I subscribed to the NYT a few years ago and it took a phone call and a retention pitch to finally unsubscribe. I vowed to never subscribe again as long as this was in place.
I just interacted with the WSJ several days ago. It was extremely annoying -- and probably painful to the poor customer service rep who has to take these calls.
I don’t read any of these regularly, but the Apple One subscription includes Apple News+ or whatever it’s called and that lets you read NYT, WSJ, LA Times, and quite a few others…only works in the Apple News app though. That’s the annoying part — you don’t technically have a subscription with them, so you can’t comment (if that matters to you). It’s more comparable to RSS feed access, albeit with no ads and full fidelity articles.
Honestly, I prefer it to their own apps, and the price + cancellation policy is WAY better.
NYTimes changed their policy sometime during the Covid years. I canceled back in 2017-18 and can confirm that it took me talking over the phone rep repeatedly saying nothing but "Cancel." for them to stop the retention spiel and finally close my account.
"Xperience Fitness" made me show up in person and sign a document. This needed to then be faxed to HQ. Of course, the gym didn't have a fax machine. So had to find a fax machine, send off a fax and wonder if anybody is going to look at it on the other end. This was in 2015 or so, not 1986.
I subscribe to the economist, and they automatically renew at a rate of $199 per year, I called to cancel and they drop it to $80 per year. Would save everyone the time if they started with $80
My previous Internet provider Cox tried this tactic on me when I canceled. My reply to them was ok, so you're admitting to overcharging me all along. I'll agree to stay with you if you also provide a refund for all previous months I was overcharged. They finally agreed to close my account at that point :)
My wife subscribed to The Economist but we weren't reading it. I tried changing my address to California, which has worked for some subscriptions because of California's consumer-friendly subscription cancellation law. That didn't work.
I tried doing the chat to cancel. I said multiple times that we wanted to cancel and the person (presumably a person following a script, although they certainly seemed robotic) just kept ignoring that. Eventually I said I'm cancelling, if you charge us, I'll charge it back and took a screenshot of that.
When they charged me, I charged it back. No need for the screenshot, which was mildly disappointing because this was one time where I felt I had proof that I tried to cancel.
We'll never subscribe to The Economist again. If you make it this difficult to leave, better not to start.
During the chat, they kept trying to make conversation, to ask questions, and to retain me. I just copy/pasted "I'm not here for chit-chat, please cancel the subscription and confirm once complete" each time they tried to engage me.
Immediately after my subscription expired they started emailing me 1/2 off offers. The whole experience put a bad taste in my mouth and I won't be back.
FWIW Comcast does this too. Just call them every 11 months and make them give you a better price. It’s dumb as heck and I want to live long enough to see them burn to the ground, but it’s one call I will make as it lets us give the only ISP option at our address in Silicon Valley that can actually give us gigabit download speeds (and capped 40mbit upload with a 1.2tb data cap) less money.
If the rep you talk to won’t do it, hang up and call again.
NYT problem was due in part that we had so many legacy systems related to subscriptions; there was a big push internally to solve this.
When "online cancel" finally rolled out we were all so excited there was a party with a sheetcake that had the cancellation landing page printed on it. We'd rather have users trust us than use dark patterns to "trap" them into a subscription.
I there a law preventing me from canceling recurring subscriptions on my credit card?
Why does my bank want me to write them some letter and create a case which they may or maynot look into.
Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
> I there a law preventing me from canceling recurring subscriptions on my credit card?
No, but there may be a contractual agreement between you and a provider where you have promised to pay for a service, and merely 'not paying' is not sufficient to cancel that. This makes far more sense in a non-digital world though, where you might pay for expensive services after the fact, rather than in advance.
In practice, most digital services will happily cancel themselves if you do just block upfront transactions. Many modern financial services/neobanks I've used have some kind of built-in functionality for this, even paypal has a page where you can manage & cancel all current subscriptions directly, blocking all future payments: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/.
> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
I believe it's because the 'card details' part is effectively a fiction for e-commerce. When you subscribe, the payment provider uses your card details to get a persistent token, which they can use to authorize future payments, and then they throw away the card details entirely. They just use the token alone to authorize future charges.
That token is somewhat independent of the specific card, by design, as unlike card details this means it can't really be stolen or leaked (it's only authorized for certain purchases from that one vendor) and it means all your normal ongoing payments don't break in the common case where you _do_ want payments to continue when your card is replaced. Bits About Money has some more background on this here: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under...
That's your bank's (bad) choice I'm afraid - it's certainly not a requirement.
Revolut for example will let you see & block all subscriptions directly from the app: https://www.revolut.com/subscriptions/. In the UK, it's a legal requirement that all banks let customers block any recurring card payments on request (at least via phone/email/letter) with no questions asked, as long as you ask at least a day before the next payment: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/banking/sto...
Why not?
You don't want your bank to honour eg your electricity payments that you authorised?
Or do you want your bank to cherry pick the transactions (you've already authorised) to honour?
> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
Do they? My bank recently decided to send me a new CC for no clear reason (old one had like two years left to expiry) and without my asking for it, and it's been a huge pain in the ass because seemingly nothing updated automatically.
> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
They update vendors because most people who get a replacement card with a new number have way more subscriptions that they want to keep going than they have subscriptions that they want to drop but for which the procedure for cancelling was too complicated to time consumers.
> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
I wish my bank had to do that. It would make my life a whole lot easier sometimes.
Nope. Use Discovercard, I've used them to cancel services for me. All you have to do is say you tried yourself and then they'll close your account, and open a new one. It's not enough for them to change your number, as the old number will still work. Problem is it will cancel every autopay connected to that card, so it's a nuclear option.
No impact. The thing that would lower your score would be if it resets the account lifetime. But every time I've done it, the account lifetime has been the same, and there are no inquiries on my account, so it seems like Discover has a way to do it where it doesn't impact your credit.
Tangential to this - no small part of the reason why I like subscriptions in the iPhone App Store is because Apple doesn't let billers fuck around like this. There's one place to see everything, and you can cancel anything in a couple clicks. It's part of why I'd probably never use an alternative app store.
True, but it makes auditing your bank account slightly more difficult.
Charges come through as "Apple" (or some variation) without indicating what the purchase was for. They also roll charges together so they're not hitting your bank account multiple times in a short period.
It's not a lot of work to go into your apple account and compare the invoices to your bank account to see what the charge was _actually_ for, but it was a pain in the rear when our credit card was stolen and used by the thief to Nickle and Dime us for 5-10 dollars here and there over the course of 6 months.
I model it as another account in my books. Each subscription has a recurring debit and it gets credited when money actually moves from my bank. It’s a bit annoying if I buy a one-off thing since I have to enter it by hand, but it’s infrequent enough that it’s not horrible.
They also send out the receipt emails a few days later than the actual charge, so when they charge you you can't immediately go check what the charge was for. I've found that spreadsheeting everything at the end of the month is the easiest way to do it.
One of my friend maintains a fitness app that uses in-app subscription when subscribing through the app or subscription through the website with a credit card.
The apple subscription generate a lot more support requests because a lot of customers are confused on how to stop the in app subscription. Unfortunately, the company can't stop the subscription, it can only be done by the customer through the app store, so instead of just being able to cancel it for confused customers who request it, they have to guide them to cancel it on their side which is a lot of work.
True, but they still have the '8 day free trial then £59.99 a year billing' for some apps. My wife installed a design app she wanted to try out, forgot to cancel and was stung last week. For such a high purchase price that feels to me like there should be addition verification step before charging.
Especially since the app was terrible and the reviews were full of people who were similarly charged and unhappy.
What is bonkers about that? Apple let 2 consenting parties enter into an agreement and provides a single interface to cancel that agreement whenever you want from their pocket without talking to anyone. I struggle to think of a better setup.
I double checked my email and confirmed I'm not hallucinating! I can upload screenshots later if you want. It seems they email me a few days before a trial ends (the longer the trial, the more advanced notice they give)
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than "free trial" subscription-based apps on the App Store. It is, overwhelmingly, a tool used for scams.
The pattern-
-hide promised functionality behind subscription.
-offer "free trial", often with very short trial periods.
-convert that into a big dollar subscriptions.
They know that most of the people who they ensnare are probably going through a multitude of tools trying to find a solution for some problem (and the fact the tool in question often fails to do what it promised is a feature because it encourages the user to move on quicker), and some subset will fail to cancel the "trial" before it becomes a pay service.
Consenting adults, sure, and personally I have never fallen prey to this, looking at the in-app purchases and just refusing to be baited, but it's enough of a problem that it should embarrass Apple a bit.
One in which no one is surprised when a free trial rolls over to a paid subscription - perhaps that shouldnt even be allowable, given that its mostly done to make money off of people not paying attention.
Let me do the same - The user went through multiple screens that told them exactly what would happen and when. That isn’t misleading so it cannot by definition be duplicitous. Do I think there is room for a more user centric design? Yes. Do I stay away from subscription based iOS apps? Yes. Do other people use them and enjoy them? also yes.
It is - free trial with automatic rollover is set up anticipating that people will forget to cancel. It is not being offered as a good faith service.
Inherently if you are relying on something to thwart or subvert the intention of the person you are dealing with you are engaging in duplicitous behavior.
