Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

If it's business to business, that's more on both sides.

Myself would like to know how that works in detail.

I disagree. I routinely go months in between using some of my various subscriptions - be it Netflix, Hulu, Audible, etc. I would be very upset if they cancelled on me... I maintain the subscriptions because I can afford to do so and because I enjoy the convenience of having it available when I want it without having to go through some sort of account activation ritual.

People need to have personal responsibility. Review your bank/credit accounts and cancel subscriptions if you want - it's your money so take responsibility.

This line of reasoning reminds me of the petulant discussion revolving around overdraft fees... as-if it's difficult to spend 3 seconds tapping a button in your banking app.

First, it is not the responsibility of the business to ensure people use the product that the business sold them. Why should it be? This standard doesn't exist for companies providing physical products. Someone could order a meal kit subscription, and after receiving the food every week, they could choose to throw it straight in the trash. The company shouldn't offer someone a refund because they chose to throw away the food they sent. The same principle applies for digital subscriptions - the subscriber is choosing to throw away access to whatever service the business provides.

Second, I think it's worth pointing out that the principle underlying your argument, that it is the responsibility of the payee to ensure the payer gets what they pay for, logically contradicts salaried or waged work. The principle you've implied is consistent with all services being paid for piecemeal, since if nothing is produced, nothing was received. This implies cashiers should be paid per transaction, chefs should be paid per meal, baristas should be paid per cup, etc. Maybe you do think that - I can't possibly know. However, I doubt you would support a minimum-wage worker having to return a day's pay to their employer if no customers showed up that day. I think that's silly, because in the absence of active demand, the employee is still providing a service: their presence, and thus the ability to fulfill transactions if requested.

I also think what you're saying not only absolves consumers of their responsibility, but also strips from them any agency in the matter. This is not a problem requiring collective action, like climate change. This is a problem where the individual's actions are 100% capable of resolving it. In a world where lots of issues are out of the individual's control, why not empower people to control what they can? Cancelling unwanted subscriptions is a simple and effective way to avoid unwanted subscription fees, and is available to every subscription-holder. Arguing that businesses should resolve, to their own detriment, a problem that consumers create, and can easily resolve, doesn't make any sense to me.

For example you could pay $20/month for ChatGPT and use it as much or little as you like, or pay $/per API call... But not every company needs to offer both.

I have always viewed the push for "subscriptions" as a business model by so-called "tech" companies with suspicion. Looks like it was warranted.

Forgetting to cancel is part of the scheme. A friend of mine once worked briefly for a direct marketing company many, many years ago, pre-www. He said they knew a certain percentage would forget to cancel. They banked on it.

This is not something new.

The reasoning? "We don't want them to realize they're paying us for a service they don't use and cancel."

I guess I see the point, but feels unethical.

They are delivering a service.

> This particular behavior is little better than taking money and simply refusing to provide service

No it's not.

> No matter how awful or shameful, people say 'it's business' and those magic words absolve every evil

No, they don't.

A business has to plan for the future. That means investments in capital and labor. These users have the right of their contract to resume using the service at a moment's notice, which the business is honoring by keeping the server capacity available, generating content, having support staff at the ready, etc.

They would regularly sign up more people than the gym could hold, but most people might go to the gym once a month or once every 3 months.

It's trivially easy to see that someone doesn't log in. Then you just pause their subscription after refunding that month. Next time they log in, you can prompt them to resubscribe with one click.

Except the neighbour did buy something. You being available to shovel their driveway. You having the equipment to shovel their driveway.

Which is why you pay for snow removal services even in months without snow.

I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).

The incredible part was that they tracked whether you got a massage that month. If not, you'd get a 1/3rd credit for a free massage. And after 3 months of no use they would stop billing the monthly fee until you return (and collect your free massage). It was, to me, unbelievably consumer-friendly and reflected well on the business. I recommended everyone I could, and they deserved it.

Unfortunately the place shut down shortly after I moved away.

In it, a very very old woman who never used her card anymore, hadn't had a balance in some time, barely remembered she had it, was not interested in the balance transfer. My requirement in addition to the balance transfer was to also offer the product that came up for the account. The product was an account protection that basically froze your payments if you were unable to make them.

