General advice when subscribing to NYT is to do it through PayPal. Once you cut them loose from their funding from PayPal, they let you go without hesitation.
I have not had good experiences with cancelling subscriptions through PayPal. My one attempt at reversing a transaction there went nowhere, and eventually I had to contact my bank to do so.
The marketing/sales talk like, “Am I to understand you’d like to cancel even though our product could be saving you $xx in time and money?” repulses me to no end. I understand they’re trying to keep a customer. I just hate the leading questions. I hate that I feel like they’re trying to outwit me, or trick me into realizing I’m so silly for wanting to cancel something.
Even though I might cancel products, the cancellation isn’t always forever. I’ll gladly go back to companies that treated me well. However, companies that pressure me to stay I typically write off as scummy and won’t go back if the need arises.
Reminds me of the old MCI telemarketers. You'd tell them you're not interested in their long distance service, and the rejoinder would be "You don't want to save money?"
I've been witness to a number of cold callers having their heritage and species loudly questioned for using this tactic.
"Cancelling your product is going to save me even more money."
I mean, it's annoying to have to talk to sales reps when you don't have to, but I feel like people here are being a little overly dramatic?
There are certainly some cases where it becomes almost impossible to cancel things (people hanging up on you, etc.) which are much worse than what is described here and looks like it would take about 30 seconds of my attention in a background chat window.
Haha yes! Right around the time I decided I didn't want the sub anymore was luckily right around when I cancelled (for unrelated reasons) the credit card they had on file. Super easy!
My credit card expired and they sent my account to collections. I still subscribe because I like the work their journalists do, but when I read an article about how they're dying I don't really feel bad for them.
(I am also tempted to cancel my Wall Street Journal subscription when I accidentally read an opinion column. Not sure why real journalists let partisan hacks put their opinion columns right next to their real work. Strange business model!)
How is that not fraudulent? Obviously they're not giving you online access anymore or sending you papers once your card gets declined for a month-to-month subscription.
I canceled WSJ a little while ago and it was a total nightmare. Had to call a number, got put on hold for about 45 minutes, then had to answer a bunch of questions and deal with an aggressive sales pitch. Never subscribing again because of that. I'm sticking with Washington Post for now because it's a lot cheaper, has better politics coverage, and the cancelation process is more reasonable (I think, haven't had to do it yet).
When the WSJ rep asked me why I was canceling, one of the reasons I gave was how bad the op-ed section is. A little while ago the news room writers actually put together an open letter complaining about the lack of accuracy in the op-ed section, and also asking for the labeling on the op-eds to be more clear, because it was affecting the news rooms' credibility.
Can you show me some examples? I subscribe to both the NYT and the WSJ to act as a check and balance on each other. But the actual news is pretty much exactly identical. The reporting choices on big stories are about the same, with the NYT throwing in some more human interest stories while the WSJ gets into business nuts and bolts. (Following the whole Gamestop thing was much easier on the WSJ, for example.)
Both newspaper's opinion sections are complete garbage. I tend to agree with the NYT's opinion columnists more than the WSJ's, but I wouldn't say the pieces are well-reasoned, that they try to explain both sides of the issue, etc. It's basically long-form Twitter, which I would pay extra to opt out of.
Yep, me too. For things like the NYT, I buy through Apple's store, and cancellation is all in one place and easy, as are the terms of when the cancellation will take effect.
Completely straightforward, no hassle, no surprises.
The challenge is the price. I call and cancel every year, and then renew in the same phone call since they finally offer me 8 bucks a month (and then bump it to 15 after a year). With Apple the cheapest option I see is 14.99, so even though it sucks up my time, the call helps me save 80+ bucks a year.
I'm surprised how many publications went the route of selling subscriptions to a virtual paper. I can't bring myself do to it. If it was just a 75 cents charge for the new articles and you could access them forever, that would be more appealing to me.
Put it this way wouldn't mind buying a national geographic on the iPad but I don't want a subscription for this very reason and it seems like a waste of money paying for something I might not get into.
I bought a subscription last year during their $4 a month special but cancelled it a few months later. I had to go through the chat system on the website to cancel my subscription, but my experience was rather different. I told the customer service agent that “I thought I’d be reading more of the newspaper but I found that the free allotment of articles will likely suit my usage,” and the service agent cancelled the subscription.
When they ask why you are cancelling say "No reason". There is literally nothing they can say to prolong the whole experience. Don't volunteer any information. Don't tell them what is wrong with their website. Don't tell them anything. You will make the whole process go longer.
I just say, "Cancel my subscription." Don't play their game, don't give them an inch, if they ask why, just repeat "Cancel my subscription". If they say something else, just say "cancel" and nothing else. They will cave.
This reminds me of the French newspaper lemonde.fr, which I had subscribed to, and then wanted to unsubscribe after a couple months. There was simply no way to do so online, not to reach any customer support. The only option was to send a letter via post. This was during our first lockdown in UK, so no way I would go to the post office for that. I'll simply never be a customer again.
Ha! I had this experience years ago. I subscribed in college to practice my French, but ended up wanting to unsubscribe because I had more important uses for the money. Sure enough, I had to use my rudimentary language skills to write a letter to unsubscribe and mail it off to France.
Glad that worked! I hope that didn't put you off learning French.
Personally, I stopped trying to write such letters after a couple instances where the recipient company claimed they never received any letter from me.
Then I learned you should always send a letter with a signature to have a proof of reception, which is a bit more expensive. And then one kept charging me anyway, and still claimed the letter didn't reach the right department (after more time spent on the phone with them).
Bottom line is if a company wants to make it difficult for you to leave the relationship with them, there are tons of tricks in the books for that. Therefore I blacklist them after any sign of dishonesty.
Being too afraid to make a quick trip to the post office sounds like major overkill to me. Besides that couldn't you have ordered stamps and envelopes online?
Can people in the UK not send outgoing letters by putting them in their mailbox and raising the little outgoing mail flag? Is that a uniquely American thing?
As a Canadian who has been in the US close to 10 years, this is the first I've heard of this! I had always assumed the flag was meant to be set by the letter carrier in some bygone era as a courtesy to let residents know they had mail. Thank you, kind internet stranger.
To answer the question, this service doesn't exist in any other country I've lived in -- Canada or Japan, in my case.
> I had always assumed the flag was meant to be set by the letter carrier in some bygone era as a courtesy to let residents know they had mail.
Even as an American I used to think this, but because I grew up in a large city where all mail collection was from a mail box at the corner of the block. It wasn't until I moved to a sprawling suburb did I have my own mailbox at the end of the driveway and I got to use that little flag thing for the first time.
In Australia, you post something by putting it in a post box, they're located in shopping areas and have specified collection times, usually daily on weekdays.
Of course, you can also go into the post office and deal with a human who will take the postage $ as needed.
These days, the number of times I've posted something can be counted in low single digits per year. Mostly dealing with government forms that need signatures because stupid reasons.
Does not exist in Germany either. Most of our regular mail delivery is done by foot or bicycle, except in very sparse rural areas. And our mailboxes have locks anyway. So it's either the post office or a street mail drop-off box/pillar box. Nobody I know does regularly post letters anyway, it's more in the range of 1-2 letters a year if even that.
In the UK, there's normally a postbox serving a whole street that people can put letters in to send (distinct from the letterbox in each house's front door). GP's nearest postbox might have been inside their local post office, or they might just have needed to buy stamps.
Most houses don't have an external mailbox, the mail goes through the front door and into a basket. A lot of houses on terraced streets have no front garden and open directly onto the road, especially in cities.
There is doorstep letter and parcel collection for less than a dollar.
I subscribed to the NYT a couple years back. I had to talk to a rep to get canceled, and at one point he offered something like half a year for free if I'd keep the subscription. I insisted on canceling, because I was getting irritated, and he laughed out loud that I refused the free offer. Right then they lost me forever as a customer.
But it was a valuable lesson on looking at the exit strategy for a service before you sign up for it. And I try real hard to only do business with companies that make it as easy to stop spending money with them as it is to start.
Tried to expand on it but I missed the edit window. If you're a subscriber (even at a discount) you count in their circulation numbers. Those numbers affect their advertising costs, the value of the news outlet (not just the NYTimes), and probably the internal performance reviews of lots of people who really don't want to lose you.
Traditionally newspapers didn't make enough money from subscription revenue to cover their costs - advertising is where the money was, payment for subscriptions was nice but a big part of its importance was as an indicator "this person cares enough to pay for this news source" for selling advertising. That hasn't really changed that much.
Not sure why your comment got downvoted, really. I agree, from their perspective it makes sense to give away a half year of service if it keeps the subscriber account active. It increases the odds above zero that the customer will stay even after they have to pay again, it looks good for the advertising stats, etc.
I don't think they're really factoring in the "angry customer" aspect, however, or they'd stop. They turned me from an ambivalent customer who decided the ROI wasn't there, into an opinionated former customer who is willing to tell friends and family the horror show that will happen if they subscribe and then decide later it isn't for them. It's the opposite of good word-of-mouth advertising, and NYT is going to suffer for it. Even if they change their policy today.
Honestly only case where I'm willing to overlook it. It's so hard for them to stay in the black. I can't imagine, in this age. For a serious newspaper that does good investigative journalism, I'll accept some desperate measures to keep subscribers and not hold it against them.
Any other company and I'd call them garbage, but the NYT does a lot of good. (Same would go for other top investigative journals that have published a lot of pieces revealing major information to the public.)
Again, I highly doubt that NYT relies on these dark patterns, but I could be wrong.
If NYT actually relied on these tactics to keep themselves afloat, then I wouldn’t call it “thriving”, simply because these kinds of techniques are not sustainable at all in the long run.
And a common definition of thriving is growing in profitability, for which stock price can often be a good metric. Their stock price gas increased 289% over the last five years.
eh, I don't know. NYT sucks up a LOT of talent from across the country. What I'm saying is: this sort of thing is maybe excusable from small/independent journalism outlets trying to stay afloat, but you don't need to make excuses for NYT. They pay their own executives handsomely to do that.
The NYT has been doing really, really well financially the last 4 years. Their stock price is up almost 300% since 2016--not the only metric, obviously, but it certainly gives some indications of how concerned investors are that it will stay in the black.
Other, smaller papers are not doing nearly as well.
NYT was once known as the paper of record decades ago. In the past recent years they have starting slipping on their journalist standards and reliability. They were pivotal in pushing the WMDs in iraq for example as well as russian collusion.
Substack. Citizen journalism is the future. The MSM solely exist to make every problem your problem through an omnipresent stream of manufactured outrage.
One reason I don't click links that go to Substack is that the founders seem happy to donate free content to alt-right outlets. I don't give traffic to organizations like that.
A while back someone posted a look into their finances and business strategy. They were fumbling the ball a decade ago, but are now doing extremely well
They're not a charity or a nonprofit that relies on donations. They're a business selling a product, and the only thing that should rationally factor into giving them money or not is if you want to buy the product. Need doesn't factor into the equation.
Some business and industries do more social good than others. We're all still adjusting to the internet. I'm on the side of leaning towards giving NYT a pass for this. It was a single chat interaction, not so bad.
No business gets a pass for crappy behaviour bordering on malpractice. NYT is a left-leaning, propaganda paper today which has fired most of its older and rational staff writers and editors.
I've never been able to cancel any subscription with ease, so nowadays I always use Privacy to get temporary credit cards. When I want the subscription cancelled, I try the provider's website, if it doesn't work, I just cancel the card all together.
I have to replace my simple.com account, so instead of doing that for a dozen or more subscriptions, I just changed the funding provider in Privacy, and keep the vendor-specific virtual cards.
There is some danger to this since just because your card is declined doesn’t mean that you stop owing them money. Gyms like to take advantage of this.
What does "to your door" mean here, because it's exactly how the process works in the US.
Typically if don't pay a bill you'll get a few months to rectify with fees tacked on, then internal collections will happen or it'll be sold to a collection service.
In both cases you'll get letters and eventually if the amount is high enough or the debt other otherwise motivated, a summons for pre trial mediation and then a civil suit.
This might vary in pre vs postpaid accounts. Postpaid typically includes credit check which requires submission of info that could later be used for collections.
The solution to that is, you never give them your real name, address, number, email, etc. It's never verified and Privacy doesn't seem to check your name matches.
Unless you have a contract, no, you don't owe them anything. Saying that you'd like recurring charges doesn't obligate you to continue paying after you've stopped using a service.
I was a member of a well-known gym for more than ten years straight. Once, my card expired, and when I went to work out they said the membership had lapsed.
No problem, right? I'll pay up on the account, re-activate, and work out. Nope, they wanted to charge me a reactivation fee. I said "no" and left. Never paid them another dime.