I’ll ruminate on the good faith service argument. That sounds like a valid angle. I see many of these app subs are predatory and wished apple provided a way to filter them out of search results. But I don’t consider the offering of the subscription functionality to be wrong. Apples implementation errors on the side of their pocketbook by being an auto enroll, but the signup screen is easy to read. It’s not buried in some TOS. Everyone who enters the agreement did so willingly and presented the terms cleanly. I understand they have a 14day return policy on these as well. At some point, people have to be responsible for their own financial decisions.
Yeah, I find it convincing. The principle I'm operating under is that both parties should benefit from any given agreement and that intentional efforts to subvert that are automatic non-starters.
I won't make the argument that subscriptions or even auto enroll are necessarily evil if we're shifting focus to less predatory industries, I would judge a given example by how difficult it was to get a refund. I think the top level principle of mirroring ease of subscription to ease of ending such applies here too, with respect to ease of billing for an unused service.
That people forget. That's part of the market of trial and subs in general. Its why gyms flourish. People subscribe but don't go.
They (iOS) have the data that you use or not use the app. They could notify you with a warning that your renewal is due. Or allow you the option to set the reminder in your calendar or bank app.
Anecdotally, I had both an Apple Arcade and an Apple TV trial a few years back. I tried cancelling prematurely to avoid surprise charges and the interface told me in no uncertain terms that if I cancelled before the trial expired, I’d lose access immediately.
Even if Apple's fees were 5%, there would be companies that would prefer a custom subscription system because they could save one cent per transaction and track the customers better.
I tend to agree, with a caveat. If you have a family Apple account and one of your family members has a subscription, you do not have visibility even though it is your credit card getting billed. So for a complete picture you have to log into each of your kids' devices to see if they have an active subscription.
It seems to be done for privacy reasons, but I don't agree with how they handle it. I should be able to see all charges going to my Apple account credit card no matter which sub-account originated them.
You can actually see this information on reportaproblem.apple.com now. Has recent charges by each family member and tells you if a subscription will renew.
In my online credit card account, I can expand each purchase and "show digital receipt" to get information about what app/subscription it was for. For all App Store purchases, Apple will also email the account that made the purchase (even if it's me) to let them know the purchase details were requested. That seems reasonable to me--the payer knows what the payment was for, and the purchaser knows the info was accessed.
Completely true. One way this has saved me in the past: Audible has an incredibly shady practice where the only way to get books is that their subscription service gives you tokens (1 a month) to redeem books with. However, if you cancel your subscription, your tokens are lost. But, if you subscribe to Audible through Apple, then because of Apple the tokens are retained, even if you cancel.
Also they force subscriptions to make the actual price you pay the most prominent. Common dark pattern is to put "8.99" a month, then under it in tiny text "Billed immediately as 107.88, renews annually". To pass Apple's approval, they would have to write "107.88" in large text, as that is what you are actually going to be charged.
1Password got me with this. I was getting it for free because my work used it, but when I left, write/autofill was suspended. I had planned to move to a different service as I dislike 1P8, but I was in a hurry to just get things working again, and $2.99 a month is cheap enough to get me by for a few months. I enter my CC details. Get charged $39.47 (10% for GST). I go back and look at the site and realise the monthly price is billed annually. I don’t recall being quoted this price when I entered my CC details, perhaps it was displayed in a way that was easy to miss for people in a hurry. In any case there’s a dark pattern in their checkout flow. It’s disingenuous to to advertise $2.99 and bill $39.47. Imagine a cafe that advertises the price of their coffee as 40c then in smallprint “times 12 made in a single payment”. The advertised price should match the billed price for all products and services.
I agree but interestingly had a conversation with my family and they all had the opposite impression. They were complaining about mysterious recurring apple charges on their bank cards that they had no idea what they were or how to find out. I pointed out that you could see all your subscriptions under your Apple ID on your phone and they were all amazed. Long winded way of saying, if anyone from apple is reading this, maybe make this more discoverable and if possible disambiguate the charges on the bill (maybe put the originating app name for the subscription in the charge?).
This is great. Maybe one day we'll see action on timeshares. I got one a long time ago that was impossible to get rid of. Fully paid for, Westgate told me it had a lot of value so I told them to just take it back, but they would't of course. I ended up just stopping all payments, went through a few years of harassing calls, and then done, nothing more. Still haunts me though, I'm afraid it could come back up with outstanding balance owed.
I think it can. More scary though, when you die unless they take active action to refuse it, your kids or whoever your inheritance goes to gets it by default. With all the financial obligations.
Yeah, John Oliver just did a Last Week Tonight on Timeshares. He goes over that in the video. Also there are scam companies that exist that promise to take your money to help you exit your timeshare agreement, then disappear. So you get double-scammed. And somehow this is technically legal?
I was contacted by those people and others, both threatening and claiming to want to help. I had a suspicion they were all affiliated with the parent scam company Westgate and so never considered dealing with any of them. Maybe they weren't related to Westgate but good to keep in mind anyone in this space is not to be trusted.
You can, but there is specific paperwork you have to file and you have something like 90 days to do it. And then the next person in line has to, and the next.
Unless everyone is on the ball and actively refuses it, someone gets stuck with it.
Could this work? It could potentially help a very large number of people get out of these scams. Seems so obvious now that you point it out I imagine someone must've thought of this before.
I imagine the timeshare company has right of first refusal for transfers, or will be adding that to their contracts as soon as this is a thing.
Now, is it legal? Maybe, maybe not. But they will pretend it is until you take them to court, and they'll quickly settle if you agree not to tell anyone else.
A right of first refusal just means that they have the opportunity to buy the timeshare before you can sell it to anyone else. That would be a-ok for the customer, since either way the timeshare's off their hands.
You'd need to be careful about how you setup and run the corporation such that the veil can't be pierced. If a court got involved, I think they'd be nonplussed if the corporation was organized, acquired the property, and filed for bankruptcy within a couple of months.
My dad got a Westgate timeshare back in the '90s. I was there when he was conned. And even at the young age I knew the salesman was the sleeziest guy on Earth. He drove us around in their limo to impress us, showing us their property. The way he talked just felt slimy.
My mom recently told me they tried to book their week at the timeshare and were told they would have to pay $1,000 to do so. Because it's a premium week or whatever bullshit. It's absolutely insane this predatory company is allowed to continue. I'm going to be forced to deal with this fucking thing when he dies. That's the truly insane thing. It's treated as property, but it's not. It's a fucking subscription that you can't cancel. Ever. You own nothing.
By the way, depending on your state, you may have to officially file to not receive the timeshare and its obligations in your father's estate. And whoever is next in line to inherit has to do the same, on down the line until the state, I suppose.
Would love to see Westgate tell the state of Massachusetts that they are the legal owners of this timeshare, and owe for annual repairs.
In my third world country (Brazil) we actually have strict regulations on cancellations (among other consumer focused laws):
- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week.
- The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once.
- If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again.
- Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.
I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.
Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.
Yeah we follow a mirror concept, which is cancelling should be at least as easy as signing up, and ideally easier. We don't have 1 click cancellations because we don't have 1 click sign ups. It requires an hour onboarding to use our service so they have to send us an email or a message in our chat bat to trigger a cancellation so we can sure they understand all the consequences.
I've been in Brazil recently and I was positively surprised with the great consumer protection laws.
One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.
TIL but the California laws are very limited to a subset of items which are already cancellable nationwide. For example, you can always cancel your property insurance and get a prorated refund. OP was talking about hotel reservations which are not cancellable in California. I don't know the situation is in Brazil for cell phone plans but according to the link you posted, it's not cancellable.
The funny thing about this, when there is a public conversation about their practices or legislative process to stop it, companies (i.e apple, uhg, john deer, Facebook, etc) will cry floods of tears, claim they'll go out of business due, people will lose their job, to the extra cost of compliance. They'd rather keep disadvantaged customers rather than compete and deliver value.
All of this while reporting record profits, trying to pr spin this, and throwing more money than lost with compliance at lobbyists who will lie and financially influence to the legislators.
If you say Louis Rossmann 3 times after saying Apple you'll get a long list of anti-consumer practices.
Most recently:
The issue with their charging ports being changed frequently and being non standard. They even tried to abuse the USBC standard just so they could get their charing cable lock in.
This is the surprising thing about Brazil, here we have the big corporations as well, and a lot (if not all) corrupt politicians. But somehow these consumer laws passed got approved and will be pretty hard to remove.
To preface, nothing against the poster since I know they were just copying the article title.
This article headline is a bit misleading, as the FTC is not looking to ban the subscriptions themselves. Rather, they would like to implement a rule that requires servicers that provide subscriptions to make it as easy to cancel as it is to enroll, rather than the current jumbling mess that is trying to cancel something like a gym, Amazon, news, cable, or other subscription where servicers try to maintain retention by putting in a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to cancel.
It's not a misleading title, it would be verboten to offer certain subscriptions. Which subscriptions? The tough to cancel ones. There are subscriptions offered today which would not be allowed to be offered.
Servicers could change the cancellation process without ever changing the subscription itself. The issue at hand is not the subscription, but the process with which one would cancel it.
“Tough to cancel subscriptions” and “not tough to cancel subscriptions” are both subsets of “all subscriptions”.
If the FTC has their way and the rules are effective, “tough to cancel subscriptions” no longer exist, and any subscriptions that previously belonged to that set now exist in the “not tough to cancel subscriptions” set.
