Also a common practice in Europe (Germany, France, Switzerland...), but frequently even worse: click to subscribe, send a fucking letter to cancel it. Le Monde and Der Spiegel both do it.
I'm a news junkie, I think paying for news is important, but I don't have even 1/4 of the subscriptions I would have if it wasn't for scummy tactics and/or the fear that I will be subject to them in the future.
They might have changed. When I checked just now, they offer a phone number and an E-Mail address to cancel a physical paper subscription (there's no account, so that makes sense).
An online "Spiegel+" subscription can be cancelled via their website.
I live in Germany and have cancelled several physical magazine and newspaper subscriptions and even political party memberships via e-mail after signing up online. I can't say anything about Der Spiegel but I would be surprised if they did it any different given that German consumer protection agencies have some teeth.
Fortunately I have been able to cancel my Le Monde Diplomatique for many years through email. I did not get a confirmation email but they stopped billing me at least.
To be picky, at least here in Italy, not "send a letter", but rather "send a registered letter with delivery receipt", which plainly means that you have a non-trivial cost (several Euro, I believe in Italy it is now 10 or 12 Euro) and you have to physically go to the post office to send it.
Recently many companies are (finally) allowing to use the PEC (which is a form of Certified Electronic Mail) which has the same legal value as the registered mail, but that the average citizens do not have (unless they have it for other reasons), which however has a (small) yearly cost, but that may be "dangerous" in the sense that it becomes your "legal address" so it needs to be monitored as anything that arrives there has legal value and is considered delivered to you the moment it arrives in the inbox.
The recommendation for using a certified letter is that you (as customer) have an independent paper trail to make your case should it go to court. At least in NL, a certified letter should not be required by the company itself.
In Finland cancelling rental contract can be fun, if you don't manage to contact your landlord. Your regular certified letter technically isn't enough. You need even more expensive version "registered with advice of receipt". Which is probably only way to prove in court that person received it...
Though I haven't had issues in cancelling stuff. Online services work nicely for all other stuff.
... and if we want to get even pickier (again at least here in Italy) a Law firm will likely send you not (still by certified mail with receipt) a "normal" letter (i.e. one or more sheets of paper inside an envelope) but rather a "piego" (literally "fold") i.e. the sheets of papers folded in three, with the address (and the stamp) written on the back.
The rationale is that you could claim that you received the letter, but upon opening the envelope you found just some blank sheets, with the piego there is no way to deny that it has been received.
And viceversa, there have been cases of envelopes sent intentionally with blank sheets inside, only to get the receipt and then be able to claim that "document X" has been sent within a required deadline (and actually fabricating the document later).
Good. The more exposure this tactic gets, the better.
I remember trying to cancel my The Times (of London) subscription a few years ago. It was a terrible experience - having to ensure a pushy sales call for 20 minutes, where the call handler kept ignoring my requests to cancel as they kept reading a hard sell script.
Living in Europe, I couldn't believe that if I wanted to unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was out of order.
I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...
I used online chat to do it. It took several attempts to get connected. They offered me a really good deal to stay but I declined on principle because I don't want to support such practices.
I had that exprience with the NYT - I had to time my call right to hit the office hours on the US east coast.
That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24/7 online chat. A far better and more convenient experience, if one that still lacks the simplicity of a simple ‘unsubscribe’ button.
Cancellation by mail is always fine, no company can opt out of it in a legal way. You don't even need to get the address right, you can mail it to any subsidiary of the company - it is the companys responsibility to correctly route it internally. You can even directly address it to the CEO and at "persönlich" to it. My favorite.
In theory yes, in practice I had multiple disputes over contract termination and in 100% of those cases the counterparty with happy with the photo. And also compare it to any "phone calls" where you basically have nothing as a proof (dunno about your jurisdiction, but in Germany it is illegal to record phone calls without prior consent and also would require technical means to do so).
Also, if you ever worked in a large corporation, they have a lot of means to track incoming mail ("Posteingangsbuch") and for an enterprise to try to pretend not to have received a letter would require maldoing by a lot of employees (who usually are not commited to giving false statements in court for their employer).
This is true for traditional "contracts", e.g. phone, apartments, gyms, etc, but these generally also involve paperwork when signing up (though in some of these cases you can sign up online and then have the confirmation mailed to you).
This is definitely not the case for websites or apps and I'm pretty sure what the NYT is doing wouldn't amuse German consumer protection agencies.
There are third party services that handle cancellation (e.g. Aboalarm) that are more reliable, and don't require any more time. I honestly just have an online fax account where I can upload a PDF to send a fax for like 20 cents, and that almost always works. It's still a dark pattern though.
In The Netherlands there are companies that will fill in, print, and send cancellation letters for you as a service. They rank very high in Google search.
A few times I found it was easier to cancel a card than to cancel a subscription.
I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.
It thankfully is now more of a thing of the past, but it used to be the case in the UK at least that places would take a telephone card payment, where you recite your card number, expiry date etc. So not only can they make any future payment they like, there is even no durable record of them having these details.
I once had a paper/digital subscription, and at some point I had cancelled the card linked to it. Unbeknownst to me (my parents were receiving the subscription), they had kept sending the paper despite the card being cancelled. When NYT eventually realized the card had been cancelled, they claimed that I owed them for the ~year or so that I had been receiving the paper after the card was cancelled, and attempted to send this to collections.
Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.
Those are not universal terms, and are actually defined in the contract which you seem to have not read. Grace periods, minimum commitments, subscription lengths, and/or post-paid terms are all common.
Ironically there are far more complaints about cloud providers shutting down entire business operations because of a late payment here on HN. Perhaps you should consider this more thoroughly instead of escalating a single unfortunate anecdote into a strawman argument against how business billing works.
I'm not sure why is this outrageous. You had a contract with NYT so they deliver you the newspaper for a payment, contract which you didn't even try to cancel. This is how contracts work.
You hand that info to the merchant because your credit card company can issue chargebacks against them and that costs them a pretty penny with their payment processor, especially if it happens often. Credit card disputes almost always slant in favor of the customer.
Folks just don't seem to realize: you make a reasonable effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit card company.
I caught a restaurant "helping" themselves to a very healthy tip for delivery; I'd tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly professed that he didn't know how to issue a refund and offered cash.
He was playing stupid because he didn't want to deal with the transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had no idea how to issue a refund to my card.
I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose the tip, he lost the cost of the food and he got dinged with a chargeback fee. He also lost my weekly pizza order.
I believe this doesn't work with debit cards, which are the norm in Europe.
Still though, it's a weird system. Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it, with some other party reimbursing me if that goes awry (and I notice).
> Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it
A peeve of mine is that the trust-until-a-screwup system is used in far more critical places than with a credit card. For instance, "DOT certification" of tires has no paper trail until people die.
If a tire fails while operating within its speed regime and before five years from manufacture, then it is to be reported to the DOT (US Department of Transportation). This usually only happens if the police are reporting on a fatal accident - most common citizens neither know that this option exists nor how to report it. If enough reports of a specific brand or type of tire come in, then the manufacturer (or importer) must provide proof of the testing done and pay some fines.
Many of the cheap Chinese tires are out of business (read: have changed business names) far before this critical last step could ever be reached, assuming that any reports were filed at all.
Disputes are enforced by Visa and Mastercard rules and apply to debit & credit cards equally. Some countries may have some extra legal protections for credit cards, but for clear examples of merchant bad faith the card network's dispute resolution process should be enough.
I also wouldn't call debit cards "the norm". They are in majority (1 to 5?), true, maybe also because many are issued for free by the bank where you have the account (which doesn't mean they are also used). But still not really "the norm".
Living in the US, with some of the worst banking infrastructure in the world, my debit card has an app that allows me to instantly lock/unlock the card, set spending limits, category limits, and even to deny a transaction if my phone isn't geolocated close to the transaction point.
I get a nearly instant alert, sometimes before the payment terminal has displayed "accepted", that there's been a charge on my card.
Also, at least in the US, debit cards have similar fraud rules to credit cards (ie you can chargeback) but the time period is much, much smaller. A week, I think.
I strongly urge you to not use your debit card and use a credit card wherever possible. Aside from better protection, any fraud or mistakes are not involving real money, but credit.
That's better, agreed. But can I e.g. limit payment amounts on these?
On Direct Debits in the UK, the merchant just charges me whatever. This is for things like utilities and phone bills, so I don't have major trust issues, but still it irks me.
In a way, it's even better than credit card: You can not set a limit - except contractually, but you can enforce it. You can do the charge-back yourself (via the Bank's website) within like 6 or 9 months of the transaction.
This will cost the vendor a lot (relatively speaking) money and is pretty easy to do. However, if there is any doubt about who is right, an action like that will lead them to invoice you all associated costs, send it to collections and then a legal fight begins.
Which I guess why many businesses prefer Klarna or other payment processors. You login with your bank account and then wire the money to them, instead of them pulling the money. Then, no chargebacks are possible.
I haven't seen an option to set a payment limit, but all banks give you the ability to cancel a direct debit authorisation at any time. For that reason alone I'd say it's always better to use direct debit than give a merchant your credit/debit card for subscription services.
In any case, the banks seem to be very good at refunding direct debits in cases where the merchants appear to be abusing them. My ex once noticed after several months that her gym was still charging her even after she'd cancelled - the bank made it very quick and easy to claim back all the extra payments!
I had to resort to cancelling a card once too, but it didn’t fix the problem. My Credit Card Provider (Barclaycard) implemented the Visa Account Updater service with no way to turn it off so my new card details went straight to the merchant.
Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a customer of 10 years.
Typically you can call your bank and ask them to block transactions from a particular merchant that you have an issue with, I have done that before, once on credit card and once on a current account.
>I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.
That's kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app).
That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction details before you confirm it on your device.
Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring subscription would be pretty convenient.
