Europeans will be able to unsubscribe from Prime with two clicks
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'd almost respect them more if they said "Okay, you got us, we deliberately added as many complicated steps as possible to minimise the number of people who successfully cancelled".
There needs to be a Freedom of Information Act which applies to large companies, requiring them to record all the decisions they make, the goals they set, and the metrics they use to achieve them.
Of course most of the data will be commercially sensitive, but if a company refuses on those grounds, the requester should be able to appeal to an ombudsman who will check whether there is a public interest in disclosure, or whether the data needs to be sent to the relevant regulator for further investigation.
Requesters would have to pay some fee for such an appeal (perhaps 100 x minimum hourly wage) which would be paid back double if the appeal was upheld. This could create the right sort of incentives for whistleblowers, and the appeal fee could be crowdfunded to make it more affordable.
Some cars also have (something like) a bank/credit card attached to their front windows near the top, those people can just drive out and the payment is automatic right before the barrier that blocks the exit.
Not set up with automatic license plate reading cameras (ANPR or whatever the UK calls it).
It's not like there's a Dark Pattern Brainstorming meeting every Tuesday at 2pm. Big companies being evil is an emergent phenomenon. Nobody needs to be told explicitly that the offboarding flow should be as irritating as possible; all it takes is ICs understanding the business and realizing that they will be rewarded for positively impacting the bottom line and making their boss look good.
What parent in this very thread said...
> There needs to be a Freedom of Information Act which applies to large companies, requiring them to record all the decisions they make, the goals they set, and the metrics they use to achieve them.
It's also hard to work (collaborate) without keeping records, especially in a big international company.
And sure, several Secretaries of State used private e-mail severs, but there was also significant backlash over the practice. Again I doubt things are less documented today than before computers became the norm.
It always ends up looking like a snazzier version of Brazil, in my head.
No more writing a letter, sending a fax or calling a phone to cancel a service or subscription that you signed up to online.
That's why I preferred Apple subscriptions to normal magazine subscriptions. Apple is a one click cancel. An old school subscription is writing a letter.
But if not then in the worst case you have to find somewhere to print the letter, sign it, then find or buy an envelope and postage stamps, and finally drop the letter off.
Maybe I should get into the habit of hand-writing those. Probably less work than the digital variant to be honest (if you keep it short) and a lot more annoying for the receiving company deciphering that handwriting.
I call a company, inform them I want to cancell, and they keep taking money off my card, they should be prosecuted for theft.
I don't get to demand that all companies must use my custom online form when they need payment from me, so why should they get to make such demands?
Why did our legal system enable this behaviour all.
This law means they have to provide an online form. That's necessary because without the law, they simply have to do nothing to deny you the most convenient option to cancel.
Big companies always have leverage over small people. This is why the law was necessary.
Fun fact, companies literally do this to each other. You have to login to some weird SAP-based vendor portal to submit an invoice.
California has a similar law, and it's saved me a lot of time and stress over the last few years.
By the way, you are free to demand that all companies use your custom online form when they need payment from you - as long as you get them to agree to it in advance. However, I doubt if many companies would do business with you unless you were paying them a lot of money.
Because there wasn't a law against it. How else would you expect the legal system to prevent it?
In Germany, email is not considered as "in writing", and that's why so many things must still be sent by post. Most of the official bureaucracy is still done this way.
I would guess that this change will be rolled back in the UK as soon as it becomes legal.
[0]https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-data-laws-to-boost-br...
[1]https://theconversation.com/why-uk-approach-to-replacing-the...
Q: For whom?
Keep in mind this isn't about all their violations, but the ones that were still ongoing in significant numbers around the year 2000.
From wikipedia:
"Many rights established under the Human Rights Act 1998 were already protected under UK law"[0]
Genuinely curious who we think has benefited most from the protections afforded by the act, and why they weren't protected beforehand?