Which I believe actually helps to illustrate my point. The issue the FTC appears to have (and this comes from more than just this article) is with the cancellation process and not the subscription itself. The subscription is far more than just the cancellation process, just as a hard to find book is more than just its ease of acquisition. The enrollment (and if the FTC has their way, cancellation) processes of subscriptions are such a minor attribute to the subscriptions themselves that defining them by that attribute alone in an article headline seems like poor authorship.
Is there some measure of semantics involved here? Quite probably, but then I say that in the world of professional writing and journalism I would expect a higher level of aptitude and proficiency. Being able to write headlines or article titles that remove as much of the semantic fuel as possible is, I believe, not an unreasonable request (or even requirement) for such professions, unless that is what the author is trying to achieve.
One of the most nefarious instances of this I have seen is a "online mental health counseling" startup that was charging a non-trivial monthly recurring fee, even though it did not have any available appointments with a professional in the coming month. I had to call and haggle for half an hour on behalf of someone who signed up for the app, and only after putting in their credit card information was shown that there are no appointments.
Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
If I remembered their name I would 100% name and shame them publicly. Unfortunately it was a while ago during the peak of the pandemic, and I don't have any email records since I myself didn't sign up for them.
>Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
The truly dreadful part is that this is precisely the kind of thing that people with depression, ADHD, and a host of other psychological conditions are unable to deal with.
That's the whole point of those kinds of mental health startups. Get the credit card information of people who don't have the energy or organisation skills to ensure that they cancel it, and charge them according to the contract. It's basically like the gym thing, except instead of hoping you are rich enough or lazy enough not to cancel, they hope you are ill enough not to cancel.
I was in a similar situation and extremely irate at first when they said refunds were not an option, but fortunately it appeared to be an issue with their automated scheduling system. Once talking to an agent they were able to link me to a provider that same day.
On the whole, it's actually been a pretty good experience over the last year. Trying to get similar counseling/medication locally was an absolute nightmare at the time... with Cerebral, everything happened super fast and the counseling I got seemed on point (ADHD/insomnia). They quickly pause/resume for when I'm out of the country traveling, no unapproved charges so far.
For example, the GoodRX [0] and BetterHelp [1] settlements were both due to alleged violations of the FTC Act and Health Breach Notification Rule, rather than a violation of HIPAA.
Had a similar problem with Thrive Market. Non refundable subscription unless you chose yearly instead of monthly then the very specific item I wanted was out of stock (among tons of other things).
Misguided priority IMO. Silicon Valley's actions are much more egregiously and obviously criminal than even the worst gym.
As tough to cancel as some gym memberships are, they at least usually spell out their precise cancellation procedure as a part of a contract and have multiple ways to get in touch with some human to deal with a situation. And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops). And with these gyms, as a last resort you at least have a chargeback as a fairly realistic option with no consequences to your life.
What I'd like to see investigated in this vein is Silicon Valley companies who provide no human customer service. Your only recourse in the event of a flawed transaction is either suck it up and take the loss, or do a chargeback and risk having your entire digital life destroyed as they retaliate against you by locking up your account. What these companies do to people daily is criminal on a level that the worst gym can't even fathom.
On the flip side it’s actual useful to have no human customer service in at least domain - mobile service. For example, it’s much more difficult to sim swap a Google Voice number than a T-mobile number, in part b/c it removes social engineering of customer service as an attack vector.
> And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops).
Why do they even get to dictate how you cancel? You should just be able to send them a letter, an email, go in and inform them, etc. What purpose does it serve for society for companies themselves to be able decide to ignore your cancellation requests unless they follow a specific procedure?
Is this the hill you really want to fight for in life? If a gym offers an email address, real life support, and/or a phone number to cancel, are you going to be intensely morally outraged that you can't send a physical letter to cancel as well?
Doesn't it seem reasonable for businesses to (for the most part) pick and choose how they conduct business and deal with their customers, so long as they're not committing fraud or other crimes?
Isn't the point of the law to protect people from crimes? Is the point of the law to dictate the tiny minute details of everyday life?
> If a gym offers an email address, real life support, and/or a phone number to cancel, are you going to be intensely morally outraged that you can't send a physical letter to cancel as well?
I think you misunderstood the parent comment:
> You should just be able to send them a letter, an email, go in and inform them
That's a "you should" statement.
The simple fact is, you can't cancel by just sending a letter, e-mail, or just going into the gym.
Usually, you have to fill out their form and send it as a registered mail to some corporate office that will likely completely ignore it for another month or two and keep charging you.
If you can join a gym by just showing up or creating an account online, then you should be able to cancel online or by just showing up and telling them to cancel.
> Doesn't it seem reasonable for businesses to [...]
Yes, but doesn't it seem shitty the way gyms operate? Fuck off with your "BUT THAT'S WHAT YOU SIGNED UP FOR" and just answer THAT question.
The problem is that every gym operates this way. Going to a competitor isn't an option.
Actually I think /u/logicalmonster really did basically understand me correctly. I just kind of ignored the post because it was weirdly hysteric while acting like I was the hysteric one (e.g. "Is this the hill you really want to fight for in life?").
My point was really just that there should be a few standard simple ways that all businesses _must_ accept for the ending of contracts. /u/logicalmonster seems to think there is value in allowing businesses to not honor such requests because it is "reasonable for businesses to (for the most part) pick and choose how they conduct business". I disagree. I see no value in such a policy and think that my recommendations would make for better economic value.
If your gym won't accept cancellation via every conceivable communication method on Earth: carrier homing pigeons, telegrams, smoke signals, braille, singing telegrams and morse code, sign language, or interpretive dance routines, then they should be thrown in prison.
How dare they pick and choose that some methods of communication are more valid than others.
> If your gym won't accept cancellation via every conceivable communication method on Earth: carrier homing pigeons, telegrams, smoke signals, braille, singing telegrams and morse code, sign language, or interpretive dance routines, then they should be thrown in prison.
Why are you pretending that I'm arguing something I am not?
That would be wonderful. I had the unpleasant experience of joining a gym then shortly moving several hours away. Cancelling the gym subscription was the last thing on my mind at the time.
I legit had to drive back to this gym in New Jersey to sign a form to "cancel" my membership. They would not accept a phone call, email, not even a signed letter stating my intent to cancel, even after I explained to them I had moved hours away. Ridiculous.
Fucking ChargePoint straight up ignores account cancellation requests, and honestly at this point my next idea is to reach out through LinkedIn contacts to their legal team to see wtf I'm not understanding here...
had a related - but not quite the same issue - with a vendor, and was getting zero help from the company trying to get a refund for a few thousand $$ for a defective product - got nowhere for weeks - finally resorted to finding the officers of the company and repeatedly calling them and their spouses at home, on the weekends in order to get satisfaction - very early in the morning and very late at night.
Hated to resort to that, but have no regrets about pissing off the CEO, CFO and any one else I called at home - and this was not a small company.
Who could blame you? If the situation was reversed, and you got a working product, then refused to pay for it, they’d have no problem sending a debt collector to annoy you as often and inconveniently as legally possible.
> Hated to resort to that, but have no regrets about pissing off the CEO, CFO and any one else I called at home
Personally, the only people they should be pissed off at is their employees and themselves. Had they not tried screwing you out of thousands of dollars, you wouldn't have been forced to escalate; I would get a pretty perverse pleasure from knowing I made their day worse in a situation like this.
These things are insane. I tried to cancel a month-to-month gym membership from a small local gym, and they told me "cancellations become effective on the 1st of the following month" and "require two months advance notice" thereby effectively charging me for three additional months after I gave notice. Apparently, this was all in the agreement I signed, although it was written so unclear, that nobody would even suspect this is how they interpret it.
I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately.
Even though they conceded, you should still follow through on all of the above. You aren't hurting a person, it's a corporation that will only change when forced financially or socially to do so.
Even if it is an individual, the predatory behavior deserves to be financially ruinous. If they cannot run their business without scamming people they should never have had a business.
Yes, all business entities, with the loose exception of a sole-proprietorship, is a corporation under the law.
There are four general types of corporations in the United States: a sole proprietorship, a Limited Liability Company (LLC), an S-Corporation (S-Corp), and a C-Corporation (C-Corp).
People who whine about corporations fail to realize that 99% of the businesses they deal with everyday are incorporated entities under the law. Your pizza shop, tanning salon, dentist, ice cream shop, sandwich truck...
A business entity can be a good or bad actor. Their legal status as a corporation does not mean they are automatically bad, regardless of the size or public/private status. Their actions and policies define them as either good or bad.
Words have meaning and they should be used appropriately.
My own amateur understanding is that LLCs are distinct from corporations, and that S-corps and C-corps are tax statuses rather than types of legal entities.
Corporations generally have more diffuse ownership than LLCs, which is why people ascribe bad things to that specific type of entity. If there is a gym doing these tactics, and it's an LLC with a handful of owners ("members"), those owners are just asshole humans that could theoretically be punched in the face. Whereas if it's a corporation with diffuse ownership, then the policies become "just business" and "nobody's fault".
Although corporations certainly can be "closely held" by a few people or a family, just as you can sell shares in an LLC to investors at arms length or have all/part of the LLC owned by a corporation or business trust.
And frankly I'm surprised by the number of small businesses I see set up as a sole proprietorship or partnership and doing-business-as rather than spending the money on LLC registration fees. Although as a business gets smaller the protection created by the LLC structure also shrinks, so it's somewhat understandable.