Faxes aren't that big either. I never liked them, never owned one, and I remember sending two faxes in my life. Maybe a few I don't remember. The last one was... to cancel a mobile phone contract.
This is not all of Europe, though Germany is known for this shenanigans (but on the other hand this gives you a confirmation of when you cancelled it if you send it Advice of Receipt)
You shouldn't say this to people like it's some obvious truth. There are many cases in which this action will land you in trouble due to it not being a legally valid termination of the contract (which of course may be different by country -- it's very common that cancelling requires an actual message to the other party).
One specific example is if your contract has a termination period, which is pretty common, at least in my part of Europe. If you simply stop paying, you are denying the other party N months of revenue (your cancellation period) that you are contractually obliged to pay. You are now defaulting on your payments and will likely pay additional fees.
This makes sense if the contract indeed has a minimum commitment that hasn't been reached.
But if the contract has no minimum term (or it has since passed) and you've made a reasonable effort to attempt to cancel with no success, it'll now be on them to recover the money through legal means which would require them to explain to the court why your cancellation attempt was ignored, demonstrating their bad faith in the process. That's not something they want to do.
The point of my comment was "this is not good general advice". The point of your comment seems to be "it can be good advice in some cases", which makes no sense to me. Obviously it can be good advice in that exact case where it makes sense, but it's not good general advice.
I'd argue it's good enough general advice and would apply to most online subscriptions as they typically have no minimum commitment. The ones with a minimum commitment would be the outliers and would require special treatment.
I agree with your point that you could get into trouble for violating your contract terms. I perhaps should have mentioned specifically about NYTimes which seem to have designed around people blocking the payments to cancel their subscription.
This was the whole issue though. I closed my bank account and moved country, and they delayed cancelling it and then chased me up on one month's payments for years - when I had no easy way of making payments in Germany.
In the end I paid it though, it was only 20 euros!
I had to do exactly that with o2 Germany. They continued to charge me after the contract expired. And they even tried to charge for the router that I actually sent back.
This isn't "Europe", it's Germany. Germany is still well known for using fax for government and corporate communication, and there was heavy criticism for how the Covid pandemic was initially handled because faxing records was so common which meant they could not be easily digitized, collected and searched.
In Sweden, sending a fax or physical letter to a government instance or private companies rather than an e-mail is more or less unheard of, unless they for some reason need a physical paper with your signature on it (I've heard this happen with customs, for example), but in almost all areas of society this has now also been replaced with Bank-ID, which is digital.[1]
I had this same issue with a number of French companies. Couldn't figure out why they weren't cancelling my contract despite repeated letters until someone told me you have to send the letter with proof of receipt otherwise they just ignore it.
There are 3 ways to cancel an O2 contract - (1) Online intimation + phone call, (2) Letter or (3) Fax [0]. Most routers (like Fritzbox) come with a fax function which you send an online fax [1]. O2 charges a maximum of 0.14 cents per fax page or free based on your DSL plan. Alternatively, you can also send a physical letter online (0.70 cents) [2].
Your comment below says that there is no receipt for confirmation. O2 provides a default PDF form on their website which to fill for termination. The letter explicitly states that "o2 should send you a written confirmation of cancellation". It is illegal for O2 to be in receipt of a letter and not send a confirmation. I am sorry if that happened to you!
Don't get me wrong - the auto-renewal of contract practices in Germany are predatory for the consumers. Recently, there has been a change in law that forces providers to extend contracts by 1 month instead of 1 or 2 years.
That's illegal in Europe. You have to be able to cancel via the same means as you signed up. So if you can signup online then you must be able to cancel online.
Here is the Dutch implementation, because it's the first I could find in English: https://business.gov.nl/regulation/automatic-renewal-subscri... As is says there "Consumers must be able to cancel their agreement in exactly the same way as they signed up for them."
It sure as hell doesn't work like this for the newspaper Le Monde (in France). Sure you can sign/resign with Apple/Google but if you sign with e-mail, you have to mail a physical letter to resign (8Euros one with proof of delivery and all)
It probably depends on which country is handling your subscription. With a German address, they don't have to consider any request in any language other than German.
A recently passed German law requires (among other changes) an online cancel button, however companies don't have to implement it until July 2022 unfortunately.
Tip: when you’re ready to cancel, change the physical address in your account to one in California. Magically, a cancel button appears (to comply with California law).
I did this the last time WSJ decided to jack my rate to something obscene.
I immediately instructed my bank to block the upcoming payments and on the renewal day the subscription was cancelled. This is pretty much a flow of their cancellation.
There are currently two ways to sign up for the New York times online, one is via the website and the other is via a subscription from the various app stores(an in-app-purchase).
To unsubscribe from the website-based subscription requires a call to NYT’s customer service based in New York which have limited operating hours- here they’ll try their best to convince you not to unsubscribe after waiting in a phone queue.
However if you chose to subscribe through an IAP then you simply browse to your active subscriptions and press a button - far simpler and on par with how easy it was to sign up.
Making subscriptions difficult to cancel is not new in any industry, NYT’s behaviour here isn’t unique, or even the worst example. I use it as a demonstration that even reputable companies use these tactics.
This is one of the reasons why certain businesses loathe IAPs, (regardless of the cost). When providing your details to a business there is a lot of added potential for lock in, follow-on marketing, increasing the cost at irregular intervals and selling your information to 3rd parties.
I say "regardless of the cost" because many types of digital goods have minimal costs to provide them. For example a 15% or 30% cut of such purchases is negligible when selling an in-game currency because there is no genuine cost for providing that currency. Even if the app store charged 0% instead of the 15% or 30%, the business would still be missing out on using your personal details for all of the other valuable ways they can extract money from you/your data.
To use Amazon as an example - I receive extreme levels of spam for the custom email address that I use with Amazon, many vendors I have purchased from have immediately on sold my contact information.
Thanks, it hadn't occurred to me that the app stores would enforce easy cancellation. I'll remember to prefer in-app sign up over website for any new subscriptions in future.
It’s best to check both options before proceeding, as some businesses do offer a cheaper subscription service when working directly - however as mentioned that may come with strings attached.
I feel the success of small developers relies on IAP, it means I can purchase from them without needing to trust them - the app stores do a good job of reviewing the app for malware and if the app doesn’t live up to expectations it is trivial to get a refund from the various app stores.
Had a similar issue with a US publication recently. They emailed to say "Your subscription of $120 has automatically been renewed, please check your card details or contact us to alter it."
Fortunately the card they have expired last December.
If they do something like this, it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product. "The only reason why people would continue to use this product is... if we make it sufficiently difficult to cancel".
When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the product know it...
I also dislike this business practice, but I don’t think the only way it comes about is from lack of confidence in product/service.
Let’s say you were building a startup and had to prioritize limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You’re talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you could do is 3+ years long.
You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
> You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if you're not happy".
I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users signing up to services I've built that one of the top reasons they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock-in has always been high up on my list of features for every service I build/am involved in.
Exactly this line of reasoning brought me to Obsidian tool, which manages files you already own. It could be a minority of users, but we love that attitude!
You don't have to "build" anything. Just have a button "cancel subscription" with a mailto: link... or even some text saying "email us at @ from your account and it will be cancelled within N hours/days".
Currently what most companies (including startups) do is burying the cancellation instructions in some Knowledge Base, or forcing some back and forth via email or phone.
You can rationalise bad behaviour all day, but we all know very well the reason people don't make it easy to cancel.
> it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product.
It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. "The only reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We're doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make that mistake."
If it's so amazing that people only unsubscribe by accident, they'll certainly miss it quickly and subscribe again immediately. The practice of using "dark patterns" to prevent people from unsubscribing is utterly disrespectful.
So much of the current economy derives benefit from captive customers who are charged ridiculous fees because they have no other place to go (think drinks at a movie theater or baggage fees on an airline, but there are many versions of the captive-customer squeeze), use extortion-type tactics to retain customers (you lose functionality of the product you've "bought" if you leave or otherwise lock you into their product making it painful to leave), or otherwise strong-arm their customers from leaving once they have them on board (high termination fees, impossible cancellation methods, threatening collections if you do a chargeback).
Many SaaS compaines even do this -- luring their customers in with low or even free offerings and then turning off those free or low priced offerings to force their users into higher paying brackets without providing any additional functionality. Pipedrive just announced that they are sunsetting their popular Esssentials plan for no really good reason than to squeeze their customers into a higher plan. I have had other companies decide to arbitrarily double or even quadruple the price of their offering for the same features because they can't find any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn't have the right price to begin with if it can't sustain their business.
Are these products good? Yeah they're decent enough. But these tactics say more about trying to squeeze every nickel not only out of those who would otherwise want to leave, but even those who would like to stay.
That would require that there is somebody overseeing the complete user experience. In reality the people who design the product probably never meet the people who design the subscription management systems.
That's not really it. They want a chance to convince you to stay and/or get feedback on why you're leaving. They can also offer some kind of one-off promotion or something to retain people. Subscriber loyalty is the absolute lifeblood of these kinds of businesses.
I work at a non-profit and we collect recurring payments from people who don't actually get anything tangible in return. The membership are rigidly ethical in all their fundraising and messaging, but they think of "call to cancel" as being a fair practice.
If you are concerned that the only way to keep people subscribed is to offer them a one-off promotion when they've decided to cancel -- isn't that kind of a tacit acknowledgement that your product doesn't contain the value that you are charging for? To me, it seems a bit like you've actually reinforced the GP's point...
On the non-profit point of view, that's hard for me to understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can't imagine having any other response to someone cancelling their recurring donation than sending them an e-mail thanking them for their support and offering a conversation for some feedback if they'd be willing to tell us how we could do better. I suppose it depends on the non-profit sector you are in, but often times people giving low dollar recurring donations aren't particularly well off and I can't imagine forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our organization but they're just too broke for a while to continue..