I didn't count, but it seemed like it took 20 clicks to just by a burger, with screen after screen after screen. I'm sure McDonald's play-tested this a lot, but I'm baffled as to how they managed to converge on this monstrosity.
It's also unclear which button to pick to pay. There's no "check out", "pay", "shopping cart", button.
1. start
2. burgers section
3. scroll down to hamburger (if it already isn't there already)
4. choose the burger you want
5. no, I want just the burger
6. add to order
7. view order
8. pay
9. credit card
maybe add a few more if there's more upsell screens near the end, but nowhere near 20.
The only benefit it would have is smoothing out spikes, but I think you'd rather have people wait for food they've already paid for than turn around because the queue for even ordering is too long.
Smoothing out the spikes is exactly what you want to be doing. The drive-thru has this built in. Customers come through in a queue and can easily see how long they will have to wait by counting cars. It makes a lot of sense to implement something similar with the self-serve kiosks.
I work at a fast food establishment with self-serve kiosks. When we are understaffed (as we often are nowadays) and we are busy, we will turn off some of the kiosks rather than let orders build up. We would much rather lose a few customers today than lose these customers forever as they have to wait 45 minutes for their food because we rushed them through ordering without proper queue management.
Choose burger -> wait for screen -> choose unmodified -> wait for screen -> choose just burger, no menu -> wait for screen -> no, I don't also want to add a doughnut -> wait for screen to go back to main screen -> start checkout -> no, I don't want to add X to my order -> wait -> confirm order -> select pay now -> try to beep my card but it doesn't work -> look at screen and see I have to select "card" (but it's the only option wtf make me choose?)
The transitions really seem to take their time. Combined with the number of "pages" you need to get through as well, makes it an experience that feels a bit slow.
I get the sense that these visual page transitions are becoming quite a thing, also with modern self checkout counters in supermarkets.
But who knows, perhaps they are trying to hide some kind of background loading action.
Big Mac, fries, and Coke should take me no longer to order on the screen than to say it verbally.
I'm not. At the point someone stands in front of the device, they've already made a decision and they're unlikely to bail just due to bad UX, and I can totally see someone who isn't aware of UX as a concept simply not optimizing.
They want a digital ordering system, this is a digital ordering system, it seems to do the job (fewer cashiers)... the fact that people actively avoid going back to McD because they don't want to deal with that abomination doesn't show up on that person's stats.
In case anyone from McD reads this: Since those machines popped up I avoid going specifically because I hate dealing with them. Before the machines, I walked in, stood in a relatively short queue, "one cheeseburger please", receive a burger, pay (often cash) and go. Now, I first spend a ridiculous amount of time dealing with the crappy machine, then wait forever for my food.
I like the idea of using a machine over talking with someone and my ideal experience would be a restaurant full of robots; but the machine should be well designed
Let's be honest - some retail jobs need the human element, but ordering a burger is not one of them.
The one complaint I have about the machines is that they run out of paper waaay too often, and they don't tell you in advance, so you often end up in a situation where you've paid but you technically have no way to prove it. The best approach at this point is to order through the app.
They must have made some serious effort, but it is also a pretty complex problem (they’re trying to address literally everyone in reading age) and McDonald is not known for pouring money into solid customer interfaces. I haven’t tried in a while but their mobile app was even more of a sluggish, hostile at every corner, trash experience.
I kinda feel like they went in from a “we replace the cashier” mindset, and not a return to first principles of why the customer came to that place, and how to satisfy that goal.
PS: also people just adapt. I had coworkers just remember step by step the screen sequence to their usual orders, and they basically blindly tapped the screen only registering the page changes. If McDonald was to change the menu tree now I’d imagine them getting pissed in reaction.
"We don't use any spy-cookies so we don't have an obnoxious pop-up covering half the screen. Do you like that? [Yes] or [Yes]"
That said, this seems to be a private initiative that simply helps you send letters/e-mails, not some official setup.