Legally it usually is, isn't it? It would be unusual for it to be a sole proprietorship.
In any case, predatory/scammy practices are bad no matter what the ownership structure is. Being small and local doesn't excuse you from abusive behavior.
Except legal entities are literally manifest in order to absorb the fallout from situations like these. So don't be shy about using existing processes and tools to issue corrective action.
Honestly, I was mostly bluffing... I didn't have time to do all of that, which is why I also had to quit the gym. I was planning to temporarily quit/suspend and then rejoin when I was able to, but they lost out on that possibility.
I think these kind of predatory cancellation things must be in part a generational thing, and these policies are so old they haven't responded to the times. Older people I know seem to expect it or be okay with it, but millenials and younger will tend to be outraged and refuse to do business with them on principle. America Online, Sirius XM, etc. were able to retain some customers by making it hard to quit, but I think turned away far more without realizing it.
Great example. I like broadcast radio. I don't like picking and choosing podcasts, I like to just listen to "what's on". I really like some of the live music content on SiriusXM (celebrity DJs, etc). I'm their ideal customer. And they'd have captured $300-400 of my value over the past 1.5 years, if they only had self-serve subscription and cancellation like Netflix or Disney+. But since they have decided to go the NYTimes route of "everyone pays a different price, and cancelling is next to impossible", they get nothing from me.
I cancelled my SiriusXM subscription a fee months ago and it was a painless experience. They even refunded the amount charged a few days prior to my call, without me even asking.
Cancelling my at&t account, on the other hand, took several calls to them and my bank, and in the end, I just had my bank stop payment.
Sometimes people you talk to have powers to change the outcome in your favour, sometimes all you need to do is ask.
I had an experience like that last year. I was cancelling my broadband in UK with Virgin, and got a £280 disconnection fee. The person who informed me said I will have to pay it in my final bill. Then over a month later I got a call from someone who's task was to see if I need a new connection where I was going. I said no, I was leaving the country. He asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I said, "you could cancel that huge penalty fee I got.." And he was just like "Sure, no problem, done."
A "disconnection fee"? This has to be the most absurd charge I have ever heard of.
What does "disconnecting" a customer involve, anyway? I recall having to return equipment or face a penalty to cover costs (high, but still somewhat understandable), but I have never had to pay to get off a broadband contract.
Often if you sign a yearly contract that includes a discounted monthly rate, if you cancel it before the end of the year, you have to pay the remainder of the contract remaining.
Most likely an early disconnection fee during the minimum term. Nearly everyone has a minimum term with virgin media as they only apply promotional discounts if you have a 12,18 or 24 month minimum term and the price shoots up as soon as you roll over onto the monthly.
Yep, something like that. I would have had to know if and when Im moving a year in advance, which is ridiculous. I mean it's not like I read the fine print on that, so all the better that they had no problem cancelling the fee.
This is it exactly; it's kind of understandable given how they want you subscribe for a long time, and most have an exception that a high-enough ranking person can mark (even if it's just "military exception" misused).
That's just the beginning. My favorite is the concept of the pre-payment penalty: a lender can (in some jurisdictions) charge you a fee if you attempt to pay down the principal on your loan sooner than you are required to.
It's supposed to compensate banks for lost profit from you not paying interest for the entire term. Equally, a bank can't cancel your mortgage before the term ends for the sole reason that it would be able to charge higher rates for a new mortgage.
It’s somewhat reasonable. If you make a loan, and it’s paid early, you stop making the expected profit and there is no guarantee you can reinvest the funds at the same rate. Therefore you will either disallow prepayment, charge for it, or price the risk of prepayment into your interest rate. If you can’t do any of those … you will invest elsewhere until the rates go up, for there is lots of competition for capital.
But borrowers should know what they’re getting into, and have options.
In the US that would be part of the particular loan contract.
It means you have to pay attention when borrowing, but loans with that penalty likely carry a slightly lower rate for the borrower (because they are predictable for the lender). It isn't entirely arbitrary.
That's normal. You signed a contract where you take X money and promise to return X+Y money over N years. But instead, now you want to return only X+Z money when Z<Y. In some cases, it's ok, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, there could be loans where you just don't have such an option. E.g. if you buy government bonds, the government can't just give you back the money you spent and take the bond back. The fee is an intermediary option - you can do it, but for a fee. Sometimes, if they really want your money, they could give you the option for free - at least you'd pay Z, it's better than nothing. But it's no law of the universe that they must.
It's common where there's a significant installation fee (perhaps installing a fibre thing on your house) which was waived in return for a 12 or 24 month contract.
I haven't heard of (or it called) a 'disconnection' fee, but 'exit' fees are common. There's no pretence with that that there's work to do in terminating your contract, it's just, oh, you signed up for 24m, you want to leave in month 18, ok no problem but we'll sting you for £X because the alternative is probably you have actually technically committed legally to 24 months so in a way although it doesn't feel like it we're doing you a favour. ... It's pretty shit I think for tenants in particular where the available service periods don't necessarily line up with the time they actually spend in the property.
This is why I always prepay for my gym membership up-front and do not enter into any agreement. There are a few places that do this. Last one I went to, I prepaid for 90 days. I confirmed they weren't even storing my payment information because I had to provide it again to renew the next quarter.
The best part of this is that when you decide you are done, you simply do nothing and its all over. Sure, you will get some marketing text spam for a few weeks but that's about it.
honestly there will be a delay from the government taking action on smaller local gyms too so I feel like there should be a way to submit the businesses for inspection at least to threaten them to improve their policies
I’m guessing you probably won’t win a chargeback unless you can show that you sent them a letter telling them to cancel (and because of this, they actually will cancel if you send them a letter).
I think another aspect of this problem is that credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.” Of course that probably wouldn’t solve the problem. The gyms would probably just continue charging you and eventually send you to debt collection.
> credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.”
Ironically, they do almost all support this, you can mark any merchant as non-future-billable and prevent all future charges from a given merchant. Unfortunately, you have to call in and ask a phone rep to do it for you, most cards don't let you set this yourself.
Modern banks like Revolut have this as literary part of their UI.
They use some simple ML to figure out which are you recurring payments, place them in a separate folder for you to keep tabs on and allow you to unilaterally stop any “future payments like that”.
I mean on top of tech like virtual cards and chargebacks with a few clicks.
It seems so simple to implement I have no idea how its not a standard feature for banks these days.
Revoking ACH authorization is an effective tactic. The CFPB dictates that if you give 3 days notice, companies are obligated to honor this. If they charge you afterwards, your bank will be more than happy to reverse the charge. To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method. If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims. Here is a sample email which I've used many times to great effect:
May this email serve as your notice to revoke the ACH/Bank Access/Debit Card authorizations of both the below primary bank account and debit card, from [company] effective today, [date]
Additionally, I am revoking withdrawal authorizations from any other accounts associated with my personal information, listed below
name:
DOB:
phone #:
email:
I am also revoking your further access to my banking accounts and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly.
THIS REVOCATION APPLIES FOR THE NEXT PAYMENT DUE DATE AND ALL FUTURE DUE DATES.
Kindly, I ask that your response to this email shall be confirmation of receipt and you agree it is at least 3 business days prior to any scheduled repayments or membership fee deduction.
Note that in accordance with 12 CFR Part 1005.10(c) (Regulation E) you MUST HALT PAYMENT.
FAIL TO COMPLY and I will submit a report to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Additionally, you will be responsible for any fees, including overdraft fees, incurred as a result of your failure to halt payment
It's not a delusion. From a legal perspective, the bank treats actions which are authorized by you and actions which are not differently. If you enter into an agreement that says you're authorizing entity X to charge you based on a contract and they charge you, the bank is likely to side with them, and tell you to go sue them if you want your money bank. If the bank knows that you did not authorize the ACH transfer, they're supposed to reverse the transaction.
Are there privacy cards that work? I find that once a recurring charge is established and tied to an account it's very hard to cancel, surviving expired cards or even canceled card numbers.
citi, capital one, and others call it “virtual cards”. They allow you to set charge limits and exp date. I always choose the current month + 1 for expiration and for charge limit, $1 more than the anticipated charge
> If they want your money they'd have to take you to small claims.
No, they'll just send it to collections, and now your credit is dinged for seven years because unless they violated their contract with you, you're still liable for the charges.
Ive never heard of gyms doing that. Is it real? They are not a lender and are not lending money to you, so I don’t see how they can affect your credit report. There’s no credit involved.
Anyone actually have a credit report with an unpaid gym membership in the report?
There is credit involved, because the contracts are worded such that's, say, a 12 month contract paid in monthly installments. The credit is the outstanding balance vs. if you had paid for the full year in cash up front.
Your credit report is answering one question: How good are you about paying for things you've agreed to pay for.
Seems unlikely - collections only want to work with bills large enough that their odds of payment make it worth talking to you. Collectors never gives full price, they pay the person you owe some smaller amount, and when you pay they collect the difference.
There are levels of collections though the first is for things where they expect you will pay, you just need a payment plan (some medical labs don't do billing in house, they always sell it to collections), so collections will buy the bill for the pull price minus $50 (or some minimal amount in that range): since most people are going to pay collections just needs to setup the details for which $50 is a fair price. At the other end there are bills that they know you are not going to pay, collections will buy the a multi-thousand dollar bill for $1, and see if they can get any form of payment at all out of you.