Almost every subscription is priced to whatever the market will bear and not an actual unit cost plus fixed margin. Our services are digital. It costs us $XX million to operate all the services we do and next to nothing to serve that a single user. In fact we give 99% of our services away for free and only ask for donations of whatever they care to give. Most donors don't actually get anything in return for their money.
Thank you for that, it's good we have smart people working our nonprofits.
On the unrelated topic of subscription cancelation, what do you believe leads your donors to accept "call to cancel" as an ethical option, compared to the apparent overwhelming majority of people who believe it unethical for the reasons stated?
It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give up partway through the process because they don't want to pick up the phone.
It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a damn about the company's confidence in its product. They care about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. The quality of the product is way secondary to that.
A reasonable legal requirement should be that customers are able to unsubscribe using the same method used to subscribe and the process should not require more time and effort than the initial subscription.
This is the case in the Netherlands and a contract cannot revoke this right (Burgerlijk Wetboek 6:236). If you subscribe online, you should be able to unsubscribe online.
Another thing that helps if you don't want to fight someone who violates this and they require you to send a letter, that an e-mail also qualifies as legally binding. So, if they ask a letter to end a subscription, they must also accept an e-mail.
T-Mobile Thuis literally delayed the end of my subscription by two months, and only cancelled it when I called back. There wasn't ever a way to cancel online. In practice they've really been truly garbage, lawful or not.
Ziggo is similar, very shitty customer service, and you have to talk to an aggressive sales person to be allowed to cancel. The moment fiber was delivered to my area I cancelled them and just hung up on the sales guy lying to me about how their speed was higher (it definitely isn't) than fiber.
Ziggo is terrible. I recently overheard one of their salespersons (at MediaMarkt) claiming that Ziggo is also fiber internet (it's cable). Only when the customer pushed him, he admitted that it is not really fiber, but then argued that it doesn't really matter, because 90whatever percent of the route from the data center to home is fiber.
Their 35/50Mbit upload speed says differently. I'm really looking forward to not having to call them again for discounts (since you otherwise pay more than new customers) because I can then actually leave them when the fiber is installed.
Good to know I just have to hang up on the sales guy.
Member lagadu nearby (root post) states it is the case of Portugal.
Edit: according to member t0mas88, it is not just Portugal, or the Netherlands as mentioned nearby: it should be a European directive, not yet implemented by all Members. I guess that this should push heavily on the service providers for general compliance (as opposed to changing the options according to geolocation, as another member here revealed mentioning California).
Reasonable would be lack payment ending the contract. We should be able to simply stop paying them with zero repercussions. Let them deal with the administrative trivia required to cancel a service.
This TBH, I think we're so used to being taken advantage of that we don't realize we should be asking for more. Especially if it's the kind of service which doesn't involve extra preparation costs for the provider.
The problem is that in the US, one cannot easily stop a debit/credit card from being billed for a particular service.
A more general solution is to make the payment infrastructure allow me to ban a particular merchant. You can implement this by reissuing a debit card, but there's no reason not to make it seamless for individual merchants.
These days you can cancel yourself via myaccount.nytimes.com.
Go to Subscription overview, and at the very bottom click "Cancel your subscription".
You can also use this to get a better deal. Just start the cancellation, choose "My subscription is too expensive" as reason, click Continue a couple of times and they'll give you a reduced rate to keep you. I now pay 2 euros a month for a digital subscription.
My understanding is this is only available in certain jurisdictions which mandate symmetry between subscribe and unsubscribe options. Others direct you to phone or Web chat.
I’m also annoyed by having to return or mail back routers when disconnecting from ISPs. When you sign up they are glad to deliver and install at no cost, but now you have to waste time or money sending them the equipment back.
It is really not the same thing: they lent you equipment. That «no cost» is not really such, but if it were, you cannot demand further "favours" on the basis of former or other favours. (Or, they could go along the lines of that "fake" «no cost» and charge you for both equipment deployment and full equipment costs incorporating them in the general fees, increasing them.)
I vowed never to pay the NYT another dime after the hassle they gave me about unsubscribing from their crossword subscription a few years ago. It was such a pain, I told to actually cancel my news subscription too. Never looked back. These days I mostly read the WSJ and it meets my needs.
Same thing with The Guardian. Subscribed online and was then told I can’t cancel via email and have to endure a pushy sales call if I want to cancel. Similar experience with The Economist except it was via live chat instead.
These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.
Don't subscribe again. You can read all these articles for free via archive. If they're going to be doing abusive things to you like that, you have a duty to pirate their content.
Same with the UK subscription craft beer service, beer52.com [1]. Subscribe easily with a few clicks, but they make you call during office hours and endure 10+ minutes on hold to cancel.
Sadly in the UK I guess we won't get the benefit of any new EU legislation to address this.
Sometimes I wonder what little things differ between countries. But this is new to me. Is it true that you find that hold time to be annoying/out of place in the UK? I once was on hold with an insurance company for ten hours... I began to wonder if 1. something happened that got me stuck in the queue, or 2. if they even had a single person working the lines.
Not OP but also from the UK. Whilst a 10 minute hold time isn't too unusual for large companies, especially if you call at a busy time like midday when everyone takes a lunch break, anything over 20 minutes would certainly warrant complaining about to anyone unfortunate enough to ask how your day is going.
A big selling point for companies for a while was quick answering of calls. My bank has genuinely answered faster than 999 (our 911 equivalent) on occasion. Although during COVID hold times have gone up dramatically for some reason.
This is the FTC, not the EU (as far as I'm aware theres no EU legislation planned or in place for this).
Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, but you could say the same about the UK.
That being said I thought it already was against UK law. Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or its just not heavily enforced. Who knows
The EU regulation on this was already passed several years ago, and is already enforced in some countries, it should be universally enforced by the end of the year.
Any chance of a reference here please? I've been unable to find the law (in my case the UK, but an EU regulation reference would help) which enacts this, and I'm dealing with a dispute at the moment where this would be helpful.
Usually Germany is pretty snappy on enforcing EU regulations, but at least in this case it would appear not as I've heard Germans more than any other EU national complaining about this issue in particular. Again though, maybe there are loopholes (just look at GDPR, or to an extent even TPD).
When I had an account with Beer52 I them and said, effectively, "This is my notice to cancel and the main motivation to cancel is because of anti-consumer behaviour like having to call to cancel. I do not authorise any further payments and any payments you do take will be subject to a dispute with my credit card company".
To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.
Hah, literally saw the title of the post and came to comments to find beer52 (after dealing with them over a year ago)... must say something about a company.
But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel the subscription. I misread that and thought I'd cancelled, then got stung with a bill, but they didn't send as they couldn't take payment.
So I retried to cancel and realised what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it sound like you _have_ unsubscribed.
For a 'hip' beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to ANYONE, even though I actually quite liked the beer.
That is not relevant. Perhaps on Reddit people are likely to find that to be a persuasive negation of the topic you're not addressing with this remark.
Having dealt with The Guardian and others like them to cancel, I say "I will not explain why I wish to cancel nor will I reconsider my decision. Please cancel my account. My account number is x, my email is y and my address is z."
I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give in and do it.
In the past when I've had to deal with a retention person and they ask why I'm leaving, I usually just say personal reasons. I've had pretty good luck with that.
In the good old days of paper delivery I used, "I'm moving to Zimbabwe." They never had a checkbox for Zimbabwe and the call ended there. Now, I guess they'll just pitch the online edition.
Maybe I'll try, "I'm about to winter over in Antarctica and won't have the internet bandwidth for your paper. Do you guys deliver there?"
Very prisoner-of-war-esque. I might try that if I ever get into such a subscription trap. I am just not sure if I could maintain my composure enough to keep saying "please".
When I had to deal with "customer retention dept" as a part of cancellation I was saying that I'm moving to another country and that immediately killed their interest.
The Economist I just didn't renew. Nothing beyond that.
What is true is that, with a lot of magazines, to get the best rate you have to select an autorenew option and then they make it difficult to cancel. (That may be the case with The Economist; don't know.) In general, you're better off just paying a bit more and passing on autorenew unless you're sure you want to keep on subscribing.
Can confirm that The Economist requires you to chat with a human to cancel. The representative will basically try to get you a "new" deal to prevent cancellation and the whole process took about 5 minutes (with me just saying no to everything).
Still better than the Globe and Mail though, had to call and talk with them for 10 minutes while they tried to sell me a different subscription.
Similar with New Scientist, needed to phone during office hours and was on hold a while, which would put me off subscribing again in future¹ though in fairness they were very quick to follow my cancel request, not hard sell on staying, etc, once I got through.
[1] of course that is now a moot point as they've been bought by DMGT and I refuse to give any money at all to those in any way responsible for, or benefiting from, the Daily Fail.
I was kinda shocked by The Guardian to be honest with you - I had a similar experience when I came to cancel my subscription to The Guardian Weekly, which is an excellent magazine.
In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.
Careful; if you don't go through their unsubscribe process, they can consider the contract still valid, and collect on the legally-still-valid subscription through liens and paycheck garnishments.
I had to stop payment via Amex to cancel WSJ. I have copies (and a receipt) of me informing WSJ that I was cancelling my subscription. Now I’m intrigued though. I’d love to see them try to claim there’s documented debt and collect on it.
The difficulty cancelling Economist one time put me off from subscribing to a paper ever since. I don't get it, their content is good, let me cancel easily and I'll come back easily. How desperate are those services that they implement measures like that, counting on people to not follow through the cancellation process, forgetting to cancel altogether, etc. And then doing the absolute minimum necessary, e.g. offering the easy cancel button for California residents only because they have to. It'll be the same with this piece of legislation. Sure they'll do it for US residents but they'll continue to pull the same crap for us here in Canada and elsewhere.