A gym's ideal customer is one who pays but never uses the facilities. One can imagine that if you often used the facilities, particularly at peak times, they almost want to discourage you,
You don't owe someone money just because they say you do. If you've given notice to someone that you want to cancel in a reasonable way, then you don't owe them money any more. Keep documentation of your efforts to cancel, and if they try to put something on your credit report, go to court.
What kind of fraud does it sound like? I gave my credit card to the merchant and said they could charge it for auto-renew, but that doesn't seem to put me under any obligation to make sure the card is still valid next year - credit cards expire or get canceled all the time. The merchant is free to cancel the subscription if the auto-renew fails.
Contract law in general does not prescribe that the contract is automatically terminated with no obligations if some payment doesn't arrive. The method of payment is pretty much orthogonal to any obligation to pay and the continuation of the contract.
The contract may stipulate that the merchant is free to cancel the subscription if you don't pay for whatever reason (the card expires, the card does not have money, you chose to pay in cash and didn't have a card, whatever). However, the contract can (and usually does) stipulate that the merchant is not required to cancel the subscription in case of non-payment, and in that case the contract is valid, they owe you service and you owe them the contractually agreed payment.
On the other hand, contract law generally would assume that the subscription is cancelled if you sent them an unambiguous request in writing even if their standard process flow (e.g. requiring a phone call with a sales rep convincing you not to quite) wasn't followed - if you've sent a letter than that and stopped paying, that should be appropriate in most circumstances.
Why would it be fraud? I paid for the service when I used it, if the business makes it impossible to cancel a subscription or makes you go through endless hoops to waste your time, that's on them. After I stop paying for it, they'll just stop providing me the service.
If you signed a contract for X amount of months, then I get it, you have to pay, but I always do month to month at the gym, they still make it impossible to cancel.
For anyone wondering - no this definitively isn't fraud - no it will have no impact your credit (there isn't even a mechanism for this to happen), nor will it get debt collectors after you (you don't owe a subscription continual payment, failure to pay only means they can terminate your service).
I have encountered similar tactics from a popular VPS provider. Set up your account to auto-renew, send the invoice to collections if they can't charge you, instead of just canceling the service. Infuriating, to the point where you'd think they'd be more concerned about driving away future customers.
This is not fraud at all. You could just as easily file a dispute. You're under no obligation to continue allowing a company to charge you a recurring subscription that you do not wish to continue with.
Cards stop working due to fraud or lost cards all the time. Businesses must accept this as a fact of life. Forcibly dunning is a malicious business practice.
Credit cards expire all the time, if I had an interest in ensuring payments flowed I would have given you an updated credit card... which I'm sure would be easier than cancelling.
It only works if you didn't give them your name and address. At least in Europe some debt collection agencies will track you down and charge an enormous fee, and will leave you with a bad credit score.
Yes we all have a credit score - it's mainly used to measure your ability to borrow and repay debt and will influence whether a company loans to you and the interest rate on said loan.
It's not (yet) as aggressive as the social scoring system in China if that is what you were alluding to...
Do you not have a similar system where you are from? How would the above be decided for you?
Well, is it a score based on your current economic situation, or your past use of credit?
Here in Norway you're evaluated/scored based on some metrics like income, job security, job prospects, education, assets, debt, defaulted debt in the past, fixed expenses, etc. I think when Americans talk about "credit score" they talk about something completely different, namely their insane system where your score is (positively) affected by taking on and managing credit card debt. In that fucked up world, two debt-free people with the same income will be "scored" differently if one of them happens to use a CC to buy all his groceries and pays off the card each month, and the other buys the same groceries on debit. Surely you don't have that insanity in the UK, do you?
There's not a universal credit score in the UK. There are a bunch of providers who will try and sell a score to you, but the actual score can vary greatly from provider to provider and guarantees nothing in terms of getting accepted for credit.
Banks giving out loans will look at the data behind the score along with a bunch of other factors. It's very possible that if Experian say person A is average and person B is good, a bank may decide to give Person A a better rate on a loan based on different data, or different weighting of the data.
In the UK maybe, not most countries. There are some corporate databases that consumers eill mever hear about, but certainly nothing even close to US credit scores.
Happened to me. Cancelled Sky Broadband, CS reps wouldn't acknowledge it. Got sick of the back-and-forth. Sky don't just make you wait on hold for 30 mins, they play ads at you while you wait. Fuck that. Stopped the direct debit.
Debt collectors got in touch years later asking for £50.
I said, "fine, send me a copy of whatever bill I supposedly didn't pay."
They didn't have it. "We don't have any documentation, just pay us."
Escalated to a complaint and they dropped it.
I'd do the same again, but could totally understand why some people wouldn't. YMMV.
When I left the UK 11+ years ago, I cancelled Sky, or so I thought. 6 months go by in another country, all my mail was redirected to my parents address in case I missed something. My parents got angry letters from Sky demanding payment, but I had already settled this before I left the country. Well, turns out they cancelled my TV subscription but was still charging me for Sky+ (ability to record). I'm not sure why it wasn't cancelled at the same time, surely when I told them I was moving to a different country as to the reason I was cancelling, I wouldn't need the Sky+ feature.
Privacy.com is awesome, but I recently tried using this for Bloomberg, and their e-commerce platform seemed to know that I was using a prepaid card and declined the authorization.
That’s not really the point. It’s that once companies have your CC info they make it arbitrarily difficult to stop paying them. This kind of behavior should run afoul of consumer protection laws.
Irrespective of the quality of the publication or whether one wants to support a specific industry or publication by default, there's no good-faith reason why canceling a subscription has to be difficult.
I agree but the original post seems to want to ask someone to reconsider subscribing (or something to that effect). To me that raises the question if it is worth whatever hassle they demonstrate.
At the moment, its hard to say... I'm loathe to say, "Nothing", but that may actually be the most correct answer.
Institutions have completely squandered what little trust the public once had in them.
I think we're living through a very specific period of history in which we're going to see some sort of new paradigm emerge and become dominant. Citizen journalism has been on the rise - I don't know how long, I admit I don't pay much attention to it - and established journalists like Matt Taibbi are moving to Substack.
I don't know what the future might hold, but I don't think the next 100 years will look at all like the past 100 years, at least insofar as the concept of "news" is concerned.
Every single outlet you just listed is just as bad as the New York Times... /r/news is absolutely the worst cesspool shithole I've ever encountered on reddit, with the possible exception of /r/politics.
It isn't just their rabid anti-conservative bias, which I'm more or less fine with as its pretty clear their possessed by their ideologies, but its their fascism of banning anyone who has a different opinion, while hilariously hiding behind "fighting fascism". I guess it makes sense though... fight fire with fire, fight fake fascism with real fascism...
Oh got it. Yeah I'm kinda skeptical of reddit as a dedicated news source, it has issues... even just skewing the context of articles with wonky titles and such.
Maybe the problem is with human's inherent intellectual laziness.
Maybe instead of visiting numerous sites and forming their own opinion people wait for a single news source to spoon feed them their thoughts for the day.
You can be lazy or you can get closer to the truth.
Imagine having a business model so fragile that your only line of defense is to obscure the cancellation process through these tactics. Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?
I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy.
And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant customer who can sign up later again, what you get is someone who hates your company.
What an incredibly stupid way to erode the brand of a publication, whose major asset to survive is precisely its brand.
Another related dark pattern: When cancelling a Prime trial, Amazon makes it appear as if you're going to lose the Prime benefits immediately, not at the end of the trial, to keep you from cancelling early.
(It seems like you DO keep them until the end of the trial, but you only get told that after cancelling)
Together with their decreased support quality (agents barely understanding what I write + the typical "tell the customer what they want to hear so they go away and give you a good CSAT, by the time they realize you lied it won't matter for you anymore"), I have a _very_ low opinion of Amazon. They still have a service (delivery time), price (free shipping) and consistency advantage in many cases, but it's quickly shrinking, and I am much more likely to buy from alternative places if they can make a competitive offer.
I've experienced the opposite with Amazon. If you complain about a product you've gotten they simply refund the full purchase price, no need to return the item or anything. I've even gotten months of prime refunded by telling them I forgot to cancel.
I assume that eating the cost of a bad purchase is cheaper for them than upsetting a long-term customer.
I've never had that experience with Amazon UK, they've always demanded that the broken / damaged item be returned.
On one occasion when I had to return an item I ended up £30 out of pocket because it had to go by courier instead of post, due to length. I had to argue with their customer support to obtain recompense despite it having been them who told me to send it courier. The item was only worth £80.
Nowadays I just use Amazon as a price baseline but shop elsewhere.
On returned items, both Amazon US and Amazon DE have been quite helpful. I think Amazon US is even more over-the-top, but I think the local retail standards for this are much higher in the US so it makes sense.
On memberships, I don't mind the Prime cancelling issues very much because they seem to always credit back a month if you later tell them you forgot to cancel. Unfortunately, there are annoying dark patterns when signing up, hiding the "No thanks" button when trying to get through an order, etc.
I just returned an item and they arranged for a courier to collect. They acknowledged the return after one day and credited my account the following day.
The only thing I noticed is they hide the collection options under a button. By default they encourage you to drop off at a depot or post office.
In my recent experience this has changed drastically. Amazon was
on average the cheapest, fastest online marketplace I'd used,
and any issues were resolved within an hour.
Now I'm still waiting for a product I ordered 3 months ago. The
only option I have is contacting the seller - who doesn't
respond. I wrote a review about the experience, which then got
promptly removed.
More recently I've ordered a few things from multiple places,
the one outstanding delivery is from Amazon, and now almost a
week late. It'll probably be the last one; their obvious lack of
interest regarding fake reviews, review resetting and
obfuscation, misleading pricing, counterfeit products and the
constantly shrinking number of quality products have taken a
toll. More often than not products are shipped from China,
making it a worse choice than many local competitors who may ask
higher prices for delivery but at least ship in two days instead
of two weeks, have a phone support hotline and a reason to care.
Very slowly but steadily the reasons I started using Amazon's
platform eroded away until it became more or less a more
approachable middleman for aliexpress dropshippers.
Same story with a full Prime subscription, not just the free trial, they use several dark patterns to confuse you about what will happen when you actually hit the cancel button.
When I found myself slowly buying fewer things on Amazon a few years ago and decided to cancel Prime after many years as a subscriber, I was so grossed out by the cancellation process that I’ve actively avoided ordering from them ever since.
I just got fooled by another Amazon dark pattern and ended up with a Prime free trial I don’t want. Went to cancel it immediately, and wow so many hoops to jump through. Hopefully I did it right. If they end up forgetting I canceled they are getting a chargeback so fast it will make their heads spin.
Curious, I cancelled mine yesterday because they messed up my billing and wouldn't/couldn't unsuspend it¹, so the CS person suggested to cancel and resubscribe. I did have to confirm about three times that this is what I wanted to do, but in no case was it hidden or not obvious.
¹ it was a bit of a mess, they first tried to bill an empty credit card, but only notified me after several attempts when prime was actually suspended. I added a regular credit card, but they don't conform to the new EU rules about authentication so it just got declined. Again, they didn't tell me they were even trying. So I added a SEPA account which is possible through the UI, but apparently they required a credit card. In the end I just cancelled, and re-signed up under the amazon of the country I live in (which is fairly new, hence not doing it the first time.) At least I get another free trial month for the hassle.*
I cancelled it a couple of years ago so perhaps things have changed, but afaik I'm not alone in feeling it was intentionally designed to confuse...lots of scrolling, multiple buttons with slightly different wordings, confusing warnings about when exactly the benefits end.
Just the fact that I–a software engineer and longtime Amazon customer–felt compelled to open a new tab and Google questions about the cancellation process, seemed ridiculous to me. Plenty of less tech savvy folks are sure to have been confused, tricked or given up in the process.
Same, then you get bombarded with ads on Amazon for a free trial despite the fact you're logged into your Amazon account and Amazon knows damn well you're not eligible for the free trial anymore. I quit Audible after prices stopped being related to length. At the $17 a pop for the three-hour books I was buying it was going to cost me $900 to get the whole series. Nope!
The other issue with audible cancellation is that you throw away your credits...but then if you try to spend 5-10 credits quickly it becomes challenging...so you don't cancel. lol
They say this, but your credits aren’t actually thrown away immediately (at least they weren’t in 2018 or thereabouts). I learned this by ending up in exactly the position you describe - trying to get rid of credits before canceling - except I gave up with one or two left. To my surprise, they were still there once I was done canceling.
Stating the obvious here: it is a Service. When you stop the provision of a cellular service, you immediately lose access to the the service. If you have not consumed the remaining of your points/credit/etc. I find it hard that the service provider would be nice enough to let you consume them points/credit/etc.