Anyway, the bottom line is for a gym you are never going to owe enough that it is worthwhile for collections to touch it.
I don't think they can do this- generally credit is tracked by social security number (in the USA). If you don't provide them with one, they will not be able to report you to a credit bureau.
Do you have a source, because I'm pretty sure that's false — they can use a combination of other identifying information such as name, birthdate, and address.
I've let a few things go to collections over the years. Comcast disputes, etc. Never really saw any impact from this. Total charge-offs probably around $1000. Not once have I had an issue getting financing or mortgage.
If you are intending to pay cash for everything, you don't even need a credit score. No one cares about who you are or what you did when you walk in the door with a bag of cash in each hand.
Some companies report this type of thing to consumer trust worthiness services (similar to credit bureaus). Other companies use these services to gage customer risk before initiating new service so you can effectively get yourself blacklisted.
Not saying this answer isn't the way to do it, but it's not without additional collateral damage in some cases.
Even if it doesn't impact other companies, the company in question may refuse to do business with you in the future (which may or may not be of concern).
If you're dealing with a (normally small) company that generally takes care of their customers, an email like this as a conversation starter is just going to make the customer support reps lives miserable and make them not want to lift a finger for you. Save this for the companies that really deserve it.
Feelings do not trump laws. If those reps are miserable working at a company knowingly employing deceptive or predatory tactics, they should find employment elsewhere.
This isn't about service reps, it's about you. Sometimes you have to look out for yourself. This is hardly being abusive to service reps so they can suck it up and deal with it.
You should care about how you treat others. When a simple "hey, can you help me cancel my subscription?" would suffice, there's no reason to make threats and go to the extreme.
> To be clear, this doesn't void the contract you have with them, you're simply revoking their privilege to charge your payment method.
It's gotten better, but on more than one occasion I've had to argue with my bank to honor my request to block the charges. I've had tellers say "Well, if you have a subscription with them, this needs to be allowed". No. As you say - my bank's obligation is to honor my account wishes, not be an arbiter of my agreements with third parties.
That is fucking bizarre that bank personnel would even try to argue with you. Why would a bank want their customers to be ripped off by shitty subscriptions?
> and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly
Can you expand on what you mean by this?
My banks don't offer me some way to revoke authorization from the bank's website. Does this mean calling customer service and giving them a business name to disallow future ach debits from?
Maybe you would since it's a local gym, but if it's a national chain credit card companies won't even let you initiate the chargeback whatsoever.
I had to go so far as to completely cancel my Amex account to get Lifestyle Fitness to stop billing me. American Express utterly refused to either chargeback, or deny future billings. To the point a new card number issued didn't even fix it. I was quite happy to sign a waiver that I'd take all liability.
This was after moving states, calling to cancel, and them saying I needed to fly in to cancel in person. Outright scam that the banks help enable.
my amex processed my chargeback for gold's gym just fine. They said it was a no obligation free trial I could cancel at any time and then when I called to cancel before the first bill they said no, you have to come once a week for that to be true..?
I'm thinking as an added protection measure we should always use a secondary phone line plus a secondary email and fake address for these types of subscriptions. You don't know what they are going to do.
They prey on people who don't want to rock the boat, don't know that they can try to rock the boat, or are just too busy for this absolute nonsense.
The leadership of any company that does anything like this should be very consciously aware that they're mediocre leftovers of the professional world. Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.
> Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.
There's a certain toxic element of business culture that preaches dominance as a virtuous thing, ether overtly, or through dubious terminology/beliefs in ideas like "alpha males." It argues that if you aren't dominating someone, then they necessarily must be dominating you in this interaction.
It is an extremely reductionistic view that has trickled down into certain parts of Weird Internet, too.
> Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory
I dont think it works as your described. Amazon is plenty predatory.
What happens is a company tries to see what it can get away with. If they don't get in legal trouble, and customers don't abandon them in droves, then other companies start doing the same. It becomes industry standard.
You might be right. Though I think this is a cousin of "I'm just following orders." Too many people don't speak up. Is there nobody who feels embarrassed that this is what they're a part of?
"Hey dad, what did you do at work today?"
"I worked with some lawyers to make an indecipherable contract so that we can extract extra money for a service someone doesn't want."
I guess the answer is some mix of "make the org structure so complex that everyone can feel innocent because no one person is pulling the trigger" (I don't buy it, that just means incompetent managers) plus a heaping scoop of cognitive dissonance.
With a sufficiently large enough org, you can build it in discrete enough parts (assuming it’s a building something based) that only the one who creates the final part is the one who knows what the ultimate goal is or the one who pulls the trigger. These people are also high enough to be inured to any effects of their decision. The second layer is even if you can see where it’s going and you do care, is it worth it to speak up and get fired? I know whistleblowers are meant to be protected (speaking only for the US) but with at-will employment and certain conditions that favor employers, how do you know they won’t cycle in someone who will do it anyway?
I think the root cause is the lack of social consequences for this kind of antisocial behaviour. Charles Boycott[0] engaged in a similar kind of behaviour and in response the local community refused to engage with him.
That particular kind of community has largely disappeared. Furthermore, the consequences of someone's actions are often so far removed from the people they interact with that the behaviour becomes easily excused.
I imagine there are consultants that go around to gyms (especially chains) and say "We've got x things that are trivial to implement and will guarantee you make $123 more per customer on average. Cost for our analysis and recommendations is $12,345 with an assurance that you will make this back in the first 6 months." And one of the things is adding a paragraph to the sign up terms.
Depending on the law though, you may be able to ignore collections, and you can dispute it if they put anything on your credit report. Just because something is in a contract that doesn't mean it is legal an enforceable. See a lawyer for details as this is different in every state and country.
Collections is mostly meaningless if you are otherwise financially responsible.
The entire system is quite abusive. You may try experimenting with "I don't give a shit", assuming your other ducks are in order. I have found it to be therapeutic.
You can contest being sent to collection tho (in the US: Fair Debt Collection Practices Act). It takes time and research to understand what you have to do, but being sent to collections isn't always a credit death sentence.
I had a similar situation. During covid, a gym I was attending shut down some of their locations because of covid, forcing all those members to crowd into fewer locations. Those gyms became unusable to me because of equipment hogging and overcrowding (I typically counted on one hour to complete a full workout and was extremely pressed for time, now it would take me at least twice that). I tried to cancel, citing my reasons, but I got a similar runaround to you. I also had to submit my cancellation in writing and mail it into their corporate office. I refused to do any of this, so I called my credit card company and complained that they were fraudulently charging me and requested that they block further charges. Sure enough, a few months later I got letters and emails threatening to cancel my membership because there was an issue with my payment method. Since the membership was month-to-month, they couldn’t hold me responsible for anything beyond the month for which I had already paid.
I joined a small private gym that works on a monthly prepaid membership. Just pay for the month in advance, and you have access. Don’t pay? No access, no pressure, no worries. Leave for months at a time and come come back with no hassle.
I personally had to get cc dispute started, because, $my_local_gym_that_is_not_a_chain also uses the same scummy tactics including, but limited to starting to add more charges. They also said, I need to fax my hand written cancellation to their HQ. I did, but as you can guess there is a reason I opened a dispute with CC.
I had a gym membership that I wanted to cancel because I had moved, and their closest location was no longer convenient.
First, they tried to tell me I had to go back to the location I had originally signed up at in order to cancel. No phone cancellation options or anything. I guess if I had moved more than a few miles away, I'd be out of luck.
After some fighting, the closer location let me fill out a paper cancellation form. The cancellation form had a very clear section that showed "paid in full" and "$0 remaining due." Despite this, I got a bill a month later for my "final month." I refused to pay it, obviously. They harassed me, calling me daily. Only once I posted a poor review online did someone finally decide the $50 (or whatever it was) wasn't worth it.
They gym itself was a fine gym, but these billing practices are scummy scummy scummy. I refuse to sign up for any other gym (except maybe a local rec center) until there's more legislation to protect my consumer rights. The cancellation nonsense isn't worth my time.
The opposite happened to my partner here in Portugal. She signed up to a gym ($100/month), and they literally forgot to start charging the account until 5 months later. Everything tends to be so inefficient here. I guess at least in this case the inefficiency worked in our favor. Now let's hope they won't take 5 months to stop charging when we cancel ;-)
My daughter had dancing lessons in the past (never again!), we quit because she did not want to go anymore. They told us we can only quit by the end of the quarter with a month's notice - it was beginning of March, so too late to quit for end of June.
Then Covid hit, classes got cancelled; we still had to pay until end of September. This fine print is totally insane.
Just cancel the payment, I wouldn't even bother to talk to them if it's clear it'll be difficult. They'll send you a letter or something saying if you don't update the payment method your access will be cancelled. Ok?
Similar. I got badly injured. Gym said I could only cancel in person. Was not possible. Played me off between gym and corporate for several days. Went ballistic on all social media, review sites etc. wrote some emails shaming them. Charged back from bank.
I get the sentiment, but we should blame the system. The reps are just trying to make a living for a low pay and don't have much power to change things.
I still have a membership to Planet Fitness from 5 years ago that charges to my account every month
while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)
I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership
worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts
I forget which gym but I sent them an email cancellation ("in writing") and they told me I had to come in. So I cancelled the card. They had some bullshit agreement with my bank where the subscription followed to my new card. So I cancelled the bank account.
Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave.