They deserve to go out of business in my opinion and I hope they do.
As a WSJ subscriber I'm so used to their blunt "to the point" editorial style that I find Economist articles too long winded and short-storyish. I always get 5 paragraphs in and still can't figure out what the article is getting at. Ain't nobody got time for that.
The Economist reached the point of calling me to ask if I knew someone who would be interested into a subscription.
I love the magazine but their marketing is really invasive and annoying.
Last time I cancelled they were a nightmare calling me every other day.
I don't know if this is the case, but these are exactly the sort of awful "customer retention" strategies I would expect from an organization where somebody is being judged/rewarded based on minimizing customer turnover metrics below some threshold.
I had a different experience with the Economist. I forgot to cancel and was billed. I emailed saying I forgot to cancel, could I unsubscribe now? And got a quick reply saying they'd cancelled and also refunded me despite me not asking.
I recently cancelled again after getting the 1-month renewal warning, and immediately got a 50% off offer, so I'll probably subscribe again.
I had a similarly easy experience with the Guardian a few years ago, based in Europe.
They must have changed recently since I subscribed and unsubscribed online earlier this year with no trouble (I unsubscribed because they signed me up to new email lists without my permission, something another newspaper I'm subscribed to (but will likely be canceling) just did as well :().
The one newspaper I've had no issues at all with is Indian Country Today. They use qgiv and while you can make an account with qgiv to edit payment details, they also send you an email every time they bill your card with a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click with no account (so it is easy to just cancel and resubscribe if you need to make changes rather than needing yet another account). All around excellent experience with ICT and qgiv.
I told the person at the The Economist's live chat that I was unsubscribing due to that dark pattern. The other reason is that even if the content is great their app isn't. The saved articles feature isn't shared between different devices. Another reason is that you need to get into an article and then get out instead of doing continuous reading. Ended up reading/annotating downloaded PDFs because it was a better experience than using their app.
I had very good experience with The Economist but, despite that, I'm still hesitant to re-subscribe because I just don't want to bother e-mailing them if I want to suspend or cancel my subscription (or add/remove print etc.).
Same with the New York Times. Having gone through calling to cancel, I vowed never to subscribe again. Now I simply scan the front page to make sure the end of the world isn’t upon us. (Many days, reading it, it appears as though it is!)/s
Newspapers are awful. I had one thrown in my yard DAILY, that the previous homeowner had signed up for. I couldn't figure out what the publication even was, or how to contact them. I ended up flagging down the delivery guy (4am), he doesn't know who the publisher is and so I just tell him to stop throwing in my yard (put in trash for all I care). It worked for a while, but probably the turnover happened and the next delivery guy started throwing in my yard again. So I wake up, flag him down, and ask for his bosses info. Call them, they're confrontational about it so I basically went on to say I feel they are littering on my property and I will report them to police if it keeps happening (yep, Karen move). That led to them telling me who the publisher was, they had a corporate holding company website, with an image of text instructing how to cancel (not SEO friendly). I had to call. After calling, I had to write a letter to some PO Box. It was insane.
Meanwhile, I signed up for a magazine 20 years ago for $8/year and still get it monthly as well. I haven't paid since, they send me an annual reminder pay which I ignore. I suppose they like including me in their readership numbers to sell print ads, so they keep sending me magazines. Luckily, I enjoy the magazine. Monthly in my mailbox (not wet out in my yard). I would not want to even think about trying to stop the deliveries, they follow me wherever I live.
I just expect these tactics from periodicals these days. Last time I signed up to one (The Economist) I used a pre-paid debit card for this very reason.
Sure enough, they eventually gave me a reason to cancel (popup modals over their online articles for paying customers) and I just emptied the card and sent an email to their customer service saying "I hereby cancel my subscription; you are no longer authorized to charge my card".
Can't refuse to cancel me if I have no money taps temple
If, theoretically, there was an unsubscribe button in one's user settings that you hadn't seen, and you sent an email instead and blocked the payment card?
The email is evidence he's let them know of his intention to cancel. Unless there is some major clause in the contract that entitles them to more money such as a minimum commitment, I don't see a problem.
Granted anyone can sue for anything anyway, but I can't see them having a strong case. They'd be paying a lot of money to try and litigate this and demonstrate their bad faith in the process.
No one would sue unless the balance was into thousands, or they're just an individual pursuing a vendetta. What would likely happen is they'd charge it off to a debt collection agency that would hassle you by whatever means of contact they have for a couple years until you paid or they gave up on it. And when they give up on it they usually just sell it downstream to an even more crappy company more willing to use aggressive tactics.
Naw, they wouldn't want to pay for a credit check. They run boiler room style call centers where the folks hassling you work on commission. So they just push whatever leads they have to their staff and make it their problem to squeeze money out of it. The entire industry is really, really, scummy, and barely one step better than those fraudsters that pretend to be the IRS.
Good thinking. When I cancelled it (No complaints, I just did one of the 12 week offers as it's too expensive for me in general) they made me go talk to a sales person in their chat room, and they actually put me on hold for ~20 minutes while waiting for the queue to clear. Then they try to sell you on a reduced rate before they'll let you cancel. C'est abusé.
Yep, if you've signed an agreement to remain a paying customer for a set duration and you pull this, they can send collections after you. In this case, I hadn't.
A lot of charities in the Netherlands do the same thing, where you can't just give a one-time donation, but have to subscribe to a monthly contribution.
That is horrible enough as it is.
But then to unsubscribe, you have to call them (during their and your office hours) and endure another couple of pitches to keep you subscribed until you are finally allowed to cancel.
And then some of them even have a cancellation term of one month.
This is the reason i have a label next to my doorbell that says: "Donations only without subscription and to volunteers". Since then we've not have a lot of charities ring the bell, and the ones that do I actually want to give to.
In my case it was trivial to unsubscribe, but they then started sending me all kinds of letters in regular intervals. And never stopped, I still get them years later. I'm certain by now they paid more for those stupid letters and pens than I donated in the first place. Which is yet another reason for me to never waste money there again, as I now know where it's used.
I've used the Times a handful of times as a student. It's always painful when student discount ends and you ring up and say I can't afford £26 a month. They'll drop it to £10 then £5 but they never match my student price. I've had to leave during bachelors and professional qualifications.
In Portugal the law makes it so you can cancel any service using the same means that you used to subscribe it, so if they support subscribing online, unsubscribing also has to be doable the same way; same goes for via phone, personal or whatnot.
It makes sense, prevents service providers from making it too difficult to terminate a contract.
This is extremely reasonable and civilized. Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability?
I have noticed of other EU countries that a response against abuse may exist, but severely delayed and only partial (e.g. about sale of misrepresented services and other contractual scams, especially when carried out over the phone).
> Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability?
not GP, ... it is a role-model when it comes to the points listed above. I think it's hard to answer your question because how would one define "good sense and reliability". At the risk of being called out for whataboutism, here is something that would be sobering for most people (like myself) applauding the current "good parts":
No. Portugal is a (atm) an radically aging country, it is rife with corruption and politics are poorly led. Brain drain is massive. Employment is extremely difficult for both the jobseeker and the employer due to poor competitiveness, low productivity and terrible regulation. Healthcare systems have been dropping off a cliff.
IMO going the direction of a dying country. And I am Portuguese.
Virtually anyone I know with a good skill set that’s profitable abroad has moved.
Also in order to retire somewhere - in order to stay anywhere outside a period of "apnea" -, you will want to find there that «good sense and reliability» mentioned ("reliability" as in "you can place trust in the policymakers and in the population in general", or what lets you avoid passing your time in the uneasiness of a "what insanity will they commit next". Some European countries have demonstrated quite an amount of perverse """creativity""", in the recent times. "Reliability" also means, conversely, that you can trust that policies will be issued to guarantee fair justice to defend the population against abuse - the thread is relevant).
Posters seem to say that Portugal has highs and lows. There should be a general balance anyway. I have been concerned for a long time about which territories have remained more solid in said terms of "good sense".
Not just Portugal, this is a European thing but apparently Germany hasn't implemented it yet and will do so starting next year.
That's the weird thing with some European "laws", they give countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries abuse that to go and implement it on the very last day.
> That's the weird thing with some European "laws", they give countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries abuse that to go and implement it on the very last day.
If you give them to the last day and they do it on the last day, they have done what you asked, it's not abuse. Want it done sooner? Require it done sooner.
Pimping has little to do with advertising, it’s a form of slavery. Nothing would stop a pimp from forcing his workers to be responsible for advertising themselves.
Big difference between "I will make you suffer" and "I won't intervene when someone I have no affiliation with nor obligation to interfere with makes you suffer."
I got up late today, so I barely have time to make pancakes and coffee before I have to leave for my day’s slavery.. if I’m late, I’ll have to do the slavery in my underpants at home until the morning meetings are over. Then I’ll drive to my slavery and be stuck there for 5-6 hours, with only lunch and snack breaks. Unless I need to take off early to run errands anyway
Actual slaves that don't get paid and get whipped if they don't meet quotas would have a major problem with your statement.
Most of the people here not only have the option of quitting, but a fair number could probably choose not to work for several months, or even the rest of their life. They certainly are not slaves.
>Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only advertise yourself.
And then serious criminals are out of the advertising business, but can still offer consultation, business and personal protection, and, of course, forced sex labour through human trafficking.
I don't know when Portugal started this, but in Germany there is at least the concept of a "grüne Well" (literally a green wave). Simply put: if you drive at the speed limit you won't get any red lights. Sadly the german administration barely makes use of this as it doesn't make them any money...
Many cities in the US do this along major roads. They'll time the lights to maximize traffic flow which ussally means if your driving the speed limit you'll at least get through 3-4 lights before you have to stop.
The red light is some distance ahead, not right in front of the speed detector so that you have to immediately hammer down the break pedal and be rear-ended by the vehicle behind.
