to call and wait for hours to get someone. Never signup for SiriusXM since then.

whenever I call they keep offering me to renew with “new customer” offer, which is/was good price when I used to commute and do enjoy many channels and play by play.

long story short I have many Echo Dots (free for “new” customers) lying around in the house now.

> health clubs are expempt

Hmm, does one sign up for an automated monthly subscription for health clubs in the US?

Surprisingly, the proposed bill exempts gyms and health clubs, which have some of the worst cancellation policies.

The result of lobbying, maybe?

Almost certainly, imo.

Were I a VC, part of my model to identify industries ripe for tech disruption would be to find those that get legislative sweetheart deals that don't benefit the taxpayer.

Ooo I just had an idea:

Uber but for lobbying

Most features apply: a map to select available lobbyiees nearby, lobby sharing, low cost lobbying. Even price jacking for peak lobbying hours!

You have a bootstrap problem though: how do you lobby for the erosion of worker's rights in the lobby gig economy without first creating the uber for lobbying app?

Prostitution is already illegal in most areas of the US; there are no rights to erode.

(/s, just in case)

“American People Hire High-Powered Lobbyist To Push Interests In Congress”

https://www.theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-l...

Maybe the result of lobbying, and undeniably the result of the politicians putting forth the bill.

Sounds like the kind of thing ALEC would push through for someone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

It doesn't sound at all like the kind of thing ALEC would do.

Unrelated to the article but this is insane:

> Statutes in Colorado, South Carolina, and Indiana exempt ALEC, specifically by name, from having to register as a lobbyist and report lobbying expenditures.

I remember cancelling a membership to a health club years back could not be done over the phone, it required a registered letter to the main office.

as i recall pennsylvania already has some protections against gyms. they're probably just not doubling up.

edit: Pennsylvania Health Club Act

A quick search suggests that the cancelation provision in the Pennsylvania Health Club Act requires certified mail or delivering (personally?) a letter. That's definitely a worse experience than "click to cancel".

[1] https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/US/PDF/1989/0/0087....

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.

Because then they send you to collections and your credit score suffers.

In the US this is implemented on a per card issuer basis (i.e. Citi, Chase) and it's up to the issuer to provide the service, which most of them don't.

The only way to do it is as a chargeback but chargebacks are after the charge and come with a whole mess of pre-requirements as well as if you do it too often your provider will kick you off.

In addition, gyms in particular often make you give them your bank account instead of a credit card.

I end up paying a year in advance, cash, to avoid giving gyms anything to work with

That is not guaranteed to terminate your obligation to pay a vendor.

Why should it? If you have an obligation to pay for a gym membership, does the gym not deserve fair payments?

I don't disagree with you. You should argue with the comment I replied to.

I remember seeing a website here that let you create prepaid cards that you could use for things like this. I'm not sure if you were able to refill the balance on them though, but it would be convenient to be able to just let them attempt to charge an empty debit card.

https://privacy.com - I don't use them as often as I should, but they do a great job.

I use virtual cards from privacy.com for just about everything I buy online. It allows you to set limits, cancel with a click, and be anonymous by giving the vendor any name and address you want. It is a good service, but I wonder if any competing services exist.

The issue still comes in with obligation to pay. If the gym has enough info on you, they can send you to collections as some others have pointed out.

Yes, but if a social security number wasn't provided then the collection agency can't do more than call and send some letters; it won't impact a credit score or anything.

That stops the payment from happening. But it does not stop your contractual obligation to pay.

So it really depends on the business and how much information they have about you, and if they are dirty enough to send you to collections for it.

A gym is likely going to send you to collections. An online SaaS is more likely to just cut you off and cancel the account.

> But it does not stop your contractual obligation to pay.

Can't you Americans just send a certified letter informing a business of your intent to cancel and asking them to send you a final bill (if any) to settle payments within a specified time limit? That should cover you legally?

The problem is generally in the contract you sign when agreeing to the membership in the first place. There’s a lot of fine print stipulating how cancellation will work exactly.

Can’t you just strike that from the contract, initial it, sign the contract and return it? If they refuse the/any edit, can’t you say they negotiate in bad faith and void the entire contract?

If the contract is void from the beginning, how do you ever plan to use the gym? Aren't you just in the same position you were before you contacted the gym in the first place?

If you don’t agree to all provisions in the contract, then you can’t become a member. Nobody’s negotiating a custom contract for every customer who walks through the door.

That was kinda my point. If they aren’t willing to negotiate with any/all customers, it’s not really a fair contract. And I’m pretty sure they do custom contracts for the owners family/friends and sales. So it’s not unreasonable to ask for changes.