She asked if I thought that was something she really needed, I said no, you don't run a balance so it'd likely not be worthwhile if she planned to continue not using it. The sups issue with the call was that I said she didn't need the product. He wanted me to swindle that lady.

I didn't walk out or anything I just said this is my 2 weeks this isn't for me. Anyway, at some point people make these things okay, we can stop it.

In my budget I allocate $100 for subscriptions and just look to stay under that. I found giving myself allowance to spend X amount made me chill out a little, so I wasn’t always trying to cut at all costs, since they are hard to avoid now. That budget item avoids the death by 1,000 cuts, while also letting me not sweat the small stuff.

[1] https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau/overview

Even incurred some chargeback fees in the process because I forgot to update a few vendors.

Rinse and repeat every now and then.

I have always heard that it’s cheaper to keep an existing client than to acquire a new one. Apparently these places don’t realize that. They don’t need to pay for advertising when they are filly booked up with people paying the market rate, nor do they need to do all the extra work invoiced in signing someone up or moving them out. I don’t own or operate a business, so maybe I’m talking out of my butt, but these people strike me as bad business owners who are chasing the wrong metrics.

EDIT: The specific app is https://copilot.money/ I use the MacOS and iOS apps though I prefer the Mac app.

To counter the dark patterns, I now use privacy.com. It's far easier to just cancel a virtual credit card.

Companies put a lot of effort into making signup frictionless, I don't buy an excuses that say cancelling is intrinsically harder than signup and can't be streamlined.

I also have to keep switching the shipping method on an order page, from the paid option, to the free (non-Prime) option. And there's a long spinner (sometimes ~15 seconds) to punish me when I click the radio button. (In the past, they've also hidden a default trial of Prime in the shipping option radio buttons, so that's another reason to check that.)

(If only Walmart.com, Target.com, Walgreens.com, etc. would close the gap to even current Amazon, we'd have better options and less trashiness. Anecdotally seems like Amazon -- either from the top, or from individuals juicing their metrics -- are taking advantage of Amazon's enviable competence and position, and cashing out excess goodwill.)

Ignore them. Just give a virtual credit card to any subscription service, and set a credit limit on it. Problem solved. If they try to keep charging your card: too bad, the charges are declined.

So I went there and cancelled my account, and they even sent me a "sorry to see you go" message. They definitely got it.

Then they went and charged my card anyway. But it was declined, because I'd closed the privacy.com virtual card I'd given them.

That's why you do this.

Glad the FTC is going after this nonsense [1].

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/03/...

https://www.bankofamerica.com/online-banking/mobile-and-onli...

I do not know if BoA offers a breakdown by merchant though.

Sure, there are proxies like Privacy.com and PayPal that let you do this, but this should be a standard feature everywhere.

There should be a standard interface to pull transaction data without having to rely on a third party as it rapes your privacy.

Notably, this apparently exists in EU.

Shortcuts being the simplest way to add a row on to the budget sheet (i.e transaction) from iPhone homescreen or macOS Spotlight.

I wrote a small tutorial here: https://rahulkrrrishna.xyz/notes/2023/11/18/simple-budgeting...

I’m a happy subscriber though and to me its yearly cost is easily made up by how much money I save using it.

My gym managed to find itself in a great little niche by being the complete opposite: they'll call you if you haven't been in for two weeks, then bug you to either start coming in again or pause your membership. The result is a dedicated membership base of regulars who seriously want to be there, which sustains itself on word-of-mouth referrals.

Of course, this is a small-time operation and not a national chain like Planet Fitness.

This is a similar to how airlines are more like banks than airlines these days. They issue credit cards and collect transaction fees, but instead of giving cardholders cash back they give them miles…gift cards for future travel, essentially. If something bad happens financially it’s a great buffer for them. They can always manipulate the value of miles within some level of reason until customers get mad (see: Delta). It’s also great to be a bank when you’re in a capital-intense business.

This concept is also how how fast-growing businesses can have cash flow problems.

Let’s say I pay my vendors right away, but when I sell my widgets I get paid 30 days later.