Of course some will still get as close to the light as they can and hammer the breaks last moment, but they'll do that at other lights too, and other unsafe things, so the danger is not caused by the light in that instance.
Is it a normal light at an intersection, or an extra one somewhere in the middle of a block? It's not hard for me to imagine people scoffing at the mid-block light and deciding to run through it.
Neither I'd say. They're usually on long stretches of old highways with no traffic lights between roundabouts where lots of commercial and residential buildings (and thus people) are right on the curb.
The trick is to drive normal speed and at the very last second speed like a madman, so that it still has to cycle to amber then red just as you leave the intersection!
Much better than what I've seen in my (US) city: speed limit 30 mph, but lights timed for 40-45 mph to get a continuous green light down the one-way street. Either you speed, opening you to tickets, or you stop needlessly on lights that are set for a faster speed than you are traveling.
Not that the .gov won't happily take in money as a result of the dark pattern they've created but the primary cause of the patterns creation is likely the same old poor coordination, inertia and ineptitude that tends to plague government in wealthy areas with lots of stakeholders.
The road is signed probably for 30 because that's what is was historically or that's what they got after evaluating what the confusing web of rules and regulations says it should be.
The lights are set up for 40-50 because the person responsible for tuning the light a) looked at existing traffic data and set the light to that or b) assessed the properties of the road using totally different measures and determined that's the speed traffic would go.
And the city doesn't change the sign to reflect the reality of the traffic because a) they'd have to re-navigate the web of rules to do that and b) shirking potential revenue is a fast track to a dead end job for bureaucrats in that state c) doing nothing is easy.
that is good people finally realize it.
these conspiracies are abundant!
intentionally creating street traffic in this "clever conspiracy way" and no-option to cancel online, both are real, and detected few years ago.
you see, it is green to discourage people from driving, in this way. yet, technically, they merely destabilize optimum good, not actually being evil.
Unless the road is determined to be a local road, posted speed limits are only enforcable if set by an engineering survey, or if it's at least X, which I think is 60 or 65. But I'm not sure it's illegal to post an unenforcable speed limit, or to ticket against it, it's just that those contesting the ticket will win.
People will do all sorts of ideological gymnastics to justify screwing the public out of money when they money lands in government coffers ad the end of the day.
People here are talking about unjust systems built to needlessly punish law abiding citizens monetarily and time wise. No gymnastics or ideologies necessary.
What comes to mind is the obscenity of civil forfeiture used without accompanying crimes upheld against the people who rightfully own said assets..
We have the absolute worst of this world. If you leave a red light and travel near the speed limit (+/- 15mph) you _will_ catch the next red light. You can absolutely floor it and catch up with the next "pack" of cars and make it into the green light but you will be at the pack for the next light which will be red.
I hate it. I hate it so much. Travelling down an avenue for 3 or 4 miles is just painful. The worst is when there is zero traffic (say 10:30 at night) and you sit at red lights watching nobody pass.
My personal favorite was a poorly-timed stop light, with a red-light camera.
If you entered the intersection as the light turned yellow, and drove the speed limit, you would still be partially in the intersection when the light turned red. And promptly get a ticket in the mail.
Nobody realized what was happening (at least not those on the receiving end of the tickets) until my high school math teacher got one.
She went out there and measured the intersection, timed the lights, then showed up to contest the ticket with poster boards containing diagrams of the velocity/distance equations.
Then gets sued for practicing engineering without a license.
In a display of civic engagement, Mats emailed the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying in the hopes that they could help him raise public awareness and asked for their “support and help to investigate and present the laws of physics related to transportation engineering.”
He got the opposite.
After curtly informing Mats that they do not regulate traffic lights, the Board warned him that without an engineering license from the state of Oregon, Mats would be breaking the law if he even referred to himself using the word “engineer.” Then, the Board launched an investigation into Mats, which lingered for nearly two years and culminated in a $500 fine. According to the Board, Mats engaged in the unlicensed “practice of engineering” when he spoke publicly about his “critique and calculations” for the yellow-light formula. Moreover, only Oregon-licensed professional engineers are allowed to use the word “engineer” to describe themselves.
Although Mats is not a licensed professional engineer (and never claimed to), he has a broad background in math and science. In his native Sweden, Mats earned a degree in electrical engineering, and worked for the Swedish Air Force and Luxor Electronics. Mats even presented his research on traffic-light timing at an Institute of Transportation Engineers conference, and he corresponded with one of the physicists who developed the original 1959 formula.
This sounds like a power tripping bureaucrat more than anything. I would take it up on appeal. Heck, might even be able to find a lawyer to help bring up a countersuit on contingency.
Wow,that's insane. Thankfully in my teacher's case, the city basically said "oops our bad" and did actually extend the yellow (albeit several months later).
Somewhat inconsistently. This was most obvious on a pair of one-way streets, but one of them has been returned to two-way traffic. AFAICT, the waves in opposite direction started at the same time and the two streams passed each other around the halfway point. Other one-way streets in the area aren't on precisely the same schedule. The stretch was only about six or seven blocks long. And the wave didn't start at the boundary street of the area on one end, but one block into the area.
I am from Brazil, and here speed limits are literally dangeorus.
1. In my city people mostly ignore speed limits, because often they are unreasonable.
2. At same time people are so used to the above, that they ignore speed limits in very unsafe places.
3. I don't ignore the limits myself since I am a new-ish driver, but I almost crashed multiple times, either because I was with my eyes too gluted at the speedometer, or because everyone else was ignoring the speed limit and almost crashed into my rear.
4. I got fined for crossing speed limit anyway, when I was trying to understand the fine, I found out they been placing radars on steep hills on fast roads, so you have basically two choices there: climb the hill using higher gears, and cross speed limit, or slow down until you can use lower gears, and risk people crashing into you.
5. In a specific very steep hill they put the speed limit so low that the only way to climb that hill is actually go fast as you can until right before the radar, brake hard, immediately put first gear, and shove your foot in the accelerator pedal again and resume the climb tires screaming, if you attempt to climb the whole hill slower your car is likely to stall, thanks to Brazillian popularity of really low power cars, our cars are literally illegal in some european cities because of how underpowered they are and thus dangerous in hilly places.
> Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light.
This is the best. You trigger a red light because you're speeding, and everybody around you just glares at you. Including the old woman walking on the side of the street.
It's like public shaming.
Thanks bud, because of you, now we all have to sit at this red light and wait. Good job.
That works so much better than the hidden speed camera ticket I get in the mail 6 months later, when I'm not even in Portugal anymore.
One is about slowing you down, the other is about revenue.
> you can cancel any service using the same means that you used to subscribe it
This should be the way for everything. I'm about to move and I need to cancel my power and my cable and I just want it to be as easy as logging into the system, selecting my last day of service, and that's it
I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. It has been illegal in Europe/the Netherlands for years, however it is not enforced at all. Most newspapers don't let you cancel without calling them, having to deal with sales people trying to convince you to keep your subscription.
> The new guidelines around “negative option marketing” — which includes everything from automatic renewals to free trials that convert to paid subscriptions if consumers take no action — go beyond mandating that companies offer straightforward cancellation.
No, fuck this! If I get a free trial I want it to auto renew; if I have to take another step to make it renew that’s a waste of time, and inconvenient. If I don’t want it to renew I’ll cancel.
How would one go about trying to get this law enforced on a company? I live in California where this tactic has supposedly been illegal for 3 years already, but when I go to cancel my AT&T internet subscription, I still can not do it online and am forced to call.
What would the consequences be of subscribing to something with a disposable card, then deactivating that card instead of formally unsubscribing? Can companies send your information to a debt collector or somehow force you to pay since you didn't cancel? Can it affect your credit score?
German law knows “Dauerschuldverhältnis” (permanent indebtedness). If you don’t cancel the contract and just cease payment, the other party can obtain title against you, and eventually impound you.
I would suppose you'd have to actually have a choice in the matter. If you have to spend 30+ minutes to unsubscribe, surely it's not the only law that applies.
True, but easy way to get around this is to just revoke the SEPA mandate - which you are always allowed to. You still owe the money, but after revocation they will have to send you an invoice and wait for your payment. Larger companies will not do this as they have no process for this, and rather allow termination.
If there's a minimum term/commitment it can be considered morally wrong (as you're depriving them of revenue you've agreed to pay in advance) and there might be more incentive to collect that amount.
If there's no minimum commitment (or it's expired already) there's basically no problem. Yes, they can in theory send that debt to collections and litigate. Both of these are expensive and are unlikely.
If you've made reasonable efforts to cancel you can indeed block future payments and let them sort it out. If they want to litigate they'd have to explain why those reasonable efforts were ignored (and have the court rule in their favour).
Fuck New York Times, I had to go through this chaos once and promised to never ever use any of their services ever again. I even went to the pain of making sure all my ad blockers were in full force when visiting the NYT. I developed a strong sense of hatred after realize what kind of slimy tactics they used to stop you from cancelling a subscription.
One day, I found a loophole. I would email them requesting a cancellation for my record and initiated a chargeback against them via my credit card company. I had no hopes of getting the money back, but then I also had evidence that I tried to reach out to them via calls and emails to make them cancel my subscription and the chargeback went through and I got a full refund. I really enjoyed that feeling knowing that the NYT lost more than they made from me as for every chargeback, the credit card company would penalize the merchant with a fixed fee - usually anywhere from $20 to $50 per chargeback if I'm not wrong.
I wish all those who had been scammed by NYT raises a chargeback and burn them to the ground. God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company like this.
Reading about opposing viewpoints broaden your horizons, and surrounding yourself with media that reinforces your own world view does nothing to make your life better.