Exceptions will exist, but the general rule is such.
That's not how Audible works. You buy the credits with your subscription unlike an unlimited-consumption model such as Netflix. As a result, they have a policy of allowing credits to be used for a limited time after canceling: https://help.audible.com/s/article/do-i-keep-my-credits-if-i...
No, it is subscription. Much like a magazine subscription, where you are purchasing the magazine each month, you are purchasing credits each month that you can use to buy audiobooks that you then own (yes yes, do you really “””own”””” things in the digital world of licenses, blah blah). So losing access to the app, and therefore the audiobooks you purchased, is not how it is supposed to work.
But THIS is how it works. This reality doesn't fit your paradigm. But the reality prevails.
In other words, when you stop paying them.. it stops. You can no longer consume the goods, past-present-future. You call it subscription. I call it a service. Because in my mind a subscription to a Newspaper is "News-as-a-Service. I stop paying Amazon, I lose the AWS. I stop paying the Economist, I lose access to all (present-past-future) issues.
Downvote all you want. Call it what you want. Still.. someone give me an example where the subscription ENDED, and they still have access to the Benefits. If not.. you're welcome. NaaS. Unless you get the paper-copy. Then you ACTUALLY bought the "News" and ONLY because YOU control the physical medium (the paper its printed on).
> someone give me an example where the subscription ENDED, and they still have access to the Benefits
Literally Audible. The person that couldn't access the app is not the norm and likely had some sort of problem. You can access the app after you cancel and can continue to download and listen to books you've already bought. That is why it is a subscription, not a service.
This probably has to do with Apple charging 30% for any in-app payments so Audible didn’t bother implementing any payments / subscriptions functionality on their app.
This isn't the first time I've seen NYT cancellation process in my social feeds. It has to be a negative feedback loop cycle. People that read HN are absolutely the type that would consider paying for NYT (or at least the two cohorts have great overlap).
This cancellation process never considered the impact of internet cancel culture and rage reactions. It's far easier to damage a brand than it is to build it up.
Last couple days have only one story from NYT with ore than 100 upvotes. I didn't bother with checking further than second page of results, but though there are lots of submissions, rarely they get more than a couple of upvotes.
The OP's claim is a little strong but in my case, it's a narrative and opinion pieces that melt in with the news. We used to have international and domestic news, and an Opinions section that had the narrative. Now, we have opinions mixed in all three, inflammatory headlines, and missing data (one-sidedness), with more extreme assertions in Opinions.
For a younger person, perhaps they wouldn't notice? I have been reading NYT and Guardian since the early 2000s, and canceled the NYT this summer when they failed to report really major events in NYC that didn't match narrative (looting and rioting that was directly observable for two days). I realized at that point we had a real problem.
The Guardian has always been more openly activist, and I have a lot of respect for their Snowden work. But Trump being in the front page for four years was a bit much.
I'm pretty happy with Reuters and to a lesser degree Bloomberg (whom I pay per month 7 times what I was paying for the NYT subscription).
It didn't used to be this bad. The NYT revamped its editorial staff and got some controversial identity politics types (Google "sarah jeong tweets" and be your own judge), and also discovered that much like Fox News, running aggressive and inflammatory headlines and opinion pieces gets clicks.
It's depressing because the NYT was more of a mainstream liberal newspaper whose main crimes were a lack of critical attitude towards foreign policy (such as the weapons of mass destruction fiasco). Its domestic reporting was decent. Now the domestic reporting is pitting Americans against one another.
Back in 2006 an AOL subscriber recorded their conversation with an AOL customer service agent while trying to cancel the service. It was really bad, way worse than this NYTimes process. The NYT wrote an article about the debacle [1] and had this to say about Netflix's great customer service and ease of cancellation, compared to AOL's awful service:
"Seeing how Netflix would be so protective of my time were I to leave makes me all the more unlikely to do so."
My experience with this was having a dormant Chase account with like $100 in it, which they chipped away at, withdrawing the $4/mo fee or whatever, until the balance was at $0, whereupon it was immediately closed.
I'm not sure if this really counts for much in their favour.
Wells Fargo "accidentally" failed to close my account when I went in person to close it--though they did give me a check for the balance and told me it was closed--and then when I realized six months later it wasn't actually closed, they tried to make me pay them 6 months worth of monthly fees before they would close it.
When I closed my Wells Fargo account, they took out all my money, charged me some account closing fee, which over-drafted and fell back to a credit card which now had a balance on it due to the overdraft and they told me they couldn't close my account. I think I ended up paying something like 130 dollars of fees just to close my account, but at that point they'd already screwed me over so many times that I just paid it all and walked out.
Terrible, terrible company.
Every person everywhere really needs to move all their money to credit unions, our banking system is so thoroughly fucked.
In the US, they would reopen your account without telling you and start charging you fees and/or interest on the amount they overpaid. I know this because it happened to me last year when American Express mistakenly refunded a credit to me twice when closing an account (one check and one bank transfer). I never even cashed the check but apparently that didn’t make a difference to them.
I've no experience with the bank named and assume it is in the US, but for what it is worth, in the UK people hardly ever pay for bank accounts. It does appear to be viable, although I'm not sure how it works.
Revenue from account fees must be peanuts, they make their money lending/investing/etc. deposits, in normal times interest rates are positive, so they might even pay for custom, getting more deposits, giving them more capital to make their money from.
Charging for bank accounts in North America is just like commission on retail brokers - everyone else is doing it, so why not? Eventually probably 'fintech startup challenger banks' with the novel idea of not charging will gain too much market share, and the big boys will scrap the fees too in order to compete (and barely feel it).
The big US banks each make over $1.5B in overdraft fees yearly. Fees on consumer accounts make up about 3-4% of the big banks annual income. Not as much as they make on consumer interest payments, but those are still some pretty big peanuts. I think they'd feel it if they scrapped fees.
It's subsidised by eye watering fees on unarranged overdrafts. When the FCA and CMA looked into it several years ago, the banks claimed they couldn't reduce overdraft fees or they wouldn't be able to afford to offer free bank accounts any more. Some challenger banks wanted it to be forbidden to describe such accounts as 'free'.
Ha, I had a bank account that I opened for one specific purpose then forgot to close. It was empty. They kept withdrawing account keeping fees, sending it into overdraft. Then they added overdraft fees. When I went to close it, they tried to badger me into paying all the fees first.
I closed an account with Santander and they sent the remaining monies in it to another bank account.
Then they accepted a charge on the account from a subscription I had forgotten to move, even though the account was closed, and because my account was then in deficit decided to reactivate my account without letting me know. Then they charged me an overdraft fee and daily penalties, and then eventually sent me a bill with like £120 of charges.
I challenged it and had to speak on the phone to people for ages. Eventually they took the charges off as a "one-off gesture of good faith" which annoyed me, because it still implies that it was my mistake and not theirs.
If signed up to the scheme (most are, including Santander), your old bank is responsible for passing on any deposits directly to your new bank account and the new bank is responsible for processing any transactions made using your old details. This carries on for, I believe 12 months.
I found the Switch Guarantee service to be excellent and believe it's a significant driver of innovation and competition in UK banking (which is far ahead of many other European countries in my experience).
My payees from my old bank were even transferred over to my new one.
(Current account = checking account to any non-UK readers.)
Ah, that's good to know for the future - I closed it manually.
I wasn't told about this and didn't know about it - mind you it was a few years ago so not sure if this is a newer service.
That’s part of of most states’ escheatment processes. Inactive bank accounts are typically closed after three years, and funds are given to the state to hold until you claim them.
I’ve had an empty Ally bank account open for at least a decade. Still get statements for it each month. Every time I’ve tried to close it, it’s accumulated $0.01 interest, which I have to transfer out before closing. That transfer takes a few days, so by the time I can close it, I’ve totally forgotten about it, or don’t have the will to go log in.
Leave it. If you're in CA (or some other states, but I know for CA) it'll get shut down after 5 years or so and the funds will go through escheatment to the state. Then you can go get them from the state. But you have to remember not to login and ignore all notices from them.
Ive slightly misstated it - they closed the cheque function on the account (although the account is still called a ‘cheque account’ now, 10+ years later). The account was active but no longer had a cheque book associated with it. However I had a physical cheque book.
I don't know about refunding here, but I love that whenever you cancel Prime, you receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the period you had paid for.
But canceling prime does not make you a non-customer for amazon. People tend to forget that. You can still order, you still have your account and the refund is an incentive to "come back" -- although you never left.
Not to criticize this behavior, just to set it into the proper context. Its just smart to see the potential customer in your cancellations anyway.
Also if you accidentally let your Prime roll over for another month and you try to cancel a few days later without having bought anything that month, they'll offer to refund the most recent payment. Happened to me a few weeks ago, I was surprised.
They choose to offer refunds but also to bury the unsubscribe button behind 5+ screens with misleading text and reminders of what you'll "lose".
Rather than good customer service, Amazon try to be generous on the visible aspects that people might talk about, but quietly cheat you with antipatterns.
Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period.
Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well.
In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently.
We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too.
And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time.
This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.
What a great attitude! I wish more businesses were like that. I had to leave a startup once, that I as a senior dev managed to drag to profitability, because I saw how they treated their customers.
It was such a sad experience- while helping out with the customer side I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I mean yeah they did get a fair amount of money from those schemes, but they did loose all of their senior devs in the process.
I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I personally don't think routine cancellation policy should even be up to the business. Deliberately preventing customers from cancelling a subscription that they are entitled to cancel, or making it unreasonably difficult or intimidating to do so, should be grounds for legal or regulatory intervention to protect consumer rights.
A basic rule along the lines that subscription services must provide a means of cancelling that would normally be no more demanding than the means of starting the same subscription seems fair to me.
Exactly. The normal SOP is to require a credit card at the beginning of the free trial period in hopes you will forget about it and allow them to keep charging every month.
Their entire business model boils down to "exploit people's unrealistic expectations of themselves to make money". They obviously feel awkward about it, and they soften the blow a lot, which is to their credit, but at the end of the day this is where their money comes from.
But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom it does work.
For anyone in the category you describe (tried Beeminder, found their expectations of themself to be unrealistic, quit Beeminder) we definitely want to talk to you.
Also calibrating self-expectations is one of things many users tell us is worth paying for.
SkyDemon (a flight planning and navigation app) is a delight for subscribers:
* Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees.
* If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy.
* When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email.
This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.
But please offer the option to autorenew. I don't want to have to spend time renewing all my subscriptions every year. I have my subscriptions for a good reason and see their charges every time -- if I want to cancel I'll do that.
This is similar to how Apple handles subs. You get notifications when subs are expiring or renewing, and if you cancel mid cycle you keep it for the remainder of the cycle usually, including free trials. Bonus, you can see all of your subs in one place, and cancel with a single tap.
The fact that it’s NOT normal to act reasonably should be telling us something.
Imagine if you had to go through this exhausting process in your personal life. After half an hour since asking your spouse to help with the dishes, your spouse finally says “now that we realize using paper plates will solve your problem of dirty dishes, is there anything else I can help you with?”
We wouldn’t tolerate that in our personal life so why do we in business? After all, corporations are people...
Reminds me of the quote “Being well adjusted to a sick society is not a measure of health”
No they aren't. I had my account stolen twice which took calls to customer service to get back and finally cancelled which took hours and you can't do online when you can't even log into your account. I have like $90 of fraudulent Netflix bills.
Interesting. I cancelled Netflix account 7 months ago and haven't used it since. A few days ago I received "Action needed: Reset your password" due to allegedly "suspicious sign-in". After changing the password and looking into the Recent activity, I couldn't see any suspicious recent login there. So I contacted the support and they said cancelled accounts are deleted after 10 months since cancellation. So now, with 3 months remaining, they apparently send a fake "suspicious sign-in" email in an attempt to convince me to re-activate the account. The email they sent was legit (no phishing) but there was near-zero probability of someone signing in because I used netflix-specific email address and randomly generated password for this account. EDIT: I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
I wish you saw more absurd situations like this in cyberpunk stories.
This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
It's wild that Douglas Adams' and Infocom's Bureaucracy, an interactive fiction published in 1987, had precisely this sort of thing as more or less its whole subject matter. It's not quite exact to what we see today, of course; for one thing, it traffics in paper forms and mail-in cards, rather than web forms and obstructionist live chats. But its juxtaposition of saccharine platitudes and hostile apathy feels no less evergreen for the intervening decades.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
That's fair; I was tempted to say that The Fifth Element also a little bit prefigured "hopepunk", in that it is, in spite of everything, a love story with a happy ending. Brazil could maybe almost be considered the "black mirror" version of the same story, if you squint really hard at least.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
Bureaucracy was very enjoyable. I wish he had released that same basic content in other forms. I often think of scenes from that game in everyday life; too few other people have ever played it.