If I sell 10 widgets the first month, and suddenly sell 1000 widgets the second month, I might look like I’m an incredibly profitable company. But I probably ran out of cash to pay my vendors for the raw materials to build my widgets.

I've heard enough horror stories about other classes of subscription-type things (gym memberships, newspaper subscriptions, etc.) that I don't even consider signing up for those - entire industries that I write off because of bad behavior when it comes to cancelling subscriptions.

I always wonder if companies think through the consequences of their aggressive "retention" efforts.

If you’re paying your full statement balance then you can wait all the way until the due date since you’ve never accrued any interest in the first place.

I had a bunch of issues with Personal Capital connections continuously messing up and there's no way to classify and evaluate the purchases.

Of course, if devs are intending to make money from subscriptions, devs may rationalize how devs should be in control of the user's subscription instead of letting the user pick Apple because users trust Apple will balance power for users.

But I still don't think a company should cancel my subscription without my knowledge to protect me from myself. One click cancel? Hell yes. But auto expiration? That's a bridge too far.

Throws a wrench into the "was hoping you forgot about it, now ask/argue with customer support on the phone" dark pattern.

I think it's something learned, and that is, something taught by the far right ideological movement and others trying to create cultural change. Empathy is outre, it's embarassing. Embracing contempt and cruelty makes people look smart, these days.

Empathy is fundamental to human rights, freedom (for others), equality, equity, justice, fairness. It leads to truth. By attacking that fundamental infrastructure (the empathy), you can undermine it all.

Though perhaps you could say businesses then actively reduce pricing to keep things just under the zombie radar, but that's even more effed up: it means the pricing strategy is such that zombie accounts are actually the business's goal, not just a side effect.

You spend a third of your life working for that money, surely you spend 5 minutes at most tracking how you spend it.

And frankly, I don't see why the government shouldn't mandate making it easy to unsubscribe.

There's a correlation between financial illiteracy and acquiring cripling debt.

> They make you call between 9 am and 5 pm, and hold for hours to cancel, sometimes even disconnect forcing you to start over, while not offering a callback option. Sometimes there are weeks I absolutely cannot afford to do this because of work.

> You buy something, and they tag a "3-4 months free" of another service, which you can't opt out of even if you want to, and then suddenly charge you that extra money on the 5th month. You obviously cancel it, but you still overpaid for a month.

> Services that charge you once a year. You forgot to cancel the Xbox subscription because you bought a PS5, got charged a year later. Now you cancel it, but you paid for the year.

> Services that make you use or forgo credits that you already paid for if you cancel. (Audible) You want to cancel, but you put it off for another month because now, you need to figure out 5 ebooks to buy. Next month, you end up in the same situation and now you need to figure out 6 ebooks to buy.

The point being, you could check all your statements weekly, and still end up spending money on something you forgot about.

I think it's one of the major failures of the education system. Why is there no class in school which covers taxes, savings, budgeting, etc? People are seemingly just expected to know this on their own.

This is true, but it doesn't mean that collective solutions cannot exist or should not be desired.

I've seen it first-hand how those with the biggest financial problems earn as much money as anybody else, but they simply can't handle it. And the rest of us are supposed to bail them out of course.

And, thankfully, the app was never released. It was basically just an app for pay-day loans.

The most vulnerable are used a fodder for a vast capitalist system.

Unfortunately bad actors have realized that what we actually are is just meat computers with unpatchable security vulnerabilities, so demanding that people just stop having problems and fit your nebulous definition of competence with unlimited and unwavering performance, has predictably not panned out.

What is the more moral solution then? Recognizing and placing systematic limits on exploitation behaviors, or is it continuing to demand super-vigilance from the victims?

This is literally what law enforcement and consumer protection is for. Otherwise we could make the same argument about pickpocketing victims, which is frankly what this is more akin to.

If someone was hired to manage your life, and they did what you did, they would be fired with contempt.

However, it's not entirely the people's fault. Credit card providers make it really easy to sign up for their cards but make it really difficult to do things like "add an alert that texts me whenever a purchase above $0.01 is made" or "alert me when my 0% APR promotional period is ending" or "tell me when i'm about to pay a late fee".