There's been a lot of talk about how newspapers are dying because nobody wants to pay for digital subscriptions. I think this industry seriously gets to blame themselves for this. I've tried subscribing to a couple of magazines back in the days and with every one of them it was a living nightmare to get out of the subscriptions. Once ending the subscription one even started sending what looked like regular invoices with due date in red and everything, but if you read the fine print at the bottom of the page it just said that "this is to start a subscription, if you are not interested ignore this mail".
Generally I don't have a problem paying for culture, and I also like reading both news papers and magazines but now days I always buy them at the local news stand. I've got enough proof that newspapers and magazines can't handle the trust with personal information and payment details.
I've also always admired journalists and the craft of good investigative journalism. It's sad that these creatives are stuck with the most hostile sales people in probably any industry (except maybe phone companies).
This. To give you an example I signed up for a local Gannett newspaper subscription for $17 per month delivered. I have since learned...
-twice a moth they claim they send premium content newspapers charged at $7 each extra. This content is trivial mass produced garbage.
-there is no billing statement detailing monthly charges. You can pay $5 a month to get an detailed billing statement.
-if you go on vacation there is no credit since they claim all the content is online.
-the newspaper shows up at my house some days at 12:15 am, so it is devoid of most news from the previous day.
I only get this for an elderly family member who reads it cover to cover everyday or I would be long gone.
I subscribed to NYT via apple pay (through their website not the app) to avoid these shenanigans but the subscription won’t show up in Apple pay. Does anyone know why?
Apple Pay is just a one-time payment authorization mechanism; it does not keep track of subscriptions and doesn't have a way to cancel them. You may have been confused with App Store subscriptions which are mediated by Apple (and they take a cut) and do allow you to cancel there.
I fell for this trap once, and instead of going through their rigamarole, I reported my credit card lost and got a new one with a new number. Of course I had to update the subscriptions I wanted to keep with the new number, but that was less hassle than cancelling that one service.
This exactly is why every year I think about subscribing to some expensive (for me) journal, then google horror stories about unsubscribing and abandon this idea.
Some people above mentioned inconvenient work hours when calling to unsub, but it's not only that. International subscribers must also pay to simply call another country. If will be put on hold for tens of minutes or more, then the price of that call will easily be more than annual sub price.
I suspect that even if FTC will change something in US, international subscribers will still be left out, because this is what usually happens in such cases.
I had this exact experience with New York Times. I subscribed, realized I didn't like their editorial style at all, and then had to call long international phone calls to get it to stop.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 587 ms ] threadI'm a news junkie, I think paying for news is important, but I don't have even 1/4 of the subscriptions I would have if it wasn't for scummy tactics and/or the fear that I will be subject to them in the future.
They might have changed. When I checked just now, they offer a phone number and an E-Mail address to cancel a physical paper subscription (there's no account, so that makes sense).
An online "Spiegel+" subscription can be cancelled via their website.
https://abo.spiegel.de/de/c/abo-service/spiegel-abo-kuendige...
It may be different for their non-German publication, but I had trouble finding any English information - which may be saying something...
Recently many companies are (finally) allowing to use the PEC (which is a form of Certified Electronic Mail) which has the same legal value as the registered mail, but that the average citizens do not have (unless they have it for other reasons), which however has a (small) yearly cost, but that may be "dangerous" in the sense that it becomes your "legal address" so it needs to be monitored as anything that arrives there has legal value and is considered delivered to you the moment it arrives in the inbox.
Oh you require it by certified air pigeon? Great, happy to; pay for it.
Though I haven't had issues in cancelling stuff. Online services work nicely for all other stuff.
The rationale is that you could claim that you received the letter, but upon opening the envelope you found just some blank sheets, with the piego there is no way to deny that it has been received.
And viceversa, there have been cases of envelopes sent intentionally with blank sheets inside, only to get the receipt and then be able to claim that "document X" has been sent within a required deadline (and actually fabricating the document later).
FWIW, from 2022 on, Germany will have a 2-click unsubscribe law [0]. It requires clearly labeled buttons and forbids a lot of dark patterns.
[0]: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two-click...
Many countries that don't have that will have consumer protection laws that simply get ignored, because simply ignoring them works for the company.
I remember trying to cancel my The Times (of London) subscription a few years ago. It was a terrible experience - having to ensure a pushy sales call for 20 minutes, where the call handler kept ignoring my requests to cancel as they kept reading a hard sell script.
The sooner this practice ends, the better.
I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...
That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24/7 online chat. A far better and more convenient experience, if one that still lacks the simplicity of a simple ‘unsubscribe’ button.
Also, if you ever worked in a large corporation, they have a lot of means to track incoming mail ("Posteingangsbuch") and for an enterprise to try to pretend not to have received a letter would require maldoing by a lot of employees (who usually are not commited to giving false statements in court for their employer).
This is definitely not the case for websites or apps and I'm pretty sure what the NYT is doing wouldn't amuse German consumer protection agencies.
Works somewhat
I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods and services is to pass full details of your payment card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it.
It thankfully is now more of a thing of the past, but it used to be the case in the UK at least that places would take a telephone card payment, where you recite your card number, expiry date etc. So not only can they make any future payment they like, there is even no durable record of them having these details.
Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.
It's definitely frustrating to cancel, and this is a good ruling that will help make it easier, but it's still your responsibility to do so.
Why can't everything be simple and easy? Maybe somebody needs to pass a law to make it so.
Ironically there are far more complaints about cloud providers shutting down entire business operations because of a late payment here on HN. Perhaps you should consider this more thoroughly instead of escalating a single unfortunate anecdote into a strawman argument against how business billing works.
Folks just don't seem to realize: you make a reasonable effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit card company.
I caught a restaurant "helping" themselves to a very healthy tip for delivery; I'd tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly professed that he didn't know how to issue a refund and offered cash.
He was playing stupid because he didn't want to deal with the transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had no idea how to issue a refund to my card.
I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose the tip, he lost the cost of the food and he got dinged with a chargeback fee. He also lost my weekly pizza order.
Still though, it's a weird system. Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of it, with some other party reimbursing me if that goes awry (and I notice).
If a tire fails while operating within its speed regime and before five years from manufacture, then it is to be reported to the DOT (US Department of Transportation). This usually only happens if the police are reporting on a fatal accident - most common citizens neither know that this option exists nor how to report it. If enough reports of a specific brand or type of tire come in, then the manufacturer (or importer) must provide proof of the testing done and pay some fines.
Many of the cheap Chinese tires are out of business (read: have changed business names) far before this critical last step could ever be reached, assuming that any reports were filed at all.
I get a nearly instant alert, sometimes before the payment terminal has displayed "accepted", that there's been a charge on my card.
Also, at least in the US, debit cards have similar fraud rules to credit cards (ie you can chargeback) but the time period is much, much smaller. A week, I think.
I strongly urge you to not use your debit card and use a credit card wherever possible. Aside from better protection, any fraud or mistakes are not involving real money, but credit.
https://gocardless.com/guides/sepa/mandates/
On Direct Debits in the UK, the merchant just charges me whatever. This is for things like utilities and phone bills, so I don't have major trust issues, but still it irks me.
Which I guess why many businesses prefer Klarna or other payment processors. You login with your bank account and then wire the money to them, instead of them pulling the money. Then, no chargebacks are possible.
In any case, the banks seem to be very good at refunding direct debits in cases where the merchants appear to be abusing them. My ex once noticed after several months that her gym was still charging her even after she'd cancelled - the bank made it very quick and easy to claim back all the extra payments!
Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a customer of 10 years.
https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau
in EU (well, at least in my country, France) a payment without 3dsecure is extremely easy to chargeback.
That's kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app).
That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction details before you confirm it on your device.
Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring subscription would be pretty convenient.
Although I was surprised how relatively big faxes are in Germany. I never had sent a fax before I was in Germany.
They ended up chasing me for 3 years over 20 euros when I moved to the UK. At least here in Sweden, credit checks aren't really a thing thankfully.
One specific example is if your contract has a termination period, which is pretty common, at least in my part of Europe. If you simply stop paying, you are denying the other party N months of revenue (your cancellation period) that you are contractually obliged to pay. You are now defaulting on your payments and will likely pay additional fees.
But if the contract has no minimum term (or it has since passed) and you've made a reasonable effort to attempt to cancel with no success, it'll now be on them to recover the money through legal means which would require them to explain to the court why your cancellation attempt was ignored, demonstrating their bad faith in the process. That's not something they want to do.
In the end I paid it though, it was only 20 euros!
In Sweden, sending a fax or physical letter to a government instance or private companies rather than an e-mail is more or less unheard of, unless they for some reason need a physical paper with your signature on it (I've heard this happen with customs, for example), but in almost all areas of society this has now also been replaced with Bank-ID, which is digital.[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID
It's not just Germany.
I think Sweden is the exception here really though (and the other Scandinavian countries, and possibly the UK).
Your comment below says that there is no receipt for confirmation. O2 provides a default PDF form on their website which to fill for termination. The letter explicitly states that "o2 should send you a written confirmation of cancellation". It is illegal for O2 to be in receipt of a letter and not send a confirmation. I am sorry if that happened to you!
Don't get me wrong - the auto-renewal of contract practices in Germany are predatory for the consumers. Recently, there has been a change in law that forces providers to extend contracts by 1 month instead of 1 or 2 years.
[0] https://www.o2online.de/service/kuendigung/
[1] https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-7490/...
[2] https://www.deutschepost.de/de/e/epost.html
[3] https://static2.o9.de/resource/blob/498264/12cd6ca6ee17a02b9...
Hopefully it'll get better. I also had a terrible experience with Vodafone in the UK, charging the higher rates for data usage with no warning.
It's based on an EU directive, but a recent one so not all countries have it live yet. More details on the EU directive and the German implementation starting next year: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two-click...