If you have already signed up for a fixed period (such as an year), then your that would remain your minimum obligation. Sleazy business will allow you to break the obligation at a hefty fine.

Lol. In america, you are not "covered legally" if the other party has more money.

I had to do exactly this to stop a company from delivering heating oil to my house. This increases the amount of time required to cancel by at least an order of magnitude.

Presumably this friction is built into the price of the service and disclosed. The known friction should stop you from signing up knowing the cost of cancelling (if it's too much).

Expecting the customer to be all-knowing is not realistic.

Or are you always reading all the terms and conditions print on all the software you install?

Wonder if you'd be able to subtract a fee of your own from their amount, to cover your costs and time?

If so... that could make it worthwhile. :)

Even if, that's an awful lot of work - cancelling should be just as easy as signing up.

I don't think it's as common in 2022, but in the early 2000s to probably 2015, health club memberships were generally a 1 year contract meaning you were on the hook for a year. You can't just cancel. There were always month-to-month plans but they are usually a few more dollars ($10-$20) a month, but people are bozos and sign on the dotted line.

they can only send you to collections if they have your ssn though right?

never sign up for a gym that needs your ssn. red flag.

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 transactions, but that's only appropriate in the event of fraudulent transactions (which a recurring gym membership arguably is not).

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.

LOL. I called my bank once to dispute a transaction and they terminated my account as it was easier to them than dealing with the support issue.

Objective failed successfully.

Once upon a time, in lands of lore, the consequent loss of prestige and credibility would have shattered that business.

Sweet were the times, when they "tried", and when customers were not forgiving.

Whilst asking your bank/CC company to block a merchant is possible, it's not a reliable way of ensuring you aren't charged by the same company again — they could make use of a different payment processor (e.g. going from Stripe to BrainTree) or merchant account, and from the bank's perspective, a different entity made a charge and the ban would not be respected.

That's not to say that asking your bank to block Merchant X isn't useful, but the bank can't guarantee that the merchant won't be able charge you again via a different payment processor/etc., and is why some banks are hesitant to offer this functionality.

The American personal banking experience feels so shady and insecure. Afaict companies often have the ability to pull money out of my bank account or credit card, that's just the way subscriptions work here. I just have to trust they don't abuse it.

In my home country we've had a national system for electronic invoices for ~10 years which allows you to receive invoices to your bank account. You can remove any such entry at any point in time. You also see all scheduled payments ahead of time and need to sign them before the due date, using a 2fa system that isn't tied to the bank itself. It's not perfect, and even feels a little aged today, but it's so much better than here in the US.

Same here in my country. It feels so weird that the service provider has the ability to just charge a card in the US if you enter the three things printed on the card. That would cause a lot of frauds if it happened here. Fortunately, the central bank has strict regulations here and we need to authorize a payment by using a password or an OTP.

Rather than having strict regulations to require password or OTP, the US has strict regulations that require banks to reimburse consumers for any credit card fraud.

I’ve had it happen a couple of times. It’s a minor inconvenience to switch over any subscriptions to a new card, but it has never cost me a penny.

It causes a lot of fraud in the US, too!

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?

I opened a new bank account just for my gym subscription. Took me about 30 seconds to do with my existing bank’s app.

I paid for 1 year membership up front 2ish years ago (this lets you lay by CC) but I'm not gonna do it again

There are lots of variants of this kind of unnecessary “friction” and I wish that legislation would be able to ban all of these awful behaviors instead of just specific examples of them.

For example, my cable company peppers its web site with ways to “upgrade” your plan easily online. Great, guess what’s missing: an easy way to downgrade anything, e.g. to fewer channels or slower Internet. Obviously they do this for exactly the same reason as the call-us-to-cancel crap but it is just different enough that they could probably keep doing it and still be in compliance with a poorly-written law.

And on the off chance something actually requires talking to a human, it is well past time to end this wait-hours-on-hold crap. Why can’t I log into my profile on the company web site, type in my phone number, describe my issue and then say CALL ME whenever the hell you manage to find an employee who is free to discuss? Furthermore, such calls could be punctuated with texts, e.g. “thank you for contacting us, please expect a call in about 10 minutes” or whatever. That stuff would have been straightforward to implement 10 years ago, much less now.

Needs to be nationwide and have real teeth in it. Before I subscribe to anything I check out the cancel procedures. If I can't cancel online or have to "chat" with a retention specialist 20 times before I can finally be shut of a company (looking at you SirusXM) I'm not subscribing.