I don't know why people think that something magically can't effect your credit report without knowledge of your SSN. Name+address+DOB is enough to identify you.
Chase does not require a Social Security number when you add an authorized user so people are always absolutely shocked their "authorized user account" appears on their credit report.
Yup, I had a ton of delinquent accounts on my credit reports that were a similar (but not exact) name and similar (but not exact) SSN and similar (but not exact) birthdate as mine. Seems they’ll just find the closest match and slap it on.
I learned this as I was applying for student loans at the end of highschool and kept getting denied. It’s the reason I ended up having to take a bunch of crazy high interest rates from Sallie Mae/now Navient to go to college as planned.
Of course the credit agencies reporting all these false debts suffer 0 consequences for it, only the consumer does. I’m still pretty mad about it 15 years later, got slightly off topic :)
Contact your bank and explain what's going on. They may have a way to block Planet Fitness' auto charge. Your bank should be sympathetic and they control outflows.
After a while, PF will drop their auto-charge because they won't want to deal with the rejected payment requests.
I hope I'm correct about this and I hope it helps!
The contract requires you to send the letter to cancel, but it doesn't prohibit you from calling to discuss the matter. You have already cancelled in compliance with the terms of the contract, you don't have to hop on a flight to do anything.
I wonder if this is a franchise thing. I've moved states more than once and Planet Fitness has been one of the easier things to deal with cancelling. Done this a few times in different states. You should be able to go into any location and make that your new home location, and then cancel there.
They also let me use a credit card for payments too.
I don't think America is the outlier here, I've had some maddening experiences with French companies when I lived there. You basically have to send them formal recorded letters threatening them with legal action just to cancel basic things, and even then they call your bluff and just ignore you 50% of the time.
I really like the idea of having a hard limit of 'clicks' to get something done/undone. If it's 4 clicks to subscribe, it should be no more than 4 to unsubscribe.
I think a better approach is to just require business to accept certain standard ways of being informed of cancellation. I.e. they must accept an email, a phone call, a letter, etc. If they then want to have an even simpler cancellation flow, that is fine, but they must accept all of these basic methods. This is how it works in Sweden.
Mine had a clause if I moved 30 miles away I could cancel. And I moved to the country, so I canceled. They wanted a letter from my preacher to prove it, my power bill wasnt enough for them.
Similar to privacy.com, which you can use to give predators a credit card that you can cancel:
You can open another checking account at your bank easily, online. I use that for my book expenses and (cough) royalties. Close the account after notifying the gym in writing that you're canceling, and voila they can't charge you anymore.
(that's if the gym draws from your bank account and not by charging a credit card. You could also tell the bank to reject charges from the gym, if that works.)
Fortunately I gave them my PayPal because they randomly signed me back up for $4.50 a month after I cancelled. I opened a dispute with PP and they set it straight.
I got the run-around one time when I tried to cancel my membership at Planet Fatness. After my evil twin got me in trouble at the gym I made sure to bring along my 6′3″ son and my 300 pound probably-autistic and foul smelling friend (also offended by my evil twin) for backup and had no trouble canceling “our” membership.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadHonestly, I prefer it to their own apps, and the price + cancellation policy is WAY better.
PS - During the process I was offered like 60% off if I kept the subscription.
I tried doing the chat to cancel. I said multiple times that we wanted to cancel and the person (presumably a person following a script, although they certainly seemed robotic) just kept ignoring that. Eventually I said I'm cancelling, if you charge us, I'll charge it back and took a screenshot of that.
When they charged me, I charged it back. No need for the screenshot, which was mildly disappointing because this was one time where I felt I had proof that I tried to cancel.
We'll never subscribe to The Economist again. If you make it this difficult to leave, better not to start.
Immediately after my subscription expired they started emailing me 1/2 off offers. The whole experience put a bad taste in my mouth and I won't be back.
If the rep you talk to won’t do it, hang up and call again.
"Can I get the new customer rate"
"No that is only for new customers"
"Okay I'd like to cancel"
"Great, anything else I can do for you today"
"Sure, I'd like to sign up for new service"
When "online cancel" finally rolled out we were all so excited there was a party with a sheetcake that had the cancellation landing page printed on it. We'd rather have users trust us than use dark patterns to "trap" them into a subscription.
Why does my bank want me to write them some letter and create a case which they may or maynot look into.
Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
No, but there may be a contractual agreement between you and a provider where you have promised to pay for a service, and merely 'not paying' is not sufficient to cancel that. This makes far more sense in a non-digital world though, where you might pay for expensive services after the fact, rather than in advance.
In practice, most digital services will happily cancel themselves if you do just block upfront transactions. Many modern financial services/neobanks I've used have some kind of built-in functionality for this, even paypal has a page where you can manage & cancel all current subscriptions directly, blocking all future payments: https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/.
> Merely changing the card number wont work because bank updates vendors with the new card. I've asked but they they have to update vendors, i don't understand why though.
I believe it's because the 'card details' part is effectively a fiction for e-commerce. When you subscribe, the payment provider uses your card details to get a persistent token, which they can use to authorize future payments, and then they throw away the card details entirely. They just use the token alone to authorize future charges.
That token is somewhat independent of the specific card, by design, as unlike card details this means it can't really be stolen or leaked (it's only authorized for certain purchases from that one vendor) and it means all your normal ongoing payments don't break in the common case where you _do_ want payments to continue when your card is replaced. Bits About Money has some more background on this here: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under...
Yes i understand my obligation to the vendor but why is the bank enforcing that ?
Revolut for example will let you see & block all subscriptions directly from the app: https://www.revolut.com/subscriptions/. In the UK, it's a legal requirement that all banks let customers block any recurring card payments on request (at least via phone/email/letter) with no questions asked, as long as you ask at least a day before the next payment: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/banking/sto...
> bank to cherry pick the transactions
bank isn't doing the cherry picking. Customer is. How would the bank know what to cherry pick.
Do they? My bank recently decided to send me a new CC for no clear reason (old one had like two years left to expiry) and without my asking for it, and it's been a huge pain in the ass because seemingly nothing updated automatically.
They update vendors because most people who get a replacement card with a new number have way more subscriptions that they want to keep going than they have subscriptions that they want to drop but for which the procedure for cancelling was too complicated to time consumers.
I wish my bank had to do that. It would make my life a whole lot easier sometimes.
I'm not sure whether to thank biden or anyone-but-trump or something else - but whoever is responsible, *THANK YOU*.
Charges come through as "Apple" (or some variation) without indicating what the purchase was for. They also roll charges together so they're not hitting your bank account multiple times in a short period.
It's not a lot of work to go into your apple account and compare the invoices to your bank account to see what the charge was _actually_ for, but it was a pain in the rear when our credit card was stolen and used by the thief to Nickle and Dime us for 5-10 dollars here and there over the course of 6 months.
The apple subscription generate a lot more support requests because a lot of customers are confused on how to stop the in app subscription. Unfortunately, the company can't stop the subscription, it can only be done by the customer through the app store, so instead of just being able to cancel it for confused customers who request it, they have to guide them to cancel it on their side which is a lot of work.
Especially since the app was terrible and the reviews were full of people who were similarly charged and unhappy.
The pattern-
-hide promised functionality behind subscription.
-offer "free trial", often with very short trial periods.
-convert that into a big dollar subscriptions.
They know that most of the people who they ensnare are probably going through a multitude of tools trying to find a solution for some problem (and the fact the tool in question often fails to do what it promised is a feature because it encourages the user to move on quicker), and some subset will fail to cancel the "trial" before it becomes a pay service.
Consenting adults, sure, and personally I have never fallen prey to this, looking at the in-app purchases and just refusing to be baited, but it's enough of a problem that it should embarrass Apple a bit.
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/04/11/app-store-subscription-...
Do you not see this as plainly duplicitous behavior? I think the intention to deceive is far more cogent than any warnings.
Inherently if you are relying on something to thwart or subvert the intention of the person you are dealing with you are engaging in duplicitous behavior.
I won't make the argument that subscriptions or even auto enroll are necessarily evil if we're shifting focus to less predatory industries, I would judge a given example by how difficult it was to get a refund. I think the top level principle of mirroring ease of subscription to ease of ending such applies here too, with respect to ease of billing for an unused service.
That people forget. That's part of the market of trial and subs in general. Its why gyms flourish. People subscribe but don't go.
They (iOS) have the data that you use or not use the app. They could notify you with a warning that your renewal is due. Or allow you the option to set the reminder in your calendar or bank app.
It seems to be done for privacy reasons, but I don't agree with how they handle it. I should be able to see all charges going to my Apple account credit card no matter which sub-account originated them.
lol, exactly like the mail-order CD club I signed up for back in high school.
Link to the Last Week Tonight video: https://youtu.be/Bd2bbHoVQSM
Unless everyone is on the ball and actively refuses it, someone gets stuck with it.
Now, is it legal? Maybe, maybe not. But they will pretend it is until you take them to court, and they'll quickly settle if you agree not to tell anyone else.
My mom recently told me they tried to book their week at the timeshare and were told they would have to pay $1,000 to do so. Because it's a premium week or whatever bullshit. It's absolutely insane this predatory company is allowed to continue. I'm going to be forced to deal with this fucking thing when he dies. That's the truly insane thing. It's treated as property, but it's not. It's a fucking subscription that you can't cancel. Ever. You own nothing.