Unfortunately I don't think that's true. I'm looking at you, beer52.com! [1]
(And yes, they were doing this long before the UK left the EU, and are still at it today)
[1] https://ibb.co/r4LfK5F
Eventually I sent an email to some random customer support email I found complaining and they actually did it.
This is unfortunate because although I can read German, I can’t write or speak it, so figuring out how to write that e-mail would be a headache.
Edit: Thanks to aboalarm.de, which I learned about from this thread, I have learned the correct formula to use:
> Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,
>
> hiermit kündige ich mein oben genanntes Abonnement Ihrer Zeitschrift fristgerecht zum nächstmöglichen Zeitpunkt.
so if I do ever decide to cancel, this thread has been quite useful.
https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...
I did this the last time WSJ decided to jack my rate to something obscene.
I mean, I really appreciate the articles but I haven't been able to follow as closely as I wanted.
There are currently two ways to sign up for the New York times online, one is via the website and the other is via a subscription from the various app stores(an in-app-purchase).
To unsubscribe from the website-based subscription requires a call to NYT’s customer service based in New York which have limited operating hours- here they’ll try their best to convince you not to unsubscribe after waiting in a phone queue.
However if you chose to subscribe through an IAP then you simply browse to your active subscriptions and press a button - far simpler and on par with how easy it was to sign up.
Making subscriptions difficult to cancel is not new in any industry, NYT’s behaviour here isn’t unique, or even the worst example. I use it as a demonstration that even reputable companies use these tactics.
This is one of the reasons why certain businesses loathe IAPs, (regardless of the cost). When providing your details to a business there is a lot of added potential for lock in, follow-on marketing, increasing the cost at irregular intervals and selling your information to 3rd parties.
I say "regardless of the cost" because many types of digital goods have minimal costs to provide them. For example a 15% or 30% cut of such purchases is negligible when selling an in-game currency because there is no genuine cost for providing that currency. Even if the app store charged 0% instead of the 15% or 30%, the business would still be missing out on using your personal details for all of the other valuable ways they can extract money from you/your data.
To use Amazon as an example - I receive extreme levels of spam for the custom email address that I use with Amazon, many vendors I have purchased from have immediately on sold my contact information.
I feel the success of small developers relies on IAP, it means I can purchase from them without needing to trust them - the app stores do a good job of reviewing the app for malware and if the app doesn’t live up to expectations it is trivial to get a refund from the various app stores.
Fortunately the card they have expired last December.
When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the product know it...
Let’s say you were building a startup and had to prioritize limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You’re talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you could do is 3+ years long.
You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if you're not happy".
I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users signing up to services I've built that one of the top reasons they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock-in has always been high up on my list of features for every service I build/am involved in.
I’ve never encountered a small startup that relies on call to cancel—only big companies that actively know they’re making it hard to leave.
Currently what most companies (including startups) do is burying the cancellation instructions in some Knowledge Base, or forcing some back and forth via email or phone.
You can rationalise bad behaviour all day, but we all know very well the reason people don't make it easy to cancel.
Email is how thousands of SaaS handle cancellations today already.
> But I'm sure its not hard to setup something I "your account" page.
That's the whole point of the subthread...
It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. "The only reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We're doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make that mistake."
Let's be real. It's a dark pattern to make people give up on cancelling, rather than go through with it.
The more difficult something is, the more likely people are to give up on any phase of doing that thing.
Many SaaS compaines even do this -- luring their customers in with low or even free offerings and then turning off those free or low priced offerings to force their users into higher paying brackets without providing any additional functionality. Pipedrive just announced that they are sunsetting their popular Esssentials plan for no really good reason than to squeeze their customers into a higher plan. I have had other companies decide to arbitrarily double or even quadruple the price of their offering for the same features because they can't find any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn't have the right price to begin with if it can't sustain their business.
Are these products good? Yeah they're decent enough. But these tactics say more about trying to squeeze every nickel not only out of those who would otherwise want to leave, but even those who would like to stay.
I work at a non-profit and we collect recurring payments from people who don't actually get anything tangible in return. The membership are rigidly ethical in all their fundraising and messaging, but they think of "call to cancel" as being a fair practice.
On the non-profit point of view, that's hard for me to understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can't imagine having any other response to someone cancelling their recurring donation than sending them an e-mail thanking them for their support and offering a conversation for some feedback if they'd be willing to tell us how we could do better. I suppose it depends on the non-profit sector you are in, but often times people giving low dollar recurring donations aren't particularly well off and I can't imagine forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our organization but they're just too broke for a while to continue..
On the unrelated topic of subscription cancelation, what do you believe leads your donors to accept "call to cancel" as an ethical option, compared to the apparent overwhelming majority of people who believe it unethical for the reasons stated?
It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give up partway through the process because they don't want to pick up the phone.
It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a damn about the company's confidence in its product. They care about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. The quality of the product is way secondary to that.
Another thing that helps if you don't want to fight someone who violates this and they require you to send a letter, that an e-mail also qualifies as legally binding. So, if they ask a letter to end a subscription, they must also accept an e-mail.
(IANAL)
Their 35/50Mbit upload speed says differently. I'm really looking forward to not having to call them again for discounts (since you otherwise pay more than new customers) because I can then actually leave them when the fiber is installed.
Good to know I just have to hang up on the sales guy.
Edit: according to member t0mas88, it is not just Portugal, or the Netherlands as mentioned nearby: it should be a European directive, not yet implemented by all Members. I guess that this should push heavily on the service providers for general compliance (as opposed to changing the options according to geolocation, as another member here revealed mentioning California).
A more general solution is to make the payment infrastructure allow me to ban a particular merchant. You can implement this by reissuing a debit card, but there's no reason not to make it seamless for individual merchants.
Go to Subscription overview, and at the very bottom click "Cancel your subscription".
You can also use this to get a better deal. Just start the cancellation, choose "My subscription is too expensive" as reason, click Continue a couple of times and they'll give you a reduced rate to keep you. I now pay 2 euros a month for a digital subscription.
Let's see how this is enforced before putting those "Mission Accomplished" banners up.
These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.
Sadly in the UK I guess we won't get the benefit of any new EU legislation to address this.
[1] https://ibb.co/r4LfK5F
A big selling point for companies for a while was quick answering of calls. My bank has genuinely answered faster than 999 (our 911 equivalent) on occasion. Although during COVID hold times have gone up dramatically for some reason.
Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, but you could say the same about the UK.
That being said I thought it already was against UK law. Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or its just not heavily enforced. Who knows
Do you have a regulation reference by any chance?
But because they offered a free month to wine52. Easy to sign up, phone up to cancel
To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.
But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel the subscription. I misread that and thought I'd cancelled, then got stung with a bill, but they didn't send as they couldn't take payment. So I retried to cancel and realised what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it sound like you _have_ unsubscribed.
For a 'hip' beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to ANYONE, even though I actually quite liked the beer.
I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give in and do it.
Maybe I'll try, "I'm about to winter over in Antarctica and won't have the internet bandwidth for your paper. Do you guys deliver there?"
Perhaps Mars?
What is true is that, with a lot of magazines, to get the best rate you have to select an autorenew option and then they make it difficult to cancel. (That may be the case with The Economist; don't know.) In general, you're better off just paying a bit more and passing on autorenew unless you're sure you want to keep on subscribing.
Still better than the Globe and Mail though, had to call and talk with them for 10 minutes while they tried to sell me a different subscription.
[1] of course that is now a moot point as they've been bought by DMGT and I refuse to give any money at all to those in any way responsible for, or benefiting from, the Daily Fail.
In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.
Last time I cancelled they were a nightmare calling me every other day.
I recently cancelled again after getting the 1-month renewal warning, and immediately got a 50% off offer, so I'll probably subscribe again.
I had a similarly easy experience with the Guardian a few years ago, based in Europe.
The one newspaper I've had no issues at all with is Indian Country Today. They use qgiv and while you can make an account with qgiv to edit payment details, they also send you an email every time they bill your card with a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click with no account (so it is easy to just cancel and resubscribe if you need to make changes rather than needing yet another account). All around excellent experience with ICT and qgiv.
https://indiancountrytoday.com/news
https://qgiv.com/
Meanwhile, I signed up for a magazine 20 years ago for $8/year and still get it monthly as well. I haven't paid since, they send me an annual reminder pay which I ignore. I suppose they like including me in their readership numbers to sell print ads, so they keep sending me magazines. Luckily, I enjoy the magazine. Monthly in my mailbox (not wet out in my yard). I would not want to even think about trying to stop the deliveries, they follow me wherever I live.
Sure enough, they eventually gave me a reason to cancel (popup modals over their online articles for paying customers) and I just emptied the card and sent an email to their customer service saying "I hereby cancel my subscription; you are no longer authorized to charge my card".
Can't refuse to cancel me if I have no money taps temple
If, theoretically, there was an unsubscribe button in one's user settings that you hadn't seen, and you sent an email instead and blocked the payment card?
Granted anyone can sue for anything anyway, but I can't see them having a strong case. They'd be paying a lot of money to try and litigate this and demonstrate their bad faith in the process.
Maybe the collector would do a credit check to find out how much money they could get from you
They probably still just canceled your account since it's paid up front and it'd be more hassle to try and collect on your debt.
That is horrible enough as it is.
But then to unsubscribe, you have to call them (during their and your office hours) and endure another couple of pitches to keep you subscribed until you are finally allowed to cancel.
And then some of them even have a cancellation term of one month.
Most of my subscriptions go via PayPal or Google so I can just cancel the payment and eventually my service will be cancelled for lack of payment.
Incidentally, I also think it's now common knowledge that unsubscribing will, in most case, initiate a lower price offer.