Likewise. But it was so hard to get any work out of Adams, apparently [1], that it's no great surprise Bureaucracy only happened in the medium of IF.
Perhaps it's time for a reimagining - I could see it working really well as a collection of "websites" with "live chats" and "emails" and so forth, borrowing tools from the "alternate-reality game" style of organic viral marketing and turning them to an altogether nobler purpose. I think that'd be the right choice of medium to tell this sort of story today.
In general, my remark was less about absurdity and more about how the same set of incentives can produce both consumer-friendly and consumer-hostile behaviors, sometimes from the same company.
Cyberpunk stories tend to focus on the "consumer-hostile" part, whereas I think the superposition of the two and the permanent conflict between them is way more interesting.
(For instance, you almost never see review systems or consumer watchdogs in cyberpunk stories)
I cancelled my Netflix subscriptions for a few months, then tried to renew and cannot because of a bug in their Credit Card process. I have phoned and tweeted and online chatted etc... Their only solutions is for me to buy gift cards, which I won't.
In the meantime, they keep sending me emails every week to beg me to try Netflix again.
So Netflix spends money to promote to me, and to answer my support requests, while they won't do a thing about their broken payment process.
>One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience
...and the other is the Netflix Specials department.
EDIT: Addendum so not to be too shitposty.
I think Netflix came to Denmark around 2013 or so, and the content at the time was pretty good. Now you have to wade through a swamp of third rate trash and maybe you're lucky to find something that isn't absolute garbage. My account will remain canceled.
Using services like Donotpay which generates credit card numbers that you can then freeze instantly might be the best solution for this. You can easily get an account when good content is recommended by friends etc then just switch off the card until you need to use the service. Cancelling is a lot of work.
Damm, same thing happened to me. I initially thought I was going crazy that my password was hacked but something did not feel right about that suspicious sign in email.
I was thinking about it. The only place where the app was still installed was an Android tablet but no one has opened the app for many months (only me and my partner has access to the tablet and none of us opened the app). It could theoretically connect from the background by itself (I think android makes it possible for apps to run in the background) but when I tried to open the app the day after I got that email, it just displayed Update required screen (we don't auto-uldate apps on that tablet). And the suspicious login mentioned in the email was not recorded in the Recent Activity in the profile. Unfortunately I don't record all network activity on home network so can't 100% rule out this possibility but it seems unlikely to me that the app would try to connect from the background after couple of months by itself.
The email I received was "We’ve detected a suspicious sign-in to your Netflix account. Just to be safe we've reset your password and you’ll need to set a new one." with a button to "Set a new password".
It didn't mention any IP or geolocation as many other services say in such cases.
> I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
Do you live in the US? GDPR does not apply to US companies serving US citizens. If you live in the EU, you might need to request account deletion, I think GDPR doesn't require that data is deleted, it gives Europeans the right to have their data deleted upon request. (I've read the entire code before but I don't remember the details on this point.)
I assume you're referring to the NYT there, not Netflix? (It doesn't matter that much, because the situation is similar either way.)
NYT is a US company serving a US locale by it's very name. GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans, or does EU business with EU offices*. The GDPR law is clear about this point, it is a protection for EU citizens regarding web sites and businesses that are focused on, directed and targeted toward EU citizens. It does not apply to interactions outside of the EU (aside from EU travelers visiting EU web sites), and it does not apply to web sites that originate outside the EU and are global that just happen to have visitors from the EU.
* The NYT might be advertising in the EU, I don't know. If it does, I'd be willing to bet that EU citizens are given an online mechanism to cancel, even though US citizens aren't...
GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans
It definitely does have UK specific ads, I’ve seen them, and GDPR is grandfathered into UK law.
I cancelled mine by cancelling the PayPal, there was no other way to cancel without phoning them. There is no online cancellation even for those in GDPR jurisdictions.
UPDATE: I've tried to log in again today with the password I reset yesterday and it no longer worked! xD So I've tried "reset password" again now and no reset password email is coming (I have checked Junk folder and even Exim SMTP logs - I can see the email from 17th there from Amazon SES but none from today).
Apparently someone from Netflix read my comments here and deactivated the account completely. :P Thanks!
Sorry if I spoiled your clever marketing strategy but I think sending a fake "suspicious login" email and keeping cancelled accounts for 10 months is just not right.
I think the reasoning behind keeping those cancelled accounts for such a long time is to keep the account's watchlist and/or recently played items - I'm not sure about the latter, though.
Either way, I agree with you that this is not right.
Notorious has at least two similar meanings; the more common one is "known unfavourably", the second meaning is a neutral "known", not positive or negative.
Most people only see the word used in the negative light so shy from it in the neutral use case to avoid being ambiguous or assumed negativity.
Using it with an adjective to clarify the meaning here is fine.
As a non-native speaker, my understanding of "notorious" so far has been what you described as the neutral form. However, to me, it does have a slight connotation of obsession or "doing it so much as to be annoying".
I am obviously not an authoritative source on how words are understood, but just wanted to add this data point.
I was kind of surprised at how simple it was to cancel my Netflix account. I was even going to fill out the standard "why are you leaving?" box because I had some strong opinions on changes they had made but they didn't even have one.
AOL was great when you were on a free trial and called saying you wanted to cancel but forgot. They just kept giving me another month. I was given maybe 6 months free when it should have been 3.
AOL in the 90s was second only to phone companies for being able to scam retention people.
In our college house, we’d always run these rackets and get free plane tickets, CDs, tickets, etc. The phone companies were even better. At peak, we’d farm $300-600 a semester for switching long distance.
My favorite of the telco scams was from the bad old days of long distance companies called "I Don't Care"[0]. Apparently, a lot of people didn't care which carrier it was, so these asshats took it to the bank
A popular scam was “slamming”. A “bad” phone company would use pressure tactics or lie and get people to sign up for ridiculous long distance plans... $5/minute or something like that.
The “loophole” on the consumer side was that of you lived with 5 roommates, you’d transfer the phone service every couple of months and then switch the long distance plans with a legit company like AT&T, Sprint, etc.
There was a period of time in the 90s where you would get a check or credit for switching... as much as $200-300! Long distance costs were in free fall and telcos were swimming in cash, so they decided to buy market share.
They've been wildly successful over the last several years and are dominating the competition in online subscriptions so I think the advice they've been acting on recently is working just fine.
I said the phrase "I want to cancel cable but keep internet" 23 times to a Time Warner retention specialist then their supervisor, and I may have talked to her supervisor, too. They get paid to ignore you and read back canned responses like "but what about your favorite channels?", "what about watching sports?", etc. It was the first time my girlfriend had ever seen me angry.
That seems really good advice. Next time I try to cancel my NYT subscription, I'll try that. I managed to do it entirely by email, but took 3 emails back and forth. Then in all the excitement of the 2020 US presidential election I subscribed again ... so the cycle will repeat.
P.S. there probably going to get a lot of people "going to prison" in the future so the scripts will include questions to out the fakers, who want to cancel without trouble.
Heh, comcast says the same thing. I was snookered into accepting a improved internet plan with "free HBO". Which after a few months added TV broadcast fee, and substantial other costs. I tried to move back and they literally said the are not an ISP and will not sell me an internet only plan.
I had to cancel the plan and have my "roommate" (actually my wife), start as a new customer to get an internet only plan.
That's so scummy (but also kind of funny, just the sheer audacity of Comcast). Honestly, I feel like that's so bald-faced and abusive on Comcast's part that the regulators might be interested in your story
The worst experience I had with this involved 4 customer service representatives simply hanging up (after a 30+ minute wait) after exhausting their script. I simply recorded the final call, stopping paying the bill, and sent the documentation I had to the credit reference agency when the contract went into default
At some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, "you owe $telco money", "No I don't", "oh?", "Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you've been had.", "Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.", never heard from the debt collection agency again.
I had a funny episode with TD when I was closing the bank account when I was leaving Canada for good.
Very hard to close the account, even in person. My point was to make sure that there is no recurring payments left on the account.
Similar bullshit. You ask to close the account, and they keep asking you back with a square face.
In the end, a year after I left Canada, I get a call from collectors saying that they have $600+ debt+penalties+interest on my allegedly closed credit card from a service the bank added itself, and that they set my credit score to zero.
Then I found that TD subscribed me on some bullshit "credit alert" right in the month when I asked for account closure.
An immediate WTF was how in the world my credit card was still active. In than latter came out that TD does not let people really close their CC accounts, only "stop them," which only amounts to just hiding you CC from web UI, and that you need specifically say that you want to "really close" the account, which I did. So, next time, if will ever set my foot in the country, I will need to ask them to "really, really, really close my account"
I had, surprisingly, the opposite experience when I exasperatedly wanted to cancel my BofA account. I had had it with their awful customer service and simply wanted to never do business with them again. I went into a branch expecting a difficult process. The teller had me all sorted and done in 5 minutes. I was impressed.
Does this sort of thing still end up hurting your credit score though? I don't know how this actually works, but I feel like I've heard scary things about it.
When you remove an invalid debt, make sure that the bank doesn't sneak it back in. The banks "push" to the credit scoring companies on regular intervals, so although the credit scoring company-ies may remove it, unless the bank/source removes it from THEIR systems, it will be re-pushed 1-3-6 months later.
(source: Dave Ramsey's mentioned that in many of his radio shows/podcast episodes)
6 months seems like a long latency. I've been nervously eyeing mine due to a credit payment mishap in nov/dec (of under 2 dollars) that lead to what I expected was a 30 day late payment, but as of today it hasn't shown up on the credit reports (I check two bureaus). After reading your comment my paranoia is starting to resurface.
I don't see how the distinction matters to the individual consumer. It's interesting as an insight into how the credit scoring system is organized i guess
It's very difficult as a consumer to get things off your credit report. You may be able to do.it, but expect it to take months of effort. For many small debts, it's just not worth it (and I believe this is by design).
I already had them for Internet access, but had DirecTV at the time for my TV.
They must have a quarterly quota to upsell to their subscriber base, so I'd get a call like clockwork every three months, pushing a cable TV package. Each time I'd tell them that the only reason I'm with DirecTV is because of Sunday Ticket (NFL package; exclusive to DTV). That always worked, until one day.
This sales rep responds with, "We have Redzone". I reply that it's not the same, and I really need the package I have with DTV. Then he says, "You know there are websites that stream all the games for free, right? Why not do that?"
Yeah, basically telling me to pirate the games.
... "That's a good point! Hell, I don't need any TV service at all then, right?"
The one downside to cable now streaming, is that the answer I used in the past "I don't have a TV" no longer shuts them up. It used to be amazing; it seemingly broke their brains. The two, three times I had to use it, the rep fell silent for a solid 3-4 seconds, then "You...don't have a TV?" "That's right" "...okay, so that's just internet then" "Yes".
times like this I imagine a cancellation service. Imagine paying $X to some Indian company that calls them and whenever they offer alternatives they just respond that they are not authorized to do that. Bonus if they have a think Indian accent that makes it somewhat hard to understand.
The only disadvantage is that you would probably have to give that company your billing information for that to work.
We can also imagine that Indian company you contract to also has a contract with your ISP. So one person is arguing with their coworker over canceling a plan, but they don’t know it. Like when cops go undercover on stings and end up attempting to arrest another cop on a different sting. Yes, that happens sometimes.
LOL, cable companies are the worst. I got Mediacom to cancel my non-working service and refund my money, but only after sending a completely deranged demand letter to them[1], copying their general counsel. And you know they googled me and found that I could back my threats before they did it.
> Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?
I'd bet that a small percentage of cancellation requests are waylaid by these sorts of underhanded tactics. Even if the success rate is low, it's still not zero.
Honestly they got me for a couple of years with this. The $10/month digital subscription was hitting my credit card, but every time I tried to cancel I ran into issues. It took took quite a while before I got annoyed enough to put the effort in to actually cancel it.
It is such a scummy tactic. I tell everyone not to subscribe to NYT just based on that experience.
I had a similar thing with Comcast which kept referring me to their retention department and asking me to call.
I replied to them no less than 5 times, each time pointing out that (a) I don't have time for phone calls (b) their terms and conditions permits cancelling by e-mail.
Another way is to notify them once by e-mail to end your subscription per [insert T&C clause and citation] and just stop paying. If they don't get payment they'll stop anyway, and if they come chasing after you, you have the notification you sent.
I've had success pursuing bad i.e. potentially illegal cancellation practices by filing a complaint through the attorney general's office where the company is located.
