"Frazzled and overloaded" is not an excuse for not looking at your bank account one time in 6 months or longer. That's just plain old fashioned irresponsible.
If you are at a stage in life where a $10 subscription is hurting, then it stands to reason you should monitor those things.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/ftc-sues-amazon-...
I don’t think it is entirely fair to demand personal responsibility when the adversary has so much more resources and incentives for making it hard to cancel.
This personally affected my friend. English was not their first language and they were tricked by Amazon into signing up for Prime. The extra charges and difficulty of canceling caused much distress for their limited budget.
Unfortunately people for whom $10/mo hurts are usually working three part time jobs while also trying to get the kids to/from school and take care of them. So I can see why they might not have time.
So you are suggesting that these three part time jobs offer more than $60/h and thus are more valuable than a 10 minute finance review where you identify your misspending of $10/mo?
Why not point this logic to companies and ask them to do this for their customers? Surely you can see the value in saving every one of your customers 10 minutes.
That is an absurdly short time for a meaningful financial review for anyone- whether they have a lot of financial transactions or if they don't (and may be unfamiliar or have anxiety about their finances). Especially if they have kids and serious responsibilities- these companies bank on you forgetting or being too exhausted to change.
I never put any sort of subscription on ACH. All subscriptions go onto credit cards. There were gradually increasing amounts from Netflix, which I got emails about, which I cancelled once I got the emails telling me the price was increasing once again. I waited 6 months because I already had an idea of what I was paying for, when I checked, it turned out there was nothing unexpected.
You calling me names because you can’t formulate a valid argument does not dispute that fact. It weakens your argument and goes against the nature of this site.
Six months in five minutes? How many transactions? (and did you remember them all?) How many different credit cards? How about your bank statements, other accounts, etc?
I still stand by the statement that 10 minutes is an absurdly small amount of time for a meaningful review of anyone's finances, and find your claim that you did it in 5 minutes very surprising. I would ask you to show me, but not interested in watching you take a dump :)
I know I don’t have the time for the high transactional overhead of most subscriptions. As such, I don’t subscribe to anything beyond insurance and internet service.
Would it be nice to have other subscriptions? Sure, probably, but the (time) cost is more than I’m willing to bear.
If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.
I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.
Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."
For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.
Choose to improve things, even if your ideal is that everyone would take care of it themselves.
What's wrong with asking businesses to simply not charge you if you don't use the service? You can play the blame game all day, but that doesn't actually give us any reason why not. "Cars shouldn't have seatbelts because you can just not crash your car" is a similar line of thinking that also doesn't make very much sense. Why shouldn't the car manufacturer take some level of responsibility?
Dying in a car crash is much worse than accidentally paying for Netflix so carmakers have a heightened responsibility to try and prevent it.
It doesn’t really map to the scenario at all, “dying in a car crash” isn’t a service people intentionally sign up for and then change their minds about.
Obviously the answer is that they CAN do that, but don't. It's nothing to do with responsibility and everything to do with them making a cheap buck off of human forgetfulness.
Pay-per-view services exist. Customers seem to prefer subscriptions.
Any subscription model works by amortising costs over a large population, which always means that some people will benefit more than others. To prevent businesses from charging for unused subscriptions, the only solution would be to ban subscriptions altogether and have everything on a pay-per-use basis. That would also include internet subscriptions and transit passes.
If Netflix will let you pay $2 to buy something from them, they sure don't advertise it. So this assertion requires what the customer wants to buy to be fungible. It's a mindset that requires one to implicitly accept the idea of content-as-gruel, and I think most people don't do that.
It also implies that people are rational and responsive actors and habituation doesn't exist, which isn't true either.
They do, through safety tests and improving it over the decades.
And we know that, because Apple basically mandated it with App Store subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions there takes seconds. And we also know that the various subscription companies absolutely hate it.
The one that specifically burns me to no end is I recall hearing from a friend that they were on the phone with a representative from one of those meditation apps trying to cancel their subscription, and just, your product literally is made for people who struggle with mental health issues and especially anxiety, and making that base of customers jump through social hoops of fire, and argue with another person and make them stand their ground on wanting to cancel, is a SUPREMELY CLASSLESS MOVE.
My idea of doing this would be to force banks, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe et cetera to have easy-to-list-easy-to-cancel subscriptions. Just two buttons, one to turn the subscription into an invoice you manually have to pay to keep going and one that cancels it outright through the payment provider.
That should hurt businesses more the more consumer hostile they are.
This is a poor perspective to have, and the purpose of government is to protect its citizens from predatory behavior. You're entitled to the opinion, but I vote for people who protect citizens, because that is where the greatest value is in aggregate improvement (vs "personal responsibility"). Existing is different levels of difficulty for everyone, and personal responsibility projection is of little value. But it is great if you're crushing it taking care of yourself.
(very similar to overdraft fees and upcoming rules to compress them by the Biden admin and the CFPB)
You might as well be saying that people should take personal responsibility and do their taxes manually if they don't want to pay $50/year to use turbotax instead of pushing for a system where the government sends you an estimate that is likely to be correct for most people (since they're already doing that anyway).
This isn't a great comparison. Looking through a bank statement once a month and clicking "end subscription" takes a few minutes for anyone. Doing your taxes manually is much more difficult. This is the easiest economic decision to choose to stop partipating in in the history of the earth.
If we take the premise that 10 minutes to review your finances a month and then cancel unused subscriptions is not a burden(and good luck with canceling in 10 minutes) then doing basic taxes takes less time than a full yearly review.
There are a great many people here who argue that doing ones taxes are an impossible burden and the government should automate it away since they have the (most of) the data.
However here it should fall upon the individual to do all this labor in a case where the business has this information already compiled.
We have pages and pages of charges each month, between groceries, camps, classes, school fees, school projects, birthday gifts, and now and then a teen grabbing coffee with friends.
I usually looks the bill quickly and see if there are any large purchases unexplained for, and of course credit card descriptions are very opaque sometimes. Noticing that month to month we had a Peacock subscription that someone signed up for as a promo, and never watched again, means I need to notice the one charge on page 3 AND poll all the family that yes no one watches.
It’s all win except for the companies getting free money for no reason. Why not fix this?
[edit] put it this way: if easy visibility into subscriptions and standardized, easy cancellation mechanisms were already mandated, would there be a strong case for changing that?
Cool that you are mentally and physically fit, I am as well.
But there are lots of people who struggle with range of mental disorders or disabilities. Some might have depression some might have ADHD, some might just be much more forgetful so they might think it is good to check account balance but 30 mins later they just don’t feel or remember they had to do it.
I would say they don’t even have to refund automatically but maybe send an email at least - “Hey are you still with us?” - after they see no activity on account for a month and we also know for sure they track user activity very closely.
But we know - no one will even propose implementing such an email because it will be loss for the company. So that would be action for government to enforce.
Doesn't this just add another hull to the titanic? People don't have 2 minutes to check their bank statements a month, but do have time to check their email regularly enough to catch this? I can't tell who this is for that would be strong enough to require governments to get involved.
Proposing that they refund money would be realistic if they would at least agree to send out email - which I do believe will never happen.
So refunding money is fantasy, sending out emails is realistic but since they won’t do it, that makes refunds even more unlikely.
Thing with returning tv would be more “I did not watch 10 days this month, reimburse these for me.”.
I don’t agree it should go this direction.
If someone did not even open list of movies for whole month or two that is a reasonable question to ask - should they get money back or at least a question via email if they really want any to keep the subscription.
That businesses and advocates play dumb when it comes to this basic fact is no longer astonishing to me, sadly