I have noticed of other EU countries that a response against abuse may exist, but severely delayed and only partial (e.g. about sale of misrepresented services and other contractual scams, especially when carried out over the phone).
not GP, ... it is a role-model when it comes to the points listed above. I think it's hard to answer your question because how would one define "good sense and reliability". At the risk of being called out for whataboutism, here is something that would be sobering for most people (like myself) applauding the current "good parts":
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202111/portuguese-lawmakers-...
One who calls the other "whataboutist" is usually a hypocrite.
IMO going the direction of a dying country. And I am Portuguese.
Virtually anyone I know with a good skill set that’s profitable abroad has moved.
We all want to retire in Portugal, but it seems there are few employment opportunities unless you know the right people.
I'm sure "retirement" is the only growth industry in Portugal these days.
Posters seem to say that Portugal has highs and lows. There should be a general balance anyway. I have been concerned for a long time about which territories have remained more solid in said terms of "good sense".
That's the weird thing with some European "laws", they give countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries abuse that to go and implement it on the very last day.
In contrast, EU directives stipulate the desired outcome and let countries draft their own national law to achieve the directive's desired outcome.
If you give them to the last day and they do it on the last day, they have done what you asked, it's not abuse. Want it done sooner? Require it done sooner.
Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only advertise yourself. I wonder what other countries have prostitution set up like this.
Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light.
Decriminalization of all drugs obviously too.
that's an excellent rule - because pimping should be illegal.
Or a protection racket.
Or just fee for protection.
Depends on the specific situation in question. There's a wide variety of schemes that fall under the definition of pimping.
"You work or I will make you suffer" is slavery.
Whether and do what degree the arrangement between the worker(s) and the pimp is exploitative is more or less tangential to that.
Mall cops certainly haven't enslaved mall owners.
All work is slavery.
I got up late today, so I barely have time to make pancakes and coffee before I have to leave for my day’s slavery.. if I’m late, I’ll have to do the slavery in my underpants at home until the morning meetings are over. Then I’ll drive to my slavery and be stuck there for 5-6 hours, with only lunch and snack breaks. Unless I need to take off early to run errands anyway
Most of the people here not only have the option of quitting, but a fair number could probably choose not to work for several months, or even the rest of their life. They certainly are not slaves.
And then serious criminals are out of the advertising business, but can still offer consultation, business and personal protection, and, of course, forced sex labour through human trafficking.
This sounds interesting. Since when have they been doing this, and do you have a link to photos, video or a more detailed description?
But we also have hidden radars which are not announced.
Of course some will still get as close to the light as they can and hammer the breaks last moment, but they'll do that at other lights too, and other unsafe things, so the danger is not caused by the light in that instance.
Much better than what I've seen in my (US) city: speed limit 30 mph, but lights timed for 40-45 mph to get a continuous green light down the one-way street. Either you speed, opening you to tickets, or you stop needlessly on lights that are set for a faster speed than you are traveling.
The road is signed probably for 30 because that's what is was historically or that's what they got after evaluating what the confusing web of rules and regulations says it should be.
The lights are set up for 40-50 because the person responsible for tuning the light a) looked at existing traffic data and set the light to that or b) assessed the properties of the road using totally different measures and determined that's the speed traffic would go.
And the city doesn't change the sign to reflect the reality of the traffic because a) they'd have to re-navigate the web of rules to do that and b) shirking potential revenue is a fast track to a dead end job for bureaucrats in that state c) doing nothing is easy.
Unless the road is determined to be a local road, posted speed limits are only enforcable if set by an engineering survey, or if it's at least X, which I think is 60 or 65. But I'm not sure it's illegal to post an unenforcable speed limit, or to ticket against it, it's just that those contesting the ticket will win.
People here are talking about unjust systems built to needlessly punish law abiding citizens monetarily and time wise. No gymnastics or ideologies necessary.
What comes to mind is the obscenity of civil forfeiture used without accompanying crimes upheld against the people who rightfully own said assets..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
I hate it. I hate it so much. Travelling down an avenue for 3 or 4 miles is just painful. The worst is when there is zero traffic (say 10:30 at night) and you sit at red lights watching nobody pass.
If you entered the intersection as the light turned yellow, and drove the speed limit, you would still be partially in the intersection when the light turned red. And promptly get a ticket in the mail.
Nobody realized what was happening (at least not those on the receiving end of the tickets) until my high school math teacher got one.
She went out there and measured the intersection, timed the lights, then showed up to contest the ticket with poster boards containing diagrams of the velocity/distance equations.
- one that shows your car before crossing the stop line when the light is red
- second showing your car after crossing the stop line within same light cycle (i.e. seconds from previous photo)
No need to do the math if you entered the intersection before the light turned red
In a display of civic engagement, Mats emailed the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying in the hopes that they could help him raise public awareness and asked for their “support and help to investigate and present the laws of physics related to transportation engineering.”
He got the opposite.
After curtly informing Mats that they do not regulate traffic lights, the Board warned him that without an engineering license from the state of Oregon, Mats would be breaking the law if he even referred to himself using the word “engineer.” Then, the Board launched an investigation into Mats, which lingered for nearly two years and culminated in a $500 fine. According to the Board, Mats engaged in the unlicensed “practice of engineering” when he spoke publicly about his “critique and calculations” for the yellow-light formula. Moreover, only Oregon-licensed professional engineers are allowed to use the word “engineer” to describe themselves.
Although Mats is not a licensed professional engineer (and never claimed to), he has a broad background in math and science. In his native Sweden, Mats earned a degree in electrical engineering, and worked for the Swedish Air Force and Luxor Electronics. Mats even presented his research on traffic-light timing at an Institute of Transportation Engineers conference, and he corresponded with one of the physicists who developed the original 1959 formula.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/04/28/...
They did not refund any of the past fines though.
1. In my city people mostly ignore speed limits, because often they are unreasonable.
2. At same time people are so used to the above, that they ignore speed limits in very unsafe places.
3. I don't ignore the limits myself since I am a new-ish driver, but I almost crashed multiple times, either because I was with my eyes too gluted at the speedometer, or because everyone else was ignoring the speed limit and almost crashed into my rear.
4. I got fined for crossing speed limit anyway, when I was trying to understand the fine, I found out they been placing radars on steep hills on fast roads, so you have basically two choices there: climb the hill using higher gears, and cross speed limit, or slow down until you can use lower gears, and risk people crashing into you.
5. In a specific very steep hill they put the speed limit so low that the only way to climb that hill is actually go fast as you can until right before the radar, brake hard, immediately put first gear, and shove your foot in the accelerator pedal again and resume the climb tires screaming, if you attempt to climb the whole hill slower your car is likely to stall, thanks to Brazillian popularity of really low power cars, our cars are literally illegal in some european cities because of how underpowered they are and thus dangerous in hilly places.
Sounds like a great way to train the entire population is to run reds between 10pm and 5am.
This is the best. You trigger a red light because you're speeding, and everybody around you just glares at you. Including the old woman walking on the side of the street.
It's like public shaming.
Thanks bud, because of you, now we all have to sit at this red light and wait. Good job.
That works so much better than the hidden speed camera ticket I get in the mail 6 months later, when I'm not even in Portugal anymore.
One is about slowing you down, the other is about revenue.
We see a lot of services trying to sell you subscriptions at the door or on the street, though.
This should be the way for everything. I'm about to move and I need to cancel my power and my cable and I just want it to be as easy as logging into the system, selecting my last day of service, and that's it
No, fuck this! If I get a free trial I want it to auto renew; if I have to take another step to make it renew that’s a waste of time, and inconvenient. If I don’t want it to renew I’ll cancel.
If there's no minimum commitment (or it's expired already) there's basically no problem. Yes, they can in theory send that debt to collections and litigate. Both of these are expensive and are unlikely.
If you've made reasonable efforts to cancel you can indeed block future payments and let them sort it out. If they want to litigate they'd have to explain why those reasonable efforts were ignored (and have the court rule in their favour).
One day, I found a loophole. I would email them requesting a cancellation for my record and initiated a chargeback against them via my credit card company. I had no hopes of getting the money back, but then I also had evidence that I tried to reach out to them via calls and emails to make them cancel my subscription and the chargeback went through and I got a full refund. I really enjoyed that feeling knowing that the NYT lost more than they made from me as for every chargeback, the credit card company would penalize the merchant with a fixed fee - usually anywhere from $20 to $50 per chargeback if I'm not wrong.
I wish all those who had been scammed by NYT raises a chargeback and burn them to the ground. God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company like this.
May it burn in hell huh xD sorry but this is so relatable and cracks me up badddd
I did the same thing for a gym membership (NYSC) and they threatened collections 3 months later. Fortunately, they went bankrupt.
For the gym, it depends on your contract. Maybe you had a 1 year commitment but you paid monthly?
I don’t really want to understand how their contemporaries propagandize, either.
That your life is better with culture (broadly) doesn’t mean that any culture improves your life.
Generally I don't have a problem paying for culture, and I also like reading both news papers and magazines but now days I always buy them at the local news stand. I've got enough proof that newspapers and magazines can't handle the trust with personal information and payment details.
I've also always admired journalists and the craft of good investigative journalism. It's sad that these creatives are stuck with the most hostile sales people in probably any industry (except maybe phone companies).
-twice a moth they claim they send premium content newspapers charged at $7 each extra. This content is trivial mass produced garbage. -there is no billing statement detailing monthly charges. You can pay $5 a month to get an detailed billing statement. -if you go on vacation there is no credit since they claim all the content is online. -the newspaper shows up at my house some days at 12:15 am, so it is devoid of most news from the previous day.
I only get this for an elderly family member who reads it cover to cover everyday or I would be long gone.
Some people above mentioned inconvenient work hours when calling to unsub, but it's not only that. International subscribers must also pay to simply call another country. If will be put on hold for tens of minutes or more, then the price of that call will easily be more than annual sub price.
I suspect that even if FTC will change something in US, international subscribers will still be left out, because this is what usually happens in such cases.