In my case:
1) First I had a rough time cancelling my account _in person_ at a T-mobile store. The remote T-mobile employees in charge of cancellation kept hanging up on the T-mobile employees calling them from the store because cancellations are bad. This was so normal to the local T-mobile employees it was laughable to them.
2) T-mobile never cancelled my account - they suspended it...and didn't tell me! They reopened it 6 months later, charged me for a few months w/o notifying me, then sent the unpaid dues to a local debt collector. I only found out after being contacted by a debt collection agency.
I was able to get both T-mobile and the collection agency they work with to "look into it", but I could not get a direct answer from T-mobile about how to fix the situation after multiple calls to them, and the collection agency relied on T-mobile to strike the debt clean.
Bob Ferguson is the attorney general for Washington where T-mobile's HQ is. Bob is THE man in case you were wondering. After filing a complaint to his office, which was then forwarded to T-mobile, I heard back from someone at T-mobile specializing in these situations in a week's time and was informed the situation was fixed and the debt was removed from my credit report.
Wow, had similar. I cancelled online, they said my account was in good standing, nothing owed, and killed my t-mobile.com account.
A few months later I got a collections notice for $500 from t-mobile, went to a t-mobile store, said that my account looked weird, and they had recorded me as not owning my phone, despite a clear account history that I paid full price for the phone and didn't owe anything.
Still get collection notices, but it's now over 7 years, and my credit card recovered by some 70 points or so when it aged out.
I don’t know if it’s American-only, but it’s definitely common place in America. These stories are particularly bad but none of them are surprising to me.
I actually found the NYT cancellation process to be relatively painless to be honest. That’s how accustomed I am to painful cancellation experiences.
T-mobile can be dirty. The law specifically prohibits holding numbers hostage--but they found a way to try anyway. My employer had gone under, I wanted to keep my number. No problem with my employer, they released it. The problem was I was trying to port the number to a pre-paid T-mobile number (at the time you could buy 1000 minutes for $100/year, the unused minutes rolled over. For light use it was the best deal out there.) The port kept failing, though, puzzling the employees. I finally got the truth out of someone in a call center--there was a big bill owed (duh! But I wasn't the responsible party.) I pointed out that what they were doing was illegal, the person I was talking to didn't care.
A letter to the regulators, though, a few days later I got a call from a much more friendly person who made it work like it should have. It's amazing how much better companies behave when the regulators come calling.
>Do they really think that they can curve their churn this way?
Yes, because it actually does work. If you need proof, just call up one of these companies and say "I am cancelling because your service is too expensive." Odds are decent that you will get some type of promo offer to keep you. If there is any competition in your area for internet/cable and you have never done this, you are wasting money.
OP could have also had any number of other problems that could have been solved by these retention specialists. Basically they are doing the equivalent of an IT person asking if you have turned it off and back on again. That might be frustrating for the type of people who read HN and know better, but the reason they ask it is because there are legitimately issues that can be solved by this extremely basic level of support.
I wonder if this isn't a profitable practice though.
However much annoying these processes are (I had to suffer an identical Financial Times cancellation process last week) They know how much it costs to take cancelling users through an account specialist and presumably they get enough people to continue subscription to make it worth while.
A continuing paying customer now is worth far more than someone who may subscribe again in the future. And even if you're sick of their cancellation process, if you want to read NY Times news again you'll signup.
Edit/addition: regarding your ".. I wonder if this isn't a profitable practice though."
Well they keep doing it, so.. at some point they ran the numbers and they saw it is better for them. Perhaps in 10y this may change, we will notice by the change of corporate practices. Profit will determine this.
I pay for a lot of subscription services like music- and film streaming, and SAAS-services but would never ever give my contact- and payment details to a newspaper or magazine. Newspapers and magazines brought their death on them self imo. People will pay for your service if they can trust them with their information, and not be harassed.
This is what throwaway credit card numbers are for. I'd like to see that concept become more mainstream. If you make it hard for me to cancel a service, fine. It's a single click in a well-designed financial app: delete card.
SiriusXM did this exact thing to me. Temp credit card declined and they kept my service active and continued to try to collect from me. I wasted hours of my life going through this cluster.
I think the primary feature is limiting the damage of a compromise.
It sounds great to also use this as a way for the customer to cancel service with an unwilling company, but I think in practice they may come after you with a collection agency.
I bet there are one or two executives who decided it would be this way. They should be named and removed. This is a prime example of an issue with simple hierarchies: the single point of failure.
I had this thought the other day - what was the last big story the NYT broke that wasn't Trump related in some way? Like, actual investigative work whether in local governments or in other countries. I can't think of a single significant story that the NYT itself broke and led the charge on
TBF, that single mention is just a tangential remark for characterisation; IMO that doesn't count as the article as a whole or in itself being "Trump-related."
It's more like, in any story where they want to point out that the subject is a sleazeball, they say he has "mob connections." That doesn't make it a story about the mafia.
(Yeah, that this was the example that came to mind does say something. More about Trump than about me, I think.)
To be fair, POWER 10 is an absolute beast. They did make the mistake of using a custom DRAM connection method (in itself actually good), for which there exists only one chip to translate it to normal DDR4. This chip uses someone else's IP for the DRAM controller part. This other company is against the system running with open firmware.
This is why we need a CPA with teeth. The should be that if you can sign up with a click on mobile, you can cancel the same way. The amount of regulatory capture in our plutocracy is maddening.
I get that ending the subscription is annoying and I wish they hadn't done it but claiming they have a "fragile" business model is just wrong.
They are WILDLY successful. Their operating profit jumped 28% last year and literally are blowing away the competition in overall subscriber numbers and growth. It's really not even close
As with many things in life, if it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.
So to answer your question, yes, it probably does reduce churn, if only slightly. Is there an occasional person who goes to try and cancel, runs into this byzantine process and then says, ah fuck it, I'll just stay subscribed so they don't have to deal with this bullshit? Yes, but probably only infrequently.
Instead, it infuriates all the rest who DO go thru the byzantine process and add more frustrating to whatever reason they were already intent on canceling from in the first place, as was demonstrated in this OP's chat transcript.
Exactly. I was cringing so hard because he kept engaging with the rep on lines of questioning that were so obviously going to go down the path they did. I've cancelled my NYT account in the past and it was rather painless because I was consistent in my response and communicated clearly that I just wanted to unsubscribe. I've since renewed my subscription, but cancelling service with an ISP or even Amazon Prime at this point is way more annoying.
It also took exactly 15 minutes between encountering the live agent for the first time and the final sign-off. That's nothing given that they had to communicate via live text chat. And as others have pointed out in this thread, it's actually possible to cancel just by filling out a form, not that this excuses the dark patterns and endless offers.
This reads as someone determined to get something juicy they could screenshot, or else someone who was already so annoyed from having to find the cancellation method on the site that they let it cloud their responses to what was a relatively painless process.
The interaction didn't seem that bad to me. The business is hurting and valuable. I can kind of see how you'd get there and want "customer retention specialists", who are people that have a job they don't like where they are probably measured on some metric related to how many cancels they let through. Sucks all around, but again I was expecting so much worse.
Except that it's not required at all, as confirmed by multiple people already in this thread.
OP chose the chat route, was complaining to the virtual chat bot for a whole page in the screenshot, then presented technical issues as a reason for cancelation - which the human support rep correctly tried to help the customer with, and customer engaged in that discussion, and once OP said they want the subscription canceled regardless (just a few messages later) it got canceled.
If you were to run a business, and a customer tells you the only reason they no longer wish to remain your customer is because of technical issues that you know how to solve, would you just try to help them, or would you ignore it?
Let's say someone disabled javascript in their browser, and your website doesn't work because of it, would you just cancel their subscription or would you offer to help and if they still insist on canceling it then cancel it like the rep in the screenshot did?
For an interesting definition of "most"? I see, what, 3 lines that weren't direct answers to direct questions? One of those was pretty legitimate feedback, which seems sensible when the rep tells you feedback is why they're asking. Another is just asking for a copy of the chatlog.
Yes. Stick to the business at hand: this is who I am, this is how you can look me up in your system, this is what I want to do. Feedback doesn't help, they're not going to take your advice, don't waste your time.
For example: "Please tell us the reason for your call today?" Should be met with the answer, "Please cancel my subscription." "May I ask why you want to cancel?" "Please cancel my subscription." "Have you ever used reader mode?" "Please cancel my subscription."
Well, yeah. They're following a flowchart that labels common objections and the responses to overcome them. You're in a pipeline. Your job is to get to the end of that pipeline without being shunted off in long and meandering side paths.
Even though the individuals are humans, they are reading a script given to them by a soulless automaton (also made of humans, but the result of an inhuman optimisation process).
Those writing the script are taking advantage of your aversion to skip social graces when they decide what questions the low-ranking representative will ask you.
The only winning move is not to play. It's not the individual's fault, but neither is it fair on you to play along. Be polite, but direct, and don't play the game.
I tend to go with a few "No, thank you"s at first and then, if the heat picks up, the ol' firm & fatherly "Look, I appreciate it, but I'm going to cancel today no matter what," informing them that there's nothing they could do or say to try to make me change my mind and stay, ♫ we never did too much talkin' anyway, so don't think twice, it's all right.
Their job is to stop you from achieving your goal. They're a person, but they're not your friend in this interaction. You don't need to be rude, but you also don't owe them anything beyond basic courtesy.
This should be met with a combination of "Sir, are you having an aneurysm right now?" and "I'm sorry, our staff only speaks English. Non-English speakers should send a letter to postal address xxx".
While this solution has a certain emotional satisfaction, I do not wish to further the notion that service providers are owed any explanation whatsoever for my demand. If the terms of the contract I entered with the service provider permits me to cancel for no reason, it is to those terms I will abide.
Even with the system is a simple drop-down I always choose “other” and enter n/a in the comment box.
When I tell someone I want to cancel a service, the only thing I ever want to hear is, "Yes sir." followed by, "All done, sir." And maybe a, "Have a nice day, sir."
Period.
I give you money. You give me a service. I stop giving you money. You stop giving me the service.
Nonsense. If your situation was generalizable, then no one would accept rebates or gifts offered during the cancelation process - yet many do, which is why sales rep continue to offer them.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. Back before prices got better, my parents used to call up the cable company every year to "cancel our service". Why? "It's too expensive." Eventually they would "give in" after shaving $20 off our monthly bill. This of course was their intent the whole time: they saved thousands of dollars over about 10 years as a result.
Very few people actually determined to cancel are going to be convinced by something like this, I suspect. There's a whole cottage industry of mostly older, upper-middle class folks who call customer service lines once a year to get their rebate. I find the whole game rather reprehensible (on the part of the companies that allow it). It constitutes a kind of wealth transfer to the people who have the free time, energy, and ability to play the game. I'd much rather these companies just reduce the price across the board towards the "average" payment, and stick to their guns with the people who call in.
This would eliminate so many hours of pointless work and frustration.
And correct answer after first cycle is. "All done! Service will end tomorrow!". And if customer tries to cancel, just tell them the new higher price with not leeway any more for them.
Usually, it's not worth the time to haggle over people to figure out the most they are willing to pay for low margin retail goods, so you don't see it at Walmart or the grocery store. But for high margin goods, such as cars, real estate, B2B sales etc, each buyer has a different amount they are willing to pay, and so you want to try and capture as much of everyone's capacity to pay as possible.
Actually, come to think of it, low margin retail and grocery does it too with coupons and whatnot that some people are willing to spend time on and others are not.
> low margin retail and grocery does it too with coupons and whatnot
Yes! I was going to mention that this is really a pretty universal feature of "pricing", but decided that was too controversial an angle on what was a rather simple point.
Yes, but the incentives are not strong enough to allow it.
Give some companies some heavy fines for this bad behavior and you’ll see the rest start to stand in line quickly.
Agree 100%. It sounded a bit like a tech request on how to get rid of ads, which established some scope for agent to assist.
I'm subscribed to NYT and WP to help support journalism; I'm using Samsung's Internet browser which is just great - no ads, easy on the battery, and a dark mode to boot.
I don't think they're discriminating, probably just massive laws they have to deal with for every new country, and they're still pretty new so probably don't have their resources.
I argue they are discriminating, even if it is indeed regulatory issues at play there.
I'm not going to fraudulently open an account misstating my residence, that's breaking their ToS - you do promise thet you're a US resident when signing up.
Of course it's their choice who they want to take on as customers. They've been providing the service for ~6 years though, which is really not that new in context.
You can spare the sarcasm - I'm sure your local ice cream shop is great but it does little for people across the globe looking for ice cream.