Would love to see Westgate tell the state of Massachusetts that they are the legal owners of this timeshare, and owe for annual repairs.
- Companies need to choose at least one channel to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. - The consumer can only be transferred from an attendant once. - If the call drops, the attendant must return the call and complete the service, without the customer having to repeat everything again. - Phone calls with human service must be available for at least eight hours a day.
I'm a particular fan of the "mirror" concept, where cancelations/returna should work in the same channels and be as easy as the purchases/subscriptions.
Consumer laws here are surprisingly good in my opinion and I am also surprised on how little lobby power consumers have in developed countries, to be treated like they are, with all the black hat tactics companies throw at them.
One law I really liked was the "right to regret", meaning you can cancel a wide array of contracts within 7 days. For example, when booking a hotel online, no matter the hotel's cancellation policies, you can cancel a reservation within 7 days of making it.
They're called things like: "cooling-off law", "buyers remorse law", or "right to cancel"
Some examples: https://cal.lawsoup.org/legal-guides/consumer/contract-cance...
All of this while reporting record profits, trying to pr spin this, and throwing more money than lost with compliance at lobbyists who will lie and financially influence to the legislators.
Most recently:
The issue with their charging ports being changed frequently and being non standard. They even tried to abuse the USBC standard just so they could get their charing cable lock in.
iPhones have consistently had lightning since 2005
MacBooks have had USBC (compatible with all USBC plugs) since 2016
iPads Pro have had USBC (compatible with all USBC plugs) since 2018
iPhones are rumoured to join the USBC club What am I missing?
> They even tried to abuse the USBC standard
When did this happen?
This article headline is a bit misleading, as the FTC is not looking to ban the subscriptions themselves. Rather, they would like to implement a rule that requires servicers that provide subscriptions to make it as easy to cancel as it is to enroll, rather than the current jumbling mess that is trying to cancel something like a gym, Amazon, news, cable, or other subscription where servicers try to maintain retention by putting in a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to cancel.
If the FTC has their way and the rules are effective, “tough to cancel subscriptions” no longer exist, and any subscriptions that previously belonged to that set now exist in the “not tough to cancel subscriptions” set.
Effectively banning them.
That’s how I interpret the title.
Is there some measure of semantics involved here? Quite probably, but then I say that in the world of professional writing and journalism I would expect a higher level of aptitude and proficiency. Being able to write headlines or article titles that remove as much of the semantic fuel as possible is, I believe, not an unreasonable request (or even requirement) for such professions, unless that is what the author is trying to achieve.
Shame on the "startup", and absolutely disgusting that we as a civilized country allow scams targeted towards a vulnerable population to happen quite legally.
The truly dreadful part is that this is precisely the kind of thing that people with depression, ADHD, and a host of other psychological conditions are unable to deal with.
I was in a similar situation and extremely irate at first when they said refunds were not an option, but fortunately it appeared to be an issue with their automated scheduling system. Once talking to an agent they were able to link me to a provider that same day.
On the whole, it's actually been a pretty good experience over the last year. Trying to get similar counseling/medication locally was an absolute nightmare at the time... with Cerebral, everything happened super fast and the counseling I got seemed on point (ADHD/insomnia). They quickly pause/resume for when I'm out of the country traveling, no unapproved charges so far.
"Who must comply with HIPAA": https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/190/who-must...
"Is a software vendor a business associate of a covered entity": https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/256/is-softw...
For example, the GoodRX [0] and BetterHelp [1] settlements were both due to alleged violations of the FTC Act and Health Breach Notification Rule, rather than a violation of HIPAA.
[0] https://www.hipaajournal.com/court-approves-ftc-settlement-g...
[1] https://www.hipaajournal.com/betterhelp-settlement-ftc-healt...
As tough to cancel as some gym memberships are, they at least usually spell out their precise cancellation procedure as a part of a contract and have multiple ways to get in touch with some human to deal with a situation. And there's always some path to cancel the service (even if it's annoying by design and has you jumping through multiple hoops). And with these gyms, as a last resort you at least have a chargeback as a fairly realistic option with no consequences to your life.
What I'd like to see investigated in this vein is Silicon Valley companies who provide no human customer service. Your only recourse in the event of a flawed transaction is either suck it up and take the loss, or do a chargeback and risk having your entire digital life destroyed as they retaliate against you by locking up your account. What these companies do to people daily is criminal on a level that the worst gym can't even fathom.
Why do they even get to dictate how you cancel? You should just be able to send them a letter, an email, go in and inform them, etc. What purpose does it serve for society for companies themselves to be able decide to ignore your cancellation requests unless they follow a specific procedure?
Doesn't it seem reasonable for businesses to (for the most part) pick and choose how they conduct business and deal with their customers, so long as they're not committing fraud or other crimes?
Isn't the point of the law to protect people from crimes? Is the point of the law to dictate the tiny minute details of everyday life?
I think you misunderstood the parent comment:
> You should just be able to send them a letter, an email, go in and inform them
That's a "you should" statement.
The simple fact is, you can't cancel by just sending a letter, e-mail, or just going into the gym.
Usually, you have to fill out their form and send it as a registered mail to some corporate office that will likely completely ignore it for another month or two and keep charging you.
If you can join a gym by just showing up or creating an account online, then you should be able to cancel online or by just showing up and telling them to cancel.
> Doesn't it seem reasonable for businesses to [...]
Yes, but doesn't it seem shitty the way gyms operate? Fuck off with your "BUT THAT'S WHAT YOU SIGNED UP FOR" and just answer THAT question.
The problem is that every gym operates this way. Going to a competitor isn't an option.
My point was really just that there should be a few standard simple ways that all businesses _must_ accept for the ending of contracts. /u/logicalmonster seems to think there is value in allowing businesses to not honor such requests because it is "reasonable for businesses to (for the most part) pick and choose how they conduct business". I disagree. I see no value in such a policy and think that my recommendations would make for better economic value.
How dare they pick and choose that some methods of communication are more valid than others.
Why are you pretending that I'm arguing something I am not?
I legit had to drive back to this gym in New Jersey to sign a form to "cancel" my membership. They would not accept a phone call, email, not even a signed letter stating my intent to cancel, even after I explained to them I had moved hours away. Ridiculous.
Hated to resort to that, but have no regrets about pissing off the CEO, CFO and any one else I called at home - and this was not a small company.
Personally, the only people they should be pissed off at is their employees and themselves. Had they not tried screwing you out of thousands of dollars, you wouldn't have been forced to escalate; I would get a pretty perverse pleasure from knowing I made their day worse in a situation like this.
I told them if you don't cancel it effective right now I am posting this dishonest predatory practice on every social media and review site in town, as well as telling all of my friends I met in here what you are doing, and asking them to please quit in protest. I'll also be doing a credit card chargeback, and a small claims court case to recover the time it takes me to deal with all of this. I will also take action to recover my back membership fees, because they repeatedly failed to maintain equipment in a usable condition, so I didn't get what I paid for. They did concede, and canceled it immediately.
There are four general types of corporations in the United States: a sole proprietorship, a Limited Liability Company (LLC), an S-Corporation (S-Corp), and a C-Corporation (C-Corp).
People who whine about corporations fail to realize that 99% of the businesses they deal with everyday are incorporated entities under the law. Your pizza shop, tanning salon, dentist, ice cream shop, sandwich truck...
A business entity can be a good or bad actor. Their legal status as a corporation does not mean they are automatically bad, regardless of the size or public/private status. Their actions and policies define them as either good or bad.
Words have meaning and they should be used appropriately.
Corporations generally have more diffuse ownership than LLCs, which is why people ascribe bad things to that specific type of entity. If there is a gym doing these tactics, and it's an LLC with a handful of owners ("members"), those owners are just asshole humans that could theoretically be punched in the face. Whereas if it's a corporation with diffuse ownership, then the policies become "just business" and "nobody's fault".
Although corporations certainly can be "closely held" by a few people or a family, just as you can sell shares in an LLC to investors at arms length or have all/part of the LLC owned by a corporation or business trust.
And frankly I'm surprised by the number of small businesses I see set up as a sole proprietorship or partnership and doing-business-as rather than spending the money on LLC registration fees. Although as a business gets smaller the protection created by the LLC structure also shrinks, so it's somewhat understandable.
In any case, predatory/scammy practices are bad no matter what the ownership structure is. Being small and local doesn't excuse you from abusive behavior.
I think these kind of predatory cancellation things must be in part a generational thing, and these policies are so old they haven't responded to the times. Older people I know seem to expect it or be okay with it, but millenials and younger will tend to be outraged and refuse to do business with them on principle. America Online, Sirius XM, etc. were able to retain some customers by making it hard to quit, but I think turned away far more without realizing it.
Cancelling my at&t account, on the other hand, took several calls to them and my bank, and in the end, I just had my bank stop payment.
I had an experience like that last year. I was cancelling my broadband in UK with Virgin, and got a £280 disconnection fee. The person who informed me said I will have to pay it in my final bill. Then over a month later I got a call from someone who's task was to see if I need a new connection where I was going. I said no, I was leaving the country. He asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I said, "you could cancel that huge penalty fee I got.." And he was just like "Sure, no problem, done."
What does "disconnecting" a customer involve, anyway? I recall having to return equipment or face a penalty to cover costs (high, but still somewhat understandable), but I have never had to pay to get off a broadband contract.
[1] https://www.virginmedia.com/legal/fibre-optic-services-terms...