Interesting - a decade later - we are just starting to see some legislation that replicates what Apple has been doing on their app store (that they are being sued over with claims that their policies are anti-consumer). Long long overdue. People chose apple because regulation and developer practices on the broader web are so horrible (despite claims that there is no fraud and the focus of the DOJ on apple, billions are literally stolen outside of apple with crickets from law enforcement).

The Apple model (if followed) would be as follows:

Subscription terms in exact same font as trial terms (ie, no newspaper $1/week offers with the silly super fine print) right next to trial terms.

Required notice in advance of subscription renewals, particularly annual or other long term renewals.

Click to cancel (after login / authentication etc)

Alert to cancel on disuse / uninstall - Apple will actually suggest cancelling a subscription if you do things like delete an app.

Clear subscription terms indicating auto-renewal or one time purchase.

Cancel anytime and use through end of current term, with end of term disclosed (you can still use through XXX).

No requirement to cancel within some days of end of term or 30 days before end of term (some do no earlier than 90 days, no later than 30 days before end of term).

If you mess up your subscription order the company can’t help you because the subscription is through Apple, all they can do is direct you to Apple. Apple also can’t help you because they don’t have access to the company’s services to make the correction. So as a consumer you have your hands tied by Apple if you use their subscription service.

Can you provide a more specific example? The order has a detailed confirmation. If you don't like it it is easy to cancel. If you really don't like it you can get a refund.

I've done a lot of subscriptions and purchases and have never had a problem with them, including getting things sorted in a few odd cases. Apple has support phone numbers with real people in a surprising number of countries.

You can setup ask to buy if you have a kid and are worried about them purchasing accidently.

Sure, I ordered a subscription to audible through the App Store. They have 2 plans and I chose the cheaper one. Then I found out the cheaper one didn’t include what I wanted so I called Audible to fix the problem and they directed me to Apple since that’s how I subscribed. I then called Apple and they had no ability to help me other than the options listed in the Apo Store. So I ended up paying twice to get the upgraded plan. Apple said they would refund me a discount for the difference but they never did. I cancelled after a month and I have yet to order any more subscriptions from Apple.

That is a good example.

Were you not able to cancel the plan you didn't want and sign up with the plan you did?

If that wasn't an option (ie, you wanted the better plan right away), quickest might be to request a refund of the bad plan and then sign up with the right plan.

If you request a refund the same day of purchase I've not had a problem with that (but it hasn't happened often). I had a somewhat similar situation, and just noted that it wasn't clear that X was not included, had no problem getting a refund. I then signed up as desired.

That said, devs should have an upgrade option that charges difference ?

No, I could not cancel the order even the same day and when I called Apple they had the same options that I did, no better access. If I had ordered through audible they could have helped me but since I ordered through Apple nobody could help me. No upgrade option.

So lesson learned, never order a sub through Apple if you can avoid it.

I would prefer if all digital subscriptions were affirm to continue and not click to cancel.

It would work simply. If you purchase a month/year, whatever & you're set up with autopay, once the subscription you have purchased ends, the next time you use the service you would have to approve continuing the subscription at the same terms with a single click.

No click? No pay.

I would also like it to require a second link on the same interstitial to review the terms of the subscription, and that it would be required that if there were any term changes from the previous purchase (new legalese, price variances, or service options added or removed) that they would also have to detail those in brief.

A great idea. Probably the only folks able to do something like this would be apple (at least pre- DOJ litigation) because they didn't have to worry about what publishers of apps thought. Once they have to offer other app stores publishers won't accept that and will just move off the apple store.

I can't advocate privacy.com enough for these shenanigans! Issuing a credit card for each vendor - with spend caps or close the card whenever.

If I can't find your cancel service page within five minutes of searching; I just close the card and am done.

They are allowed to send your bills to collection. They probably won’t, but don’t count on it. Not paying your bills is not a legally protected way of cancelling.

On fixed-cost memberships, I'd love to see legislation forcing the hand to say that payments are for future services, not past, and that failure to pay means being cut off from future services until payment is made. This way these companies couldn't send you to collections since you're paid up for everything you've "consumed".

> Not paying your bills is not a legally protected way of cancelling

In normal relations, when you pay you get the goods or service, and when you do not pay you do not get it, without presumptions. If you buy a carrot - or more relevantly, newspapers - everything but the cash is redundant: not everyone would accept to subscribe to a different model, if not on very exceptional services.

Full text of the proposed bill: https://legiscan.com/PA/text/HB2511/id/2569740/Pennsylvania-...

"This section shall not apply to a business entity that is subject to the act of December 21, 1989 (P.L.672, No.87), known as the Health Club Act" (in reference to disclosure of material changes to a service)

What is it with health clubs?!