Great that it works for you, but they won't take most people on the earth as a customer, including me. Even if I would be OK with illegally breaking their terms, my account would be subject to block and ban at any moment.
I always hate it when a customer service person asks me why I'm canceling their subscription.
I called my mobile phone carrier to cancel and they asked me why. I said "I don't like your TV advertisements". That put a quick end to that line of enquiry.
I'm curious if there is a relationship between how strict one company's retention policy is (e.g., tactics like this), and the overall health of the business. Is it positive, negative, neutral? In either case, I do worry about the future of paid journalism.
Eh, I'm not going to download a whole app for reading one article a month. There really needs to be something where I can just hit a bunch of checkboxes for the news sites I want to subscribe to, and then that app could charge me accordingly. Hell if Google integrated it with their Google News app, it could be super seamless.
Oh! I didn't know that. Looks like you give up the introductory offer, but the price is actually a bit better ($17/mo vs $17 every 4 weeks) and I'm perfectly fine with that.
When most people see "cancel membership" they will think it is immediately. They will just wait to cancel until the last possible day and when they forget it's free money for Netflix. It's smart/shady. I'm sure it contributes to their decreasing churn.
Full disclosure, I used to work for Netflix. I really don't think they're trying to be shady. When you click to cancel, it tells you what your last day of service will be. This is also how just about all monthly subscription services work. One of the most important metrics at Netflix is how many hours members are watching. Any A/B test that can improve that metric is really cherished, because Netflix wants happy customers who both stick around and tell their friends. Trying to squeeze an extra month out of them doesn't really fit their style.
Okay makes sense then. I just don't see any of the elder people who I have setup Netflix risk pressing the cancel button because they can't get it set up. However, they do try to remove their credit card number and it doesn't let you. Which is actually another annoyance, why can't I delete my credit card from your site. It's still a dark pattern or just bad data security.
That's a good point about older customers. I could see them being confused. I'm not really sure to be honest though, as I didn't work on this stuff when I was there. I'm not sure about the credit card issue either.
in fact, they've made it so easy that we've resubscribed plenty. if anything, the netflix model is one to emulate. that being said, we've never tried removing my credit card.
This has not been my experience with Netflix at all. I regularly unsubscribe and resubscribe later. Unsubscribing is always just a click of a button and I've never had to speak to anyone at Netflix for anything.
Incidentally they also appear to honor their data deletion policy. If I stay unsubscribed for more than six months, my account ceases to exist and I need to create a new one to resubscribe.
I would have thought Netflix would be the gold standard for how to do this properly. I'm sure they have lots of people like me who subscribe a few months a year just to check out whatever's new. If I ever ran into a problem like this I would never sign up again.
There are several publications I would willingly support (eg The Atlantic, the New Yorker) but I don’t and this is the reason why: I absolutely refuse to subscribe to services that are going to be a hassle to cancel.
It’s the gym business model. I’m sure this shows incremental gains in revenue but I bet it’s at the cost of retarding growth.
I want to start and stop a subscription as I please. I want to do it without having to speak to a human being. I don’t want to be called by the provider to renew my subscription.
I will not reward or support scummy retention tactics.
Me too. I've subscribed and unsubscribed to their digital plans a bunch of times in the past ~10 years and it was never difficult. Perhaps this is new?
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadEven though I might cancel products, the cancellation isn’t always forever. I’ll gladly go back to companies that treated me well. However, companies that pressure me to stay I typically write off as scummy and won’t go back if the need arises.
I've been witness to a number of cold callers having their heritage and species loudly questioned for using this tactic.
I mean, it's annoying to have to talk to sales reps when you don't have to, but I feel like people here are being a little overly dramatic?
There are certainly some cases where it becomes almost impossible to cancel things (people hanging up on you, etc.) which are much worse than what is described here and looks like it would take about 30 seconds of my attention in a background chat window.
(I am also tempted to cancel my Wall Street Journal subscription when I accidentally read an opinion column. Not sure why real journalists let partisan hacks put their opinion columns right next to their real work. Strange business model!)
When the WSJ rep asked me why I was canceling, one of the reasons I gave was how bad the op-ed section is. A little while ago the news room writers actually put together an open letter complaining about the lack of accuracy in the op-ed section, and also asking for the labeling on the op-eds to be more clear, because it was affecting the news rooms' credibility.
Both newspaper's opinion sections are complete garbage. I tend to agree with the NYT's opinion columnists more than the WSJ's, but I wouldn't say the pieces are well-reasoned, that they try to explain both sides of the issue, etc. It's basically long-form Twitter, which I would pay extra to opt out of.
Completely straightforward, no hassle, no surprises.
Put it this way wouldn't mind buying a national geographic on the iPad but I don't want a subscription for this very reason and it seems like a waste of money paying for something I might not get into.
Thanks for posting
Personally, I stopped trying to write such letters after a couple instances where the recipient company claimed they never received any letter from me.
Then I learned you should always send a letter with a signature to have a proof of reception, which is a bit more expensive. And then one kept charging me anyway, and still claimed the letter didn't reach the right department (after more time spent on the phone with them).
Bottom line is if a company wants to make it difficult for you to leave the relationship with them, there are tons of tricks in the books for that. Therefore I blacklist them after any sign of dishonesty.
To answer the question, this service doesn't exist in any other country I've lived in -- Canada or Japan, in my case.
Even as an American I used to think this, but because I grew up in a large city where all mail collection was from a mail box at the corner of the block. It wasn't until I moved to a sprawling suburb did I have my own mailbox at the end of the driveway and I got to use that little flag thing for the first time.
In Australia, you post something by putting it in a post box, they're located in shopping areas and have specified collection times, usually daily on weekdays.
Of course, you can also go into the post office and deal with a human who will take the postage $ as needed.
These days, the number of times I've posted something can be counted in low single digits per year. Mostly dealing with government forms that need signatures because stupid reasons.
There is doorstep letter and parcel collection for less than a dollar.
https://send.royalmail.com/
But it was a valuable lesson on looking at the exit strategy for a service before you sign up for it. And I try real hard to only do business with companies that make it as easy to stop spending money with them as it is to start.
Traditionally newspapers didn't make enough money from subscription revenue to cover their costs - advertising is where the money was, payment for subscriptions was nice but a big part of its importance was as an indicator "this person cares enough to pay for this news source" for selling advertising. That hasn't really changed that much.
I don't think they're really factoring in the "angry customer" aspect, however, or they'd stop. They turned me from an ambivalent customer who decided the ROI wasn't there, into an opinionated former customer who is willing to tell friends and family the horror show that will happen if they subscribe and then decide later it isn't for them. It's the opposite of good word-of-mouth advertising, and NYT is going to suffer for it. Even if they change their policy today.
Any other company and I'd call them garbage, but the NYT does a lot of good. (Same would go for other top investigative journals that have published a lot of pieces revealing major information to the public.)
Unfortunately this is now a debatable topic. Their headlines have been trending towards the National Enquirer for years.
IMHO, they should crash and burn.
Yes, it sucks, but that’s how the free market works.
If NYT actually relied on these tactics to keep themselves afloat, then I wouldn’t call it “thriving”, simply because these kinds of techniques are not sustainable at all in the long run.
And a common definition of thriving is growing in profitability, for which stock price can often be a good metric. Their stock price gas increased 289% over the last five years.
Other, smaller papers are not doing nearly as well.
Typically if don't pay a bill you'll get a few months to rectify with fees tacked on, then internal collections will happen or it'll be sold to a collection service.
In both cases you'll get letters and eventually if the amount is high enough or the debt other otherwise motivated, a summons for pre trial mediation and then a civil suit.
Which part of Europe are you from?
No problem, right? I'll pay up on the account, re-activate, and work out. Nope, they wanted to charge me a reactivation fee. I said "no" and left. Never paid them another dime.
What a stupid business.
For what it's worth I've never had trouble canceling anything I've subscribed to.
The contract may stipulate that the merchant is free to cancel the subscription if you don't pay for whatever reason (the card expires, the card does not have money, you chose to pay in cash and didn't have a card, whatever). However, the contract can (and usually does) stipulate that the merchant is not required to cancel the subscription in case of non-payment, and in that case the contract is valid, they owe you service and you owe them the contractually agreed payment.
On the other hand, contract law generally would assume that the subscription is cancelled if you sent them an unambiguous request in writing even if their standard process flow (e.g. requiring a phone call with a sales rep convincing you not to quite) wasn't followed - if you've sent a letter than that and stopped paying, that should be appropriate in most circumstances.
If you signed a contract for X amount of months, then I get it, you have to pay, but I always do month to month at the gym, they still make it impossible to cancel.
You probably don't subscribe to things that are hard to cancel!
Cards stop working due to fraud or lost cards all the time. Businesses must accept this as a fact of life. Forcibly dunning is a malicious business practice.
You have made cancelling through English difficult so I am communicating cancellation to you financially.
It’s funny how they listen more to the latter. The only dark pattern they have is credit reporting which has real risks if they cross a line.
Yes we all have a credit score - it's mainly used to measure your ability to borrow and repay debt and will influence whether a company loans to you and the interest rate on said loan.
It's not (yet) as aggressive as the social scoring system in China if that is what you were alluding to...
Do you not have a similar system where you are from? How would the above be decided for you?
Here in Norway you're evaluated/scored based on some metrics like income, job security, job prospects, education, assets, debt, defaulted debt in the past, fixed expenses, etc. I think when Americans talk about "credit score" they talk about something completely different, namely their insane system where your score is (positively) affected by taking on and managing credit card debt. In that fucked up world, two debt-free people with the same income will be "scored" differently if one of them happens to use a CC to buy all his groceries and pays off the card each month, and the other buys the same groceries on debit. Surely you don't have that insanity in the UK, do you?
Banks giving out loans will look at the data behind the score along with a bunch of other factors. It's very possible that if Experian say person A is average and person B is good, a bank may decide to give Person A a better rate on a loan based on different data, or different weighting of the data.
LMAO talk about bias! If anything he's describing the the credit scoring system implemented in the U.S. ...
Debt collectors got in touch years later asking for £50.
I said, "fine, send me a copy of whatever bill I supposedly didn't pay."
They didn't have it. "We don't have any documentation, just pay us."
Escalated to a complaint and they dropped it.
I'd do the same again, but could totally understand why some people wouldn't. YMMV.
how can that leave you with bad credit score if you never gave them your social security ( or equivalent) ?
What part of Europe has credit scores?
Also you can’t just send an collections agency with huge fees, there’s laws against that. At least in the Netherlands
The value is way higher than some inconvenience.
For me it is and I stated why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
So much for your "paper of record". It's the Paper of the Establishment. And always has been.
Institutions have completely squandered what little trust the public once had in them.
I think we're living through a very specific period of history in which we're going to see some sort of new paradigm emerge and become dominant. Citizen journalism has been on the rise - I don't know how long, I admit I don't pay much attention to it - and established journalists like Matt Taibbi are moving to Substack.
I don't know what the future might hold, but I don't think the next 100 years will look at all like the past 100 years, at least insofar as the concept of "news" is concerned.
There's tons of decent news sites.
It isn't just their rabid anti-conservative bias, which I'm more or less fine with as its pretty clear their possessed by their ideologies, but its their fascism of banning anyone who has a different opinion, while hilariously hiding behind "fighting fascism". I guess it makes sense though... fight fire with fire, fight fake fascism with real fascism...
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/14/967917822/author-on-trumps-ac...
National NPR shows tend to be more cautious but local shows have been much more explicit:
https://www.kalw.org/post/rise-fascism-united-states-how-sho...
Rarely read/listen to BBC but they seem a bit less hyperbolic than NPR.
There is NO single site that gets it correct.
Maybe you're being too hard on the news media.
Maybe the problem is with human's inherent intellectual laziness.
Maybe instead of visiting numerous sites and forming their own opinion people wait for a single news source to spoon feed them their thoughts for the day.
You can be lazy or you can get closer to the truth.
I mean best you’re doing is getting maybe another month or so of revenue from a customer who is just pushing the pain of cancelling because they are busy or lazy.
And at the end instead of getting what could be a dormant customer who can sign up later again, what you get is someone who hates your company.
What an incredibly stupid way to erode the brand of a publication, whose major asset to survive is precisely its brand.
Was asked if i was suuuuuuure i wanted to leave, 3 separate times before it canceled.
Definitely not thinking of doing that again, or like i do for some streaming services, pay for a couple months, stop, then pay for a few more.
Utterly rediculous.
Cancelation apparently required a fax. Got a legal friend to help me write a scary letter.
Service was promptly canceled.