All of them will make you go through a labyrinthian exercise to turn these alerts on, if they make them available (LOOKING AT YOU, CITIBANK) and many will not alert you on anything less than $50, which is crazy given how many transactions are smaller than that!

Also, in a world where everything is getting more expenses and incomes aren't keeping up, using a tool that reminds you how broke you are on a daily basis isn't fun. So I can understand why folks shy away from it. I certainly did when I was living at the edge for a few years after I graduated. (That said, having this data is essential for creating a plan to change that outcome, but thinking long-term is not fun.)

Regardless, things are getting better. Most utilities and other services accept eChecks now with Bill Pay, which allows people to pay for their recurring expenses from one place. Many restaurants and shops use Toast, Stripe, Clover or newer NCR POS's which make it easy to email your receipts. (A pet peeve of mine is restaurants that use Stripe or something like that but don't accept Apple Pay or hand you a bill instead of a mobile POS. Like, come on; you're already paying for these features!)

In those 30 minutes they could cancel unused subscriptions and maybe save $50 a month. $50 a month isn't bad, but it's not going to be the difference between retiring comfortably and not retiring.

Or they could spend those 30 minutes updating their resume and applying to a job; if they apply for a better job every month they could easily find a better paying job that gives them an additional $20,000 a year, especially if they do this consistently.

Overall, I agree people would benefit from more effort put into their personal finances, but people have limited mental energy and their time can be better spent on things other than cancelling subscriptions. Indeed, if someone is willing to put effort into improving their financial situation and the best option society offers them is for them to pinch pennies and cancel their subscriptions, that is a sad situation for them and reflects poorly on society.

> [...] basic budgeting, retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary.

These look like things that are generally unavailable to those who can least afford not doing those things.

It's expensive to be poor.

That type of practice could use some sort of regulation.

I'm not surprised at all, a few billions is paltry. I think i have a few subs that i've forgotten about for months or years. I have several bank accounts and several credit cards, things become complicated.

At the time i liked what those people were making, or i wanted to watch a certain series, etc.

>negotiating rents

I have never, ever been in a situation where a rent negotiation would have done anything except ensure I didn't get the apartment.

Is that real? Where?

It's as if, when I go to relax or exercise, my only option is hiking in a tick-infested field. I spend an extra 15 minutes prepping my clothes before going out, and an extra 15 minutes checking every inch of my body after I come back in.

It's true that all this extra work is my responsibility. It's also true that ticks suck (literally) and it would be preferable if there were a way to prevent them from parasitizing me in the first place.

Laws exist to protect people from bad actors so our time and efforts can be better spent on things that are valuable to us and society.

Is 30 minutes a month an unreasonable responsibility to protect against companies taking advantage of people with unutilized subscriptions? Should the law be updated to enable people to save people that time and effort? Maybe. I don't think it's an unreasonable thing to at least consider.

A common thing I hear when talking about things like the student loan crisis and the housing market crash of the late 2000s is "well no one forced them to take out those loans" or "I took out a loan and I paid it off, why can't they?" But when it's as prevalent an issue that more than half of undergrad students in the U.S. are in debt, and the fact that poor people taking out subprime mortgages just so they can have somewhere to live can cause a global financial disaster, it starts making me think -- yeah maybe it is the "government's fault". Maybe us smart people on the top have to understand not everyone is as smart as us, and we have to build a system that works for all the truly clueless folk.

I don’t disagree, but I’d point out that this applies to basically anything in life. Relationships, exercise, health, work, etc. The fact is people prioritize and many don’t prioritize their finances. All of us drop the ball on something.

Maybe for someone who already has good financial habits it is 30 minutes, but for people who never bother with this it will take far more time.

It’s designed to be complicated, confusing or easy to forget just so it traps people at least once. It’s borderline fraud sometimes, at least it feels like that to me. The recourse is to be super vigilant but when you let guard down you fall into a trap and it’s hard to beware all traps at all times especially when they’re being constantly evolving

People do check this stuff. Even then it's easy to forget about something for a few months. Or ask if your SO is using something.