It appears that health clubs are already highly regulated when it comes to memberships, so perhaps it seems like this law would be confusing to overlay on top of those regulations: https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/protect-yourself/consumer-ad...

> health clubs are already highly regulated when it comes to memberships

I had thousands of dollars of prepaid training with 24 Hour Fitness in New York City when they potted that LLC into bankruptcy. Class counsel negotiated a $50 gift card for anyone with claims over $200, or something stupid like that. Bought home equipment and work with my trainer over Zoom.

TL; DR Even in highly-regulated markets, the protections are B.S.

That's how gyms subsidize costs. January firsters are often make or break gyms. Mostly due to the fact that leases on those spaces are expensive and the insurance for them is a complete racket (all insurance is a racket, though).

While this is accurate (for "globo-gyms" like Anytime or PF, not gyms that actually having training components and charge $150-250/mo), that doesn't explain why it made its way into legislation. Legislators don't care about business models and let's be honest most of them aren't smart enough to understand it even if they did care.

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.

> Nobody from Planet Fitness or any fitness-related association is walking around the halls of the capitol twisting arms.

The CEO of Planet Fitness was a contributor to Trump's campaign fund in 2016. I think you're underestimating how politically connected these groups are.

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.

They have a business plan that is predicated on people signing up for a service that they want to use but don’t and fail to unsubscribe because it’s like giving up on reaching their perceived potential best selves. It’s simple.

The gyms could still offer online cancellation and continue to make bank from this behavior if they sold you a contract with a minimum term, and heavy cancellation fees if you try to cancel early.

http://web.archive.org/web/20220418022008/https://pahouse.co...

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."

The issue with cancelling magazine subscriptions has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22426102

The FTC issued a statement about ramping up enforcement against consumer entrapment last year: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/...

From the FTC statement, they require companies to:

  * Disclose clearly and conspicuously all material terms of the product or service, including how much it costs, deadlines by which the consumer must act to stop further charges, the amount and frequency of such charges, how to cancel, and information about the product or service itself that is needed to stop consumers from being deceived about the characteristics of the product or service. The statement provides detail on what clear and conspicuous means, particularly noting that the information must be provided upfront when the consumer first sees the offer and generally as prominent as the deal offer itself.

  * Obtain the consumer’s express informed consent before charging them for a product or services. This includes obtaining the consumer’s acceptance of the negative option feature separately from other portions of the entire transaction, not including information that interferes with, detracts from, contradicts, or otherwise undermines the consumer’s ability to provide their express informed consent.

  * Provide easy and simple cancellation to the consumer. Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place.

This was issued Oct. 28, 2021. Has anyone who has tried to (e.g.) cancel a magazine subscription noticed any difference?

This is one of those things that sounds really good on the surface, and hopefully it is so, but I'm always wary of unintended consequences when it comes to legislation.

Are there any loopholes or bad behavior this might enable? Just something to keep in mind and consider, but on the surface I'd have to say that this does sound pretty good.

> unintended consequences

What do you think might happen?

One thing I can think of immediately is that smaller companies may have to implement something now that wasn't there - whereas larger can easily absorb the cost.

I've seen "subscription forms" that don't actually process anything, they just save the info in a database for someone to manually do stuff with later. These companies will now have to work out how to do a cancel button.

Arguably, they should have to anyway, and it's not likely to be a big issue, but these types of legislation are often used to make a "moat" for established players that new ones find hard to cross.

Despite the title all the bill actually requires is that the company allow cancellation over the internet if the subscription was bought over the internet. No actual clickable cancel button is required. In particular handling it by email is fine under the bill.

Yeah, I was stretching to try to come up with an example. In this case, it sounds like a good all around.

> Are there any loopholes or bad behavior this might enable?

Yes; if you're a company that doesn't like Click to Cancel, and your company's Pennsylvania business is small relative to your total business, the logical choice is simply to stop serving Pennsylvania citizens.

Removing unethical companies from your territory benefits people immensely. This is an unintended benefit, not a negative result.

CA has a similar law allowing online cancellation, and is a larger market that is hard to ignore

I have the exact same line of reasoning.. and unfortunately I think it’s often near impossible to know how laws may be abused (sometimes it’s completely predictable).

I think people have already touched on it potentially pushing certain companies out of PA.. which in theory reduces competition which is bad for consumers. So that’s one example of how this legislation that’s designed to protect consumers could end up hurting them from another angle.

Another thing I’d wonder about is: if laws like this were to catch on.. does it start to disincentivize subscription-based business models? We’ve seen such a shift towards subscriptions.. but would that potentially change dramatically?