(It seems like you DO keep them until the end of the trial, but you only get told that after cancelling)
Together with their decreased support quality (agents barely understanding what I write + the typical "tell the customer what they want to hear so they go away and give you a good CSAT, by the time they realize you lied it won't matter for you anymore"), I have a _very_ low opinion of Amazon. They still have a service (delivery time), price (free shipping) and consistency advantage in many cases, but it's quickly shrinking, and I am much more likely to buy from alternative places if they can make a competitive offer.
I assume that eating the cost of a bad purchase is cheaper for them than upsetting a long-term customer.
On one occasion when I had to return an item I ended up £30 out of pocket because it had to go by courier instead of post, due to length. I had to argue with their customer support to obtain recompense despite it having been them who told me to send it courier. The item was only worth £80.
Nowadays I just use Amazon as a price baseline but shop elsewhere.
On memberships, I don't mind the Prime cancelling issues very much because they seem to always credit back a month if you later tell them you forgot to cancel. Unfortunately, there are annoying dark patterns when signing up, hiding the "No thanks" button when trying to get through an order, etc.
The only thing I noticed is they hide the collection options under a button. By default they encourage you to drop off at a depot or post office.
Now I'm still waiting for a product I ordered 3 months ago. The only option I have is contacting the seller - who doesn't respond. I wrote a review about the experience, which then got promptly removed.
More recently I've ordered a few things from multiple places, the one outstanding delivery is from Amazon, and now almost a week late. It'll probably be the last one; their obvious lack of interest regarding fake reviews, review resetting and obfuscation, misleading pricing, counterfeit products and the constantly shrinking number of quality products have taken a toll. More often than not products are shipped from China, making it a worse choice than many local competitors who may ask higher prices for delivery but at least ship in two days instead of two weeks, have a phone support hotline and a reason to care.
Very slowly but steadily the reasons I started using Amazon's platform eroded away until it became more or less a more approachable middleman for aliexpress dropshippers.
When I found myself slowly buying fewer things on Amazon a few years ago and decided to cancel Prime after many years as a subscriber, I was so grossed out by the cancellation process that I’ve actively avoided ordering from them ever since.
¹ it was a bit of a mess, they first tried to bill an empty credit card, but only notified me after several attempts when prime was actually suspended. I added a regular credit card, but they don't conform to the new EU rules about authentication so it just got declined. Again, they didn't tell me they were even trying. So I added a SEPA account which is possible through the UI, but apparently they required a credit card. In the end I just cancelled, and re-signed up under the amazon of the country I live in (which is fairly new, hence not doing it the first time.) At least I get another free trial month for the hassle.*
Just the fact that I–a software engineer and longtime Amazon customer–felt compelled to open a new tab and Google questions about the cancellation process, seemed ridiculous to me. Plenty of less tech savvy folks are sure to have been confused, tricked or given up in the process.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55637140
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpEQ4OWNO4Y&feature=emb_titl...
Exceptions will exist, but the general rule is such.
No, it is subscription. Much like a magazine subscription, where you are purchasing the magazine each month, you are purchasing credits each month that you can use to buy audiobooks that you then own (yes yes, do you really “””own”””” things in the digital world of licenses, blah blah). So losing access to the app, and therefore the audiobooks you purchased, is not how it is supposed to work.
But THIS is how it works. This reality doesn't fit your paradigm. But the reality prevails.
In other words, when you stop paying them.. it stops. You can no longer consume the goods, past-present-future. You call it subscription. I call it a service. Because in my mind a subscription to a Newspaper is "News-as-a-Service. I stop paying Amazon, I lose the AWS. I stop paying the Economist, I lose access to all (present-past-future) issues.
Downvote all you want. Call it what you want. Still.. someone give me an example where the subscription ENDED, and they still have access to the Benefits. If not.. you're welcome. NaaS. Unless you get the paper-copy. Then you ACTUALLY bought the "News" and ONLY because YOU control the physical medium (the paper its printed on).
Literally Audible. The person that couldn't access the app is not the norm and likely had some sort of problem. You can access the app after you cancel and can continue to download and listen to books you've already bought. That is why it is a subscription, not a service.
I will not subscribe again after this experience.
This cancellation process never considered the impact of internet cancel culture and rage reactions. It's far easier to damage a brand than it is to build it up.
Unlikely considering the general popularity of articles highlighting their incompetence/malfeasance. See: slatestarcodex articles of the last week
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
?? I automatically assume that articles that are written by NYT, NewYorker, and The Guardian are complete BS and should be ignored.
0 journalism found there.
Wanna spend money somewhere? Spend it on The Atlantic or Bloomberg.
Bad: NewYorker, New York Times, The Information
Not Bad: The Economist
Good: The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, The Politico (at least in the EU)
Very good: Reuters
Can you please elaborate on why you feel that way?
For a younger person, perhaps they wouldn't notice? I have been reading NYT and Guardian since the early 2000s, and canceled the NYT this summer when they failed to report really major events in NYC that didn't match narrative (looting and rioting that was directly observable for two days). I realized at that point we had a real problem.
The Guardian has always been more openly activist, and I have a lot of respect for their Snowden work. But Trump being in the front page for four years was a bit much.
I'm pretty happy with Reuters and to a lesser degree Bloomberg (whom I pay per month 7 times what I was paying for the NYT subscription).
It's depressing because the NYT was more of a mainstream liberal newspaper whose main crimes were a lack of critical attitude towards foreign policy (such as the weapons of mass destruction fiasco). Its domestic reporting was decent. Now the domestic reporting is pitting Americans against one another.
"Seeing how Netflix would be so protective of my time were I to leave makes me all the more unlikely to do so."
Maybe the NYT should take their own advice.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/business/yourmoney/02digi...
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/net...
I'm not sure if this really counts for much in their favour.
Terrible, terrible company.
Every person everywhere really needs to move all their money to credit unions, our banking system is so thoroughly fucked.
The cashier gave me all the cash I’d already taken from the account.
Charging for bank accounts in North America is just like commission on retail brokers - everyone else is doing it, so why not? Eventually probably 'fintech startup challenger banks' with the novel idea of not charging will gain too much market share, and the big boys will scrap the fees too in order to compete (and barely feel it).
https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/22/investing/atm-overdraft-fee...
https://www.depositaccounts.com/blog/banks-income-fees.html
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/20...
Then they accepted a charge on the account from a subscription I had forgotten to move, even though the account was closed, and because my account was then in deficit decided to reactivate my account without letting me know. Then they charged me an overdraft fee and daily penalties, and then eventually sent me a bill with like £120 of charges.
I challenged it and had to speak on the phone to people for ages. Eventually they took the charges off as a "one-off gesture of good faith" which annoyed me, because it still implies that it was my mistake and not theirs.
If signed up to the scheme (most are, including Santander), your old bank is responsible for passing on any deposits directly to your new bank account and the new bank is responsible for processing any transactions made using your old details. This carries on for, I believe 12 months.
I found the Switch Guarantee service to be excellent and believe it's a significant driver of innovation and competition in UK banking (which is far ahead of many other European countries in my experience).
My payees from my old bank were even transferred over to my new one.
(Current account = checking account to any non-UK readers.)
Fun times.
Cheques basically don’t exist here in NZ now.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Not to criticize this behavior, just to set it into the proper context. Its just smart to see the potential customer in your cancellations anyway.
Rather than good customer service, Amazon try to be generous on the visible aspects that people might talk about, but quietly cheat you with antipatterns.
Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well.
In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently.
We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too.
And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time.
This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
With a positive attitude like yours, it seems like something I would want to know about.
It was such a sad experience- while helping out with the customer side I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I mean yeah they did get a fair amount of money from those schemes, but they did loose all of their senior devs in the process.
I personally don't think routine cancellation policy should even be up to the business. Deliberately preventing customers from cancelling a subscription that they are entitled to cancel, or making it unreasonably difficult or intimidating to do so, should be grounds for legal or regulatory intervention to protect consumer rights.
A basic rule along the lines that subscription services must provide a means of cancelling that would normally be no more demanding than the means of starting the same subscription seems fair to me.
https://help.beeminder.com/article/25-how-do-auto-canceling-...
https://blog.beeminder.com/autocancel/
Their entire business model boils down to "exploit people's unrealistic expectations of themselves to make money". They obviously feel awkward about it, and they soften the blow a lot, which is to their credit, but at the end of the day this is where their money comes from.
But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom it does work.
For anyone in the category you describe (tried Beeminder, found their expectations of themself to be unrealistic, quit Beeminder) we definitely want to talk to you.
Also calibrating self-expectations is one of things many users tell us is worth paying for.
* Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees.
* If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy.
* When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email.
This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.
Imagine if you had to go through this exhausting process in your personal life. After half an hour since asking your spouse to help with the dishes, your spouse finally says “now that we realize using paper plates will solve your problem of dirty dishes, is there anything else I can help you with?”
We wouldn’t tolerate that in our personal life so why do we in business? After all, corporations are people...
Reminds me of the quote “Being well adjusted to a sick society is not a measure of health”
Well, which one is it? /j
This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
Perhaps it's time for a reimagining - I could see it working really well as a collection of "websites" with "live chats" and "emails" and so forth, borrowing tools from the "alternate-reality game" style of organic viral marketing and turning them to an altogether nobler purpose. I think that'd be the right choice of medium to tell this sort of story today.
[1] https://www.filfre.net/2015/08/bureaucracy/
Cyberpunk stories tend to focus on the "consumer-hostile" part, whereas I think the superposition of the two and the permanent conflict between them is way more interesting.
(For instance, you almost never see review systems or consumer watchdogs in cyberpunk stories)
I cancelled my Netflix subscriptions for a few months, then tried to renew and cannot because of a bug in their Credit Card process. I have phoned and tweeted and online chatted etc... Their only solutions is for me to buy gift cards, which I won't.
In the meantime, they keep sending me emails every week to beg me to try Netflix again.
So Netflix spends money to promote to me, and to answer my support requests, while they won't do a thing about their broken payment process.
How much more could I do (note that Netflix CS replies to the other person's reply in that thread): https://twitter.com/dorfsmay/status/1315402870661902336
Clearly, Tech (at least for payment processing), Marketing and Customer Services don't talk to each other.
...and the other is the Netflix Specials department.
EDIT: Addendum so not to be too shitposty.
I think Netflix came to Denmark around 2013 or so, and the content at the time was pretty good. Now you have to wade through a swamp of third rate trash and maybe you're lucky to find something that isn't absolute garbage. My account will remain canceled.
I’m not sure I’m ready to chalk it up to nefarious motives. But it is quite suspicious.
The email I received was "We’ve detected a suspicious sign-in to your Netflix account. Just to be safe we've reset your password and you’ll need to set a new one." with a button to "Set a new password".
It didn't mention any IP or geolocation as many other services say in such cases.
Do you live in the US? GDPR does not apply to US companies serving US citizens. If you live in the EU, you might need to request account deletion, I think GDPR doesn't require that data is deleted, it gives Europeans the right to have their data deleted upon request. (I've read the entire code before but I don't remember the details on this point.)
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100629
GDPR also requires you to be able to cancel by the same way you signed up, so any company that doesn’t let you cancel online is in flagrant violation.
NYT is a US company serving a US locale by it's very name. GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans, or does EU business with EU offices*. The GDPR law is clear about this point, it is a protection for EU citizens regarding web sites and businesses that are focused on, directed and targeted toward EU citizens. It does not apply to interactions outside of the EU (aside from EU travelers visiting EU web sites), and it does not apply to web sites that originate outside the EU and are global that just happen to have visitors from the EU.
* The NYT might be advertising in the EU, I don't know. If it does, I'd be willing to bet that EU citizens are given an online mechanism to cancel, even though US citizens aren't...
It definitely does have UK specific ads, I’ve seen them, and GDPR is grandfathered into UK law.
I cancelled mine by cancelling the PayPal, there was no other way to cancel without phoning them. There is no online cancellation even for those in GDPR jurisdictions.
Apparently someone from Netflix read my comments here and deactivated the account completely. :P Thanks! Sorry if I spoiled your clever marketing strategy but I think sending a fake "suspicious login" email and keeping cancelled accounts for 10 months is just not right.
Either way, I agree with you that this is not right.
Using it with an adjective to clarify the meaning here is fine.
I am obviously not an authoritative source on how words are understood, but just wanted to add this data point.
In our college house, we’d always run these rackets and get free plane tickets, CDs, tickets, etc. The phone companies were even better. At peak, we’d farm $300-600 a semester for switching long distance.
[0]https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1998-08-27-98082605...
The “loophole” on the consumer side was that of you lived with 5 roommates, you’d transfer the phone service every couple of months and then switch the long distance plans with a legit company like AT&T, Sprint, etc.