There are so many charges on a typical CC statement that spending time every day going through them isn't always worth it either.

But, see...

>No one is looking out for you.

... that's just it, isn't it?

Nobody's looking out for you. We send kids to public school from ages five to eighteen, but at a broad level, we do not have a requirement for any of that education to be about how to take charge, and stay on top of, your fiscal health. I'm not sure how you can look down on others like that when a large chunk of people are kicked into adulthood without ever having been taught how to look after themselves financially.

They may be too exhausted from their second job - or from the one job they have to be on their feet the whole work day - and may not have the mental energy to comb through financial statements. You have the luxury of time and energy, so real reasons sound like excuses to you. I would recommend you (re)read John Scalzi's essay on Being Poor[1]. Except:

>> Being poor is knowing how hard it is to stop being poor.

The link between stress and poor decision-making is well studied, and unfortunately poor financial health is self-reinforcing: being poor is very expensive!

1. https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

I had a regular order with Chewy, until the dog food brand I was having drop shipped stopping selling that particular type of dog food to Chewy (but I could get it somewhere else). And I had to sit on hold for 30 fucking minutes, just so Chewy would stop charging me (considerably more) for, and shipping to me, dog food that I did not want, had never wanted, and was actually shopping elsewhere to avoid. And I didn't find out that they didn't carry that brand anymore until they shipped "what we believe is the closest match" to me. I honestly thought it was a mis-pick initially, so when I went to resolve it, I followed that customer service UI pattern, to no avail. They've changed it since then, but the fact still remains, that was not at all a scenario I should've needed to call in for. I certainly shouldn't have needed to sit on hold for it. When I finally spoke to the CSR, she was apologetic that I even had to talk to her about it.

> retirement savings, not paying random fees, not paying interest, moving spare money to investment accounts every month, rebalancing your investments every quarter, negotiating rents, negotiating your salary.

Where else do people need to actively manage their pension accounts like in the US? If your employer does not provide a decent 401k they trying to create a solid retirement investment account is an uphill challenge. In most other places it's simply a tax into a pension fund.

> not paying random fees There is very little price transparency. Random fees are typically not random, but hidden. You can't book a rental car online without being hit with some municipal tax or other surcharge at the counter. In SF a health surcharge often added to the bill on top tax. It makes no fucking sense that it is not a part of the price or part of the sales tax. Cellular carriers and ISPs know exactly how much you gonna be paying but will bend backwards to make sure you don't know it until very end.

You are right that basic financial discipline is a personal responsibility, but removing the asymmetry in the relationship between large businesses and consumers is on the government and legal system.

There's so much bullshit required a lot of the time in canceling things or even knowing that you were signed up for something in the first place. Just purchasing something these days will automatically sign up yourself up for endless emails from that and other companies, even if you unchecked the so-called newsletter option. There are so many dark patterns that sign people up for things that they didn't even they got signed up for. I have absolutely been signed up for something, either by accident or a dark pattern, that I didn't realize until latter. It wasn't due to laziness, me lamenting others, or some bad habit. It was due to being effectively tricked and legally scammed.

Companies have used software-based services as a sort of trojan horse, and they absolutely take advantage of people who don't understand technology.

Of course, that's a pathetic excuse, and I tell myself that one of these days I will check my statements but that day never comes.

It's quite easy to be lazy in the moment and put this "work" off to tomorrow. As a result, days, weeks and months go by.

I now use privacy.com for most subscriptions and one-off trials etc. It at least notifies me via email every time there is a transaction.

It was easy to look at statements when they arrived by mail.

But with paperless billing, you've got to conscientiously log into your credit card site each month. If you have four cards, that's four logins. Who's going to do that? Not many.

The only reason I review my transactions it's because it's easy through an aggregator like Monarch (was using Mint before it shut down). And the only reason I do that is for budgeting -- reviewing transactions is just a side effect.

It still annoys me to no end that I don't have a single bank or credit card that will attach my statement as a PDF to a monthly email. As long as there's a secure email transmission connection, I don't understand why they won't do that.