Essentially the same law already exists in California. The only effect has been the intended one.

In Sweden you’re allowed to cancel by phone call, email, letter, etc. Point is they don’t get to stipulate how you cancel the service. The US needs a similar consumer protection. Click to cancel is a good step, but really just providing multiple simple methods that legally work for all services is the correct approach.

Companies will just make cancellation online possible but very hard.

Eg. You have to click the "learn more" link and then log in separately to a support forum where you will be DM'ed the one time use link for cancellation, which will only be valid for 5 minutes and require verifying your email and SMS number

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

I don’t see why legislators would have a desire to prevent that. But businesses might, and some require some proof of living in CA for things like CCPA requests, like a mailing address or ID in CA.

there's already something like this (no surprise) https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/statutes/restore-on...

i'm guessing pretty much only CA enforces it and generally to make $ the way police do from ticketing.

credit cards are the market solution here. they work. virtual cards are even better. more effective and efficient legislation would be to simply enforce processors to accept and not differentiate virtual mastercard / visa / amex cards!

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?

Haven't used one myself but iirc a credit card number is generated on the fly for each transaction (or maybe a set of transactions). So someone trying to charge you again will fail if it's no longer valid, and you can't correlate it easily with other data.

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/

Absolutely necessary. Looking at you NYtimes and economist

I wish this was more commonplace in Germany, here its not uncommon to have to send a physical letter to cancel a service

The legislation is just about to change in that regard https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...

Didn't the FTC require "click to cancel" if you clicked to buy?

I usually just block them from the credit card if there are too many hoops to cancel

That may work, or it may result in a referral to collections.

I wouldn’t advise it. Did this once, ended up paying for an extra year of subscription when they came to collect.

I wish gyms had similar legislation.

We all need this!!

The effect of this bill is probably that it will either never be enforced or companies will terminate business in Pennsylvania, at least until more jurisdictions adopt compatible rules. At best companies would only offer these rights for Pennsylvania residents. Local legislation seems incompatible with the economies of scale of internet commerce. I wish that rather than creating laws like this that only govern a tiny percentage of people, local jurisdictions would enter a pact to do so in unison before making an actual law. In the mean time, global companies are getting more brazen about ignoring compliance when there are literally hundreds of authorities they must in theory obey.

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.

Once a few do it, it’ll be more likely:

1. that it may be cost effective just to do everywhere

2. that federal legislators will take note that it is popular

A lot of new laws in the US gain popularity at the state level before becoming national law.

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

Amazon would love it, as it would begin to crush smaller retailers and they have the capacity to handle dealing with various law differences.

The federal government is too dysfunctional to pass this sort of obvious legislation. They protected their video rental records within a year after Bork was smeared. Dark financial patterns? That's just too hard to do.

If the federal legislature is not elected on a platform having to do with quality-of-life issues then obviously they will not work on that or be held accountable to it.

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.

PA is also the 5th most populous state. 90% of US states are smaller in population.

> companies will terminate business in Pennsylvania

It's a fairly populous state at over 4% of the US total, I can't imagine national companies nixing PA.

I think ignoring it is more likely. Imagine instead every jurisdiction enacting similar unique laws. You'd have ~25 things to comply with.

We already see this - have you read the disclaimers on loans? Many will have a call out for California, Wisconsin, and South Dakota if I remember correctly, as those states have certain things required or prohibited.

Any online store dealing with gun or gun-adjacent stuff already has been dealing with variations of these for years; knives that are illegal in certain areas, etc.

Home Depot has to block shipping gas-powered lawn equipment to CA now.

Are these frictions good for either businesses or consumers? What is wrong with the desire that a good consumer protection protection be rolled out nationally rather that state by state?

It's a good goal but it's also surprisingly hard to pass, much of these things are actually handled at the state level and for the feds to step in requires exercising the commerce clause, which always causes a fight.

That’s why there are efforts like the Uniform Commercial Code to harmonize basic laws across all 50 states. Unfortunately many aspects of it are stacked against consumers like UCITA that enables abusive software licensing practices.

More work for lawyers and not a problem: cost of doing business that will be passed on to you.

I find it fascinating that there are more than 11,000 tax jurisdictions in the USA[0]. I think the comparison is interesting, as I'm sure many of these are ignored by many online retailers. It seems like there are some efforts at standardizing Sales Tax approaches across the country. Similar efforts could be interesting for consumer protections.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/state-sales-tax-jurisdictions-in-t...

That’s 11,000 jurisdictions just for sales tax. There are many other jurisdictions not listed there that impose other types of taxes.

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