So what that website does is it collects email addresses for companies and support systems, provides a template and lets you sign with the Austrian digital signature (or just a scribble on the screen). Then it sends it for you. If they don't respond they follow up automatically and tell you how to automatically file a complaint with the regulator.
I have been cancelling a lot of services this way and never had an issue.
Compare to Rackspace. To stop getting billed there you have to cancel your account.
If I ever need some short term cloud resources my first stops would be places that I've already got cloud resources and places where I no longer currently have anything but still have an account. In other words, places where I already know something about how to use their offerings, and merely have to log in and start configuring.
By making me delete my account Rackspace has guaranteed I'll only be looking at them when a project's hosting is going to be expensive that I need to check out all the major providers to find which one has the best deal.
I'm not sure if Rackspace intended this behavior or if it was an accidental consequence of another change. It used to be that if you got rid of all your hosts and storage and other paid services your billing would go to $0/month.
At some point they added a $5/month support fee, and that billed even if you weren't using any services. Cancelling the account then became the only way to stop getting billed.
When I cancelled I got some sort of survey asking why I cancelled and I explained that it was to stop that $5/month fee, so it is possible that if that was just an unintended consequence of the new fee they've fixed it.
I signed up for Amazon student after I finished college (still had access to a mail account and didn't know about the program before, or maybe it didn't exist yet) so I got prime for 25€ for a couple years. I watched one show on prime and never used it for music. Only really wanted the free and faster shipping. As soon as student ended I unsubscribed as it wasn't worth 45€ to me.
I'm sure they'll have run focus groups or whatever with proposed unbundled pricing to see which services people would pay for and how it stacks up.
Rockefeller never had a monopoly. He was accused and convicted not of having a monopoly, but anti-competitive behavior. Also, during the long trial, his market share kept slipping, and he was unable to stop the slide.
His competitors had never been vanquished, and had figured out how to compete with Standard Oil.
https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr/dp/140...
What's ironic about the book is Chernow reaches the standard conclusions that you wrote, but his actual text says the opposite. I suspect that Chernow's preconceived notions about Standard Oil were so strong he was not convinced by his own research and narrative of what actually happened.
My point mostly related to Amazon - they’re really not a monopoly, but they’re definitely strategically pursuing a direction which left unrestrained would give them that monopoly. In this specific example it is Amazon using their AWS cloud infrastructure to bundle video streaming into Prime to then create a mix that strangles competitors. In the case of Standard Oil what I remember were strategic investments into directly unprofitable rail infrastructure and then SO using that to exert pressure on smaller oil competitors to force them to sell at a loss. I’m no expert but I think this is what makes anti-trust so difficult to prove reliably.
The point the anti-trust people are repeating over and over is that anti-trust has been broken since the early 1980’s. So, this means huge chunks of the economy and many enormous conglomerates competing in it are themselves fortresses because lax anti-trust enforcement. In that worldview it doesn’t matter whether it’s Amazon or Walmart… or RadioShack or whatever. We literally can’t imagine another world because these conditions go as far as most of us can remember.
And yet an endless stream of unstoppable monopolies have collapsed or been humbled of their own accord since 1980.
IBM, Cisco Systems, Intel, Kodak, GE, GM, Microsoft, KMart, Lotus, etc.
A steady state of communism is worse for people. History amply shows that.
But yeah, I noticed you moving the goal posts :-)
> The damage you refer to is simply free markets being a chaotic system.
That damage has real effects on society. Markets are a tool we shape in order to benefit society. Take restrictions on anti-competitive behaviours, the 40 hour work week, or outlawing child labour as examples of how we've moulded that tool to improve society while keeping it useful.
Consider this: free market capitalism enabled child labor laws. The reason is simple. Children had to work because non-free market societies did not produce enough surplus to make it possible for them to not work.
Free market capitalism also enabled 40 hour week laws.