This is an unrealistic attitude. One can insult people all day, but it doesn't change the fact that society doesn't work properly if we don't account for things humans do, even if it only looks like they are hurting themselves. On one hand, we shouldn't use law to force people to "be responsible for themselves" in petty cases (as opposed to e.g. forcing people to have car insurance), but if enough people commit the same mistake, it's almost by-definition not purely their fault - and on a more objective note, it is certainly pointless to waste time wondering how much of it is carelessness and how much of it is reasonable given what else is going on in people's lives and what their experiences and competencies are like. We simply must give a shit, as natural as it feels to want to just let people deal with things themselves.

Again, one can continue to consider these people mostly at fault or try to get them educated or just make fun of them or hyperbolically lament the fall of society or whatever one's preferred flavor of reaction is, but we also have to solve the active problem. Modern society is too integrated and complex to not give a shit.

Ideally, what I'd like to be able to say is that modern humans are too sympathetic and imaginative to not give a shit.

I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd actually suggest a legal route is because there's many companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.

If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive practices, full stop.

While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending spam from the same accounts they send important information. This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very controversial take.

If you use your credit card heavily, then this takes a lot more than 5 minutes. Keeping the CC usage light in order to make it easier to manage is important to me, and a key part of that is to avoid recurring charges as much as possible.

"But, if it's that bad, they shouldn't even be signing up for this stuff!", I hear some of you saying. You look for an escape wherever you can. Some little thing that will pull you, even for a moment, out of the monotony of the daily grind. Don't blame these people.

First, there is a lot of crap in a bank statement. They are tiring to parse.

Second, logging into and using your banking portal is a chore. First, you have to remember your password. Not everyone is using a password manager. (Love the work that Apple has done to bridge this gap, and I'm ABSOLUTELY LOVING passkeys.) Second, you have to present a second factor. Some (few) banks are with the times and use a TOTP second factor. Many use SMS two-factor. Many will CALL you with the code. All of them suck. Then you have to navigate the new UIs that look very pretty and are designed to simplify common functions (mostly checking your balance) but have made things like filtering your statement by transactions from today more difficult.

Third, many merchants use very confusing IDs that make it confusing to see where a transaction originated from (for example: a restaurant that uses an abbreviated form of their former name or their parent company's name in the merchant ID). Apple, for example, uses APPLE.COM/BILL for iCloud _and_ AppleCare transactions. This segues into my last reason why navigating transactions periodically sucks.

Tracing a previous expense is an AWFUL experience 99.95% of the time.

I capture every single receipt and bank alert into Expensify (moving into Google Sheets), so tracing an unknown charge is very easy for me (search my email; failing that, search Expensify; failing that, log into bank, which is painful; see above). However, I had to spend significant effort building systems and writing code to accomplish this since there are basically zero services that do this for consumer spending.

Most people don't save receipts. Those that do often don't save them digitally. I know this because I work in consulting, an industry where we have to track receipts to submit expense reports, and EVERYONE whines about this. Many have to block time in their calendar to get this done.

Regardless, even if you do save all of your receipts and alerts, you still need to log into the portal for the vendor that charged that $5.95 and find that charge. Portals that can be even harder to log in and navigate through than banks.

Determining which Apple service that APPLE.COM/BILL charge was associated with, for example? Good fucking luck. It's clicks on clicks on clicks. (They also make you use a single card for ALL digital purchases you make with them. Want to buy an album? Want to buy AppleCare for your new iPhone? Are you forced to subscribe to this super critical app on that iPhone that used to be free? The same card is used for all of that. This is the biggest reason why I've been investing time in moving App Store subscriptions into separate accounts. But even this sucks because many app vendors will only use the App Store for managing subscriptions!)

Consequently, when your statement, which you spent five minutes _just trying to get to_, presents an unknown $5.95 charge (that you didn't get alerted on if you had alerts on because your bank won't send alerts for anything below $50), it's easier to say "welp" and charge it back (a whole process in and of itself) or say "it's five dollars" and forget about it.

Yeah it takes a bit of time once or twice a month, but it's worth it I think.

Twice a year or so I catch "late fees" on my spouse's CC that shouldn't be there. Banks just seem to randomly do that because in most cases they'll get away with it.