There was a period of time in the 90s where you would get a check or credit for switching... as much as $200-300! Long distance costs were in free fall and telcos were swimming in cash, so they decided to buy market share.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...
I don't know. Ask Amazon[1] I guess?
My point is that it's wrong to attribute this to a "fragile" business model. It's just plain, old greed and contempt for the customer.
[1] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/255977/20210114/amazon-pr...
If it doesn't, trying to repair that damage could be an exercise in futility. :/
P.S. there probably going to get a lot of people "going to prison" in the future so the scripts will include questions to out the fakers, who want to cancel without trouble.
> Me to retention person: Hi, I just switched to AT&T Fiber and I'm up and running, so I want to get rid of my Comcast internet.
> Rentention person: Is this the sort of sitation where you would move your Comcast internet to a new location?
> Me: No.
> Rentention person: Ohh, well in that case, I'll go ahead and cancel you're account. Ok done now.
Literally a 4 minute phone call including automated prompts.
I had to cancel the plan and have my "roommate" (actually my wife), start as a new customer to get an internet only plan.
At some point they sent a debt collection agency, that was much less stressful than it sounds. They called me up, "you owe $telco money", "No I don't", "oh?", "Yes, I have complete documentation of cancelling it, but their CS reps kept hanging up. Sorry, you've been had.", "Oh, this again. Sorry to have bothered you.", never heard from the debt collection agency again.
Very hard to close the account, even in person. My point was to make sure that there is no recurring payments left on the account.
Similar bullshit. You ask to close the account, and they keep asking you back with a square face.
In the end, a year after I left Canada, I get a call from collectors saying that they have $600+ debt+penalties+interest on my allegedly closed credit card from a service the bank added itself, and that they set my credit score to zero.
Then I found that TD subscribed me on some bullshit "credit alert" right in the month when I asked for account closure.
An immediate WTF was how in the world my credit card was still active. In than latter came out that TD does not let people really close their CC accounts, only "stop them," which only amounts to just hiding you CC from web UI, and that you need specifically say that you want to "really close" the account, which I did. So, next time, if will ever set my foot in the country, I will need to ask them to "really, really, really close my account"
Ameritrade is owned by Charles Schwab now with TD having a minority stake in Schwab. Before that TD had a 40% stake in Ameritrade.
(source: Dave Ramsey's mentioned that in many of his radio shows/podcast episodes)
I already had them for Internet access, but had DirecTV at the time for my TV.
They must have a quarterly quota to upsell to their subscriber base, so I'd get a call like clockwork every three months, pushing a cable TV package. Each time I'd tell them that the only reason I'm with DirecTV is because of Sunday Ticket (NFL package; exclusive to DTV). That always worked, until one day.
This sales rep responds with, "We have Redzone". I reply that it's not the same, and I really need the package I have with DTV. Then he says, "You know there are websites that stream all the games for free, right? Why not do that?"
Yeah, basically telling me to pirate the games.
... "That's a good point! Hell, I don't need any TV service at all then, right?"
The answer? was a streaming box. I expect to see a monthly rental fee for the streaming box...
It keeps companies in line.
The only disadvantage is that you would probably have to give that company your billing information for that to work.
[1] https://gowder.io/pgmediacom.pdf
I'd bet that a small percentage of cancellation requests are waylaid by these sorts of underhanded tactics. Even if the success rate is low, it's still not zero.
It is such a scummy tactic. I tell everyone not to subscribe to NYT just based on that experience.
I replied to them no less than 5 times, each time pointing out that (a) I don't have time for phone calls (b) their terms and conditions permits cancelling by e-mail.
Another way is to notify them once by e-mail to end your subscription per [insert T&C clause and citation] and just stop paying. If they don't get payment they'll stop anyway, and if they come chasing after you, you have the notification you sent.
In my case: 1) First I had a rough time cancelling my account _in person_ at a T-mobile store. The remote T-mobile employees in charge of cancellation kept hanging up on the T-mobile employees calling them from the store because cancellations are bad. This was so normal to the local T-mobile employees it was laughable to them. 2) T-mobile never cancelled my account - they suspended it...and didn't tell me! They reopened it 6 months later, charged me for a few months w/o notifying me, then sent the unpaid dues to a local debt collector. I only found out after being contacted by a debt collection agency.
I was able to get both T-mobile and the collection agency they work with to "look into it", but I could not get a direct answer from T-mobile about how to fix the situation after multiple calls to them, and the collection agency relied on T-mobile to strike the debt clean.
Bob Ferguson is the attorney general for Washington where T-mobile's HQ is. Bob is THE man in case you were wondering. After filing a complaint to his office, which was then forwarded to T-mobile, I heard back from someone at T-mobile specializing in these situations in a week's time and was informed the situation was fixed and the debt was removed from my credit report.
A few months later I got a collections notice for $500 from t-mobile, went to a t-mobile store, said that my account looked weird, and they had recorded me as not owning my phone, despite a clear account history that I paid full price for the phone and didn't owe anything.
Still get collection notices, but it's now over 7 years, and my credit card recovered by some 70 points or so when it aged out.
I actually found the NYT cancellation process to be relatively painless to be honest. That’s how accustomed I am to painful cancellation experiences.
A letter to the regulators, though, a few days later I got a call from a much more friendly person who made it work like it should have. It's amazing how much better companies behave when the regulators come calling.
Yes, because it actually does work. If you need proof, just call up one of these companies and say "I am cancelling because your service is too expensive." Odds are decent that you will get some type of promo offer to keep you. If there is any competition in your area for internet/cable and you have never done this, you are wasting money.
OP could have also had any number of other problems that could have been solved by these retention specialists. Basically they are doing the equivalent of an IT person asking if you have turned it off and back on again. That might be frustrating for the type of people who read HN and know better, but the reason they ask it is because there are legitimately issues that can be solved by this extremely basic level of support.
However much annoying these processes are (I had to suffer an identical Financial Times cancellation process last week) They know how much it costs to take cancelling users through an account specialist and presumably they get enough people to continue subscription to make it worth while.
A continuing paying customer now is worth far more than someone who may subscribe again in the future. And even if you're sick of their cancellation process, if you want to read NY Times news again you'll signup.
Thousands of Americans Waste $348 a Year on Subscriptions They’re Not Using [0]
It makes perfect sense to have a 'shield' that will minimize the 'quitters'. And this article focuses on streaming services only.
People who want to leave a service are probably NOT coming back. So an effort to keep vs lose forever has little downside.
https://www.gobankingrates.com/saving-money/budgeting/americ...
Edit/addition: regarding your ".. I wonder if this isn't a profitable practice though." Well they keep doing it, so.. at some point they ran the numbers and they saw it is better for them. Perhaps in 10y this may change, we will notice by the change of corporate practices. Profit will determine this.
My guess is there are a lot of potential subscribers reading stories like this and deciding not to bother with a subscription.
I think the primary feature is limiting the damage of a compromise.
It sounds great to also use this as a way for the customer to cancel service with an unwilling company, but I think in practice they may come after you with a collection agency.
"Mr. Freidman, who was partners with Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, disclosed the plan in a 2012 speech at Yeshiva University. "
It's more like, in any story where they want to point out that the subject is a sleazeball, they say he has "mob connections." That doesn't make it a story about the mafia.
(Yeah, that this was the example that came to mind does say something. More about Trump than about me, I think.)
Apart from that, they're great.
They are WILDLY successful. Their operating profit jumped 28% last year and literally are blowing away the competition in overall subscriber numbers and growth. It's really not even close
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/05/business/media/new-york-t...
So to answer your question, yes, it probably does reduce churn, if only slightly. Is there an occasional person who goes to try and cancel, runs into this byzantine process and then says, ah fuck it, I'll just stay subscribed so they don't have to deal with this bullshit? Yes, but probably only infrequently.
Instead, it infuriates all the rest who DO go thru the byzantine process and add more frustrating to whatever reason they were already intent on canceling from in the first place, as was demonstrated in this OP's chat transcript.
This reads as someone determined to get something juicy they could screenshot, or else someone who was already so annoyed from having to find the cancellation method on the site that they let it cloud their responses to what was a relatively painless process.
A single chat interaction? Not horrible.
That’s not your problem if you want to cancel.
OP chose the chat route, was complaining to the virtual chat bot for a whole page in the screenshot, then presented technical issues as a reason for cancelation - which the human support rep correctly tried to help the customer with, and customer engaged in that discussion, and once OP said they want the subscription canceled regardless (just a few messages later) it got canceled.
If you were to run a business, and a customer tells you the only reason they no longer wish to remain your customer is because of technical issues that you know how to solve, would you just try to help them, or would you ignore it?
Let's say someone disabled javascript in their browser, and your website doesn't work because of it, would you just cancel their subscription or would you offer to help and if they still insist on canceling it then cancel it like the rep in the screenshot did?
For example: "Please tell us the reason for your call today?" Should be met with the answer, "Please cancel my subscription." "May I ask why you want to cancel?" "Please cancel my subscription." "Have you ever used reader mode?" "Please cancel my subscription."
Those writing the script are taking advantage of your aversion to skip social graces when they decide what questions the low-ranking representative will ask you.
The only winning move is not to play. It's not the individual's fault, but neither is it fair on you to play along. Be polite, but direct, and don't play the game.
The script they have doesn't work anymore. If it's designed to make you stay it has backfired in spectacular way.
Even with the system is a simple drop-down I always choose “other” and enter n/a in the comment box.
https://i.imgur.com/dPLVwn6.png
Period.
I give you money. You give me a service. I stop giving you money. You stop giving me the service.
Its just that goddamn simple.
Very few people actually determined to cancel are going to be convinced by something like this, I suspect. There's a whole cottage industry of mostly older, upper-middle class folks who call customer service lines once a year to get their rebate. I find the whole game rather reprehensible (on the part of the companies that allow it). It constitutes a kind of wealth transfer to the people who have the free time, energy, and ability to play the game. I'd much rather these companies just reduce the price across the board towards the "average" payment, and stick to their guns with the people who call in.
This would eliminate so many hours of pointless work and frustration.
It's price discrimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Usually, it's not worth the time to haggle over people to figure out the most they are willing to pay for low margin retail goods, so you don't see it at Walmart or the grocery store. But for high margin goods, such as cars, real estate, B2B sales etc, each buyer has a different amount they are willing to pay, and so you want to try and capture as much of everyone's capacity to pay as possible.
Actually, come to think of it, low margin retail and grocery does it too with coupons and whatnot that some people are willing to spend time on and others are not.
Yes! I was going to mention that this is really a pretty universal feature of "pricing", but decided that was too controversial an angle on what was a rather simple point.
I'm subscribed to NYT and WP to help support journalism; I'm using Samsung's Internet browser which is just great - no ads, easy on the battery, and a dark mode to boot.
1. Create a virtual credit card for one merchant
2. Set the monthly payment limit just above the merchant's monthly charge
3. When you no longer feel like paying the charge, decrease the limit to $1 a month or just cancel the card.
4. Any future charges will be blocked!
5. Let the merchant's systems go through the hassle of terminating your account.
Can you use a VPN?
I'm not going to fraudulently open an account misstating my residence, that's breaking their ToS - you do promise thet you're a US resident when signing up.
Of course it's their choice who they want to take on as customers. They've been providing the service for ~6 years though, which is really not that new in context.
Is my local ice cream shop DISCRIMINATING by not serving ice cream in Norway and Osaka Japan?
No, they're not discriminating. They just don't have the resources to serve those locations.
I'm enjoying the hell out of Privacy.com. I'll think of you next time I use it!
Great that it works for you, but they won't take most people on the earth as a customer, including me. Even if I would be OK with illegally breaking their terms, my account would be subject to block and ban at any moment.
I called my mobile phone carrier to cancel and they asked me why. I said "I don't like your TV advertisements". That put a quick end to that line of enquiry.
Shame too because I love the NYT, but I’m mostly able to scratch that itch with the economist, my local paper, and some smaller news outlets.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nytimes.an...
Thanks for the tip!
in fact, they've made it so easy that we've resubscribed plenty. if anything, the netflix model is one to emulate. that being said, we've never tried removing my credit card.
Incidentally they also appear to honor their data deletion policy. If I stay unsubscribed for more than six months, my account ceases to exist and I need to create a new one to resubscribe.
I would have thought Netflix would be the gold standard for how to do this properly. I'm sure they have lots of people like me who subscribe a few months a year just to check out whatever's new. If I ever ran into a problem like this I would never sign up again.
It’s the gym business model. I’m sure this shows incremental gains in revenue but I bet it’s at the cost of retarding growth.
I want to start and stop a subscription as I please. I want to do it without having to speak to a human being. I don’t want to be called by the provider to renew my subscription.
I will not reward or support scummy retention tactics.