Heck, it wasn't until around 1800 or so that free market agriculture produced enough food to eliminate the constant specter of famine that preceded it, and still haunts every non-free market agriculture system.
I don’t think we need to suffer obvious business monopolies for years until a new paradigm shows up. Who benefits from that except the monopolists?
That's what they earned by providing value. In a pure free market monopolies are hard to keep up for long.
Unless you can bribe politicians to create regulations and slow competitors, it will be hard to stop younger, fresher and better rivals.
The larger a company, the more inefficient it becomes and the more prone to be dethroned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_monopoly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-granted_monopoly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercive_monopoly
You speculate that Prime Video is a loss leader, and that would make it an even bigger an anticompetitive threat to the rest of the streaming market.
>Europeans will be able to avoid X
where X is some internet/tech/privacy related mess
way too often.
where are US lawmakers/bureaucracy?
why things like seems to be forced mostly by EU lawmakers/bureaucracy?
Case in point, Stefan Löfven, who was Sweden’s prime minister until a few months ago, traveled today in the same coach class airplane I used. I don’t know if he could have afforded/used something better, but politicians in private airplanes gift the press a field day.
So democracy in some parts of Europe is a little bit more the business of the people than the business of the businesses.
Each country in Europe has three to five main parties plus a lot of minor parties. They are mostly independent and the ideological range is much wider.
When is their own lifestyle what is in risk, politicians do care.
If the resulting regulations makes it even harder for small businesses to keep up with all the red tape, entrenching big American businesses in their position - that's even better.
The US government sucks as well in different ways, but nobody is seriously threatening to leave (especially because of all that money spent every year on the army).
Regulation in these areas is really very much needed.
They patented the wrong thing!
Some issuing banks don't participate but most of the major issuers do.
At the small place I work this is delightfully old fashioned. There's an HTTPS API we can use to submit cards we want to check. The submission format consists of one line per card, with each line being formatted as a bunch of space-padded fields. It would be right at home on a punched card being feed to some FORTRAN or COBOL code on an IBM 360.
There's another API to get responses. We poll that once a day. Responses are in a similar punched card like format, containing one line for each card. The time for a given card's response to show up varies from one day to several. There is no "there will be no response" response.
I think the big companies get a more modern interface. I've had a couple of occasions where I needed to have my current card cancelled and a new one issued, and almost as soon as I got off the phone with the bank I've gotten a notice on my phone that the old card in Apple Wallet has been updated.
It looks like it takes five or six clicks right now for me, and I'd only count one of those unreasonable.
From the account page, I have to click Prime, click Manage to get a menu, click End Membership, then twice I have to click Cancel to confirm.
If they combined it to one confirmation page I would say it's fine. But that's still four clicks, or five if you start on a random page.
1. Click user icon in top right hand corner (I would not count this one)
2. Click "Account & Settings"
3. Click "End membership"
4. Click "End on {Month} {Day}, 2022"
Two clicks will also be nice, but not sure there was a problem that needed fixing. Maybe it is worse in some parts of Europe than others, or maybe I get a different menu because I'm an immigrant to Europe and not a European.
I have also done it many times before and the process was more or less the same, prime just simply does not have enough content to subscribe for more than one month at a time, so I always cancel immediately after subscribing.
If we only now could get the cheaper mobile plans new customers get, that would be nice. I really hate to ask once a year "Can I get the new plan?" "No, ok I will cancel my plan." Only to wait for their call back where they give me the cheaper/upgraded plan.
1. Click “account”
2. Click “Manage Prime Membership”
3. Click “Manage Membership”
4. In the drop down click “manage membership” (ok, this is a bit silly, but no misdirection so far)
5. Click “end membership”
6. Click “cancel my benefits”
I could see an argument to be made that step 5 should be the last step. But it took me less than 20 seconds to figure out how to cancel my Prime membership even though I’ve never done it before.
All that said, I also appreciate the argument by EU regulators that a subscription cancel flow should only be 2-3 clicks at the most.