It's supposed to compensate banks for lost profit from you not paying interest for the entire term. Equally, a bank can't cancel your mortgage before the term ends for the sole reason that it would be able to charge higher rates for a new mortgage.
But borrowers should know what they’re getting into, and have options.
It means you have to pay attention when borrowing, but loans with that penalty likely carry a slightly lower rate for the borrower (because they are predictable for the lender). It isn't entirely arbitrary.
The best part of this is that when you decide you are done, you simply do nothing and its all over. Sure, you will get some marketing text spam for a few weeks but that's about it.
I think another aspect of this problem is that credit cards don’t just let you mark a transaction as “don’t allow any more of these.” Of course that probably wouldn’t solve the problem. The gyms would probably just continue charging you and eventually send you to debt collection.
Ironically, they do almost all support this, you can mark any merchant as non-future-billable and prevent all future charges from a given merchant. Unfortunately, you have to call in and ask a phone rep to do it for you, most cards don't let you set this yourself.
They use some simple ML to figure out which are you recurring payments, place them in a separate folder for you to keep tabs on and allow you to unilaterally stop any “future payments like that”.
I mean on top of tech like virtual cards and chargebacks with a few clicks.
It seems so simple to implement I have no idea how its not a standard feature for banks these days.
May this email serve as your notice to revoke the ACH/Bank Access/Debit Card authorizations of both the below primary bank account and debit card, from [company] effective today, [date]
[Bank Name] Checking Account x** Savings Account x** and Debit Card x**
Additionally, I am revoking withdrawal authorizations from any other accounts associated with my personal information, listed below
name: DOB: phone #: email:
I am also revoking your further access to my banking accounts and have already removed your authorization with the Bank directly.
THIS REVOCATION APPLIES FOR THE NEXT PAYMENT DUE DATE AND ALL FUTURE DUE DATES.
Kindly, I ask that your response to this email shall be confirmation of receipt and you agree it is at least 3 business days prior to any scheduled repayments or membership fee deduction.
Note that in accordance with 12 CFR Part 1005.10(c) (Regulation E) you MUST HALT PAYMENT.
FAIL TO COMPLY and I will submit a report to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Additionally, you will be responsible for any fees, including overdraft fees, incurred as a result of your failure to halt payment
What do you do if they tell you no one got this email?
But more realistically, at that point you've already filed a claim with the CFPB so who cares what they say? It will get settled one way or the other.
Better to use something like a Privacy card in the first place so you can revoke it on your own terms.
Nothing in the protocol, but many individual banks have their own in-house ways of failing the pull.
No, they'll just send it to collections, and now your credit is dinged for seven years because unless they violated their contract with you, you're still liable for the charges.
Anyone actually have a credit report with an unpaid gym membership in the report?
Your credit report is answering one question: How good are you about paying for things you've agreed to pay for.
There are levels of collections though the first is for things where they expect you will pay, you just need a payment plan (some medical labs don't do billing in house, they always sell it to collections), so collections will buy the bill for the pull price minus $50 (or some minimal amount in that range): since most people are going to pay collections just needs to setup the details for which $50 is a fair price. At the other end there are bills that they know you are not going to pay, collections will buy the a multi-thousand dollar bill for $1, and see if they can get any form of payment at all out of you.
Anyway, the bottom line is for a gym you are never going to owe enough that it is worthwhile for collections to touch it.
99 dollar ding on credit. Hundreds of calls from hundreds of numbers about it. Took years to finally block all the numbers.
Beyond abusive.
You'd be surprised what gets sent to collections. I recall one client that collected on behalf of a fried chicken restaurant.
If you are intending to pay cash for everything, you don't even need a credit score. No one cares about who you are or what you did when you walk in the door with a bag of cash in each hand.
Not saying this answer isn't the way to do it, but it's not without additional collateral damage in some cases.
Even if it doesn't impact other companies, the company in question may refuse to do business with you in the future (which may or may not be of concern).
A decent person cares about being decent towards other human beings.
It's gotten better, but on more than one occasion I've had to argue with my bank to honor my request to block the charges. I've had tellers say "Well, if you have a subscription with them, this needs to be allowed". No. As you say - my bank's obligation is to honor my account wishes, not be an arbiter of my agreements with third parties.
Can you expand on what you mean by this?
My banks don't offer me some way to revoke authorization from the bank's website. Does this mean calling customer service and giving them a business name to disallow future ach debits from?
Maybe you would since it's a local gym, but if it's a national chain credit card companies won't even let you initiate the chargeback whatsoever.
I had to go so far as to completely cancel my Amex account to get Lifestyle Fitness to stop billing me. American Express utterly refused to either chargeback, or deny future billings. To the point a new card number issued didn't even fix it. I was quite happy to sign a waiver that I'd take all liability.
This was after moving states, calling to cancel, and them saying I needed to fly in to cancel in person. Outright scam that the banks help enable.
I think first logical step is to legislate banks from enabling this. That should cover most of the problem without a wide ranging laws.
The leadership of any company that does anything like this should be very consciously aware that they're mediocre leftovers of the professional world. Real leaders of real companies don't have to be predatory. It is a screaming confession of incompetence.
There's a certain toxic element of business culture that preaches dominance as a virtuous thing, ether overtly, or through dubious terminology/beliefs in ideas like "alpha males." It argues that if you aren't dominating someone, then they necessarily must be dominating you in this interaction.
It is an extremely reductionistic view that has trickled down into certain parts of Weird Internet, too.
I dont think it works as your described. Amazon is plenty predatory.
What happens is a company tries to see what it can get away with. If they don't get in legal trouble, and customers don't abandon them in droves, then other companies start doing the same. It becomes industry standard.
"Hey dad, what did you do at work today?"
"I worked with some lawyers to make an indecipherable contract so that we can extract extra money for a service someone doesn't want."
I guess the answer is some mix of "make the org structure so complex that everyone can feel innocent because no one person is pulling the trigger" (I don't buy it, that just means incompetent managers) plus a heaping scoop of cognitive dissonance.
With a sufficiently large enough org, you can build it in discrete enough parts (assuming it’s a building something based) that only the one who creates the final part is the one who knows what the ultimate goal is or the one who pulls the trigger. These people are also high enough to be inured to any effects of their decision. The second layer is even if you can see where it’s going and you do care, is it worth it to speak up and get fired? I know whistleblowers are meant to be protected (speaking only for the US) but with at-will employment and certain conditions that favor employers, how do you know they won’t cycle in someone who will do it anyway?
That particular kind of community has largely disappeared. Furthermore, the consequences of someone's actions are often so far removed from the people they interact with that the behaviour becomes easily excused.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
It's a bit like the toothpaste consultant story.
The entire system is quite abusive. You may try experimenting with "I don't give a shit", assuming your other ducks are in order. I have found it to be therapeutic.
I joined a small private gym that works on a monthly prepaid membership. Just pay for the month in advance, and you have access. Don’t pay? No access, no pressure, no worries. Leave for months at a time and come come back with no hassle.
First, they tried to tell me I had to go back to the location I had originally signed up at in order to cancel. No phone cancellation options or anything. I guess if I had moved more than a few miles away, I'd be out of luck.
After some fighting, the closer location let me fill out a paper cancellation form. The cancellation form had a very clear section that showed "paid in full" and "$0 remaining due." Despite this, I got a bill a month later for my "final month." I refused to pay it, obviously. They harassed me, calling me daily. Only once I posted a poor review online did someone finally decide the $50 (or whatever it was) wasn't worth it.
They gym itself was a fine gym, but these billing practices are scummy scummy scummy. I refuse to sign up for any other gym (except maybe a local rec center) until there's more legislation to protect my consumer rights. The cancellation nonsense isn't worth my time.
Then Covid hit, classes got cancelled; we still had to pay until end of September. This fine print is totally insane.
Isn't charging people for things you don't give them supposed to be one of those things that are illegal no matter what any contracts say?
them: "Sorry, there's nothing I can do, I simply can't help you!"
customer: "I'll be really annoying."
them: "I figured out how to help you!"
They finally agreed to cancel remotely.
while I had no problem signing up online, you can only cancel your membership in person at your "home" location, or by sending them a certified mail letter formally request cancellation (which I have tried and failed apparently because I never heard back)
I now live on the other side of the country, so it feels ridiculous to spend money on a flight ticket just to cancel a gym membership
worse, Planet Fitness requires you provide bank account/routing number for payment, so there is no way to cancel payment unless I switch bank accounts
Bank accounts don't need to be some terminal relationship. If they don't treat you right, leave.
edit: It was Workout Anytime
And if you do, they will keep your membership active (for years) before reporting debt to the credit agencies.
I don't know why people think that something magically can't effect your credit report without knowledge of your SSN. Name+address+DOB is enough to identify you.
Chase does not require a Social Security number when you add an authorized user so people are always absolutely shocked their "authorized user account" appears on their credit report.
I learned this as I was applying for student loans at the end of highschool and kept getting denied. It’s the reason I ended up having to take a bunch of crazy high interest rates from Sallie Mae/now Navient to go to college as planned.
Of course the credit agencies reporting all these false debts suffer 0 consequences for it, only the consumer does. I’m still pretty mad about it 15 years later, got slightly off topic :)
After a while, PF will drop their auto-charge because they won't want to deal with the rejected payment requests.
I hope I'm correct about this and I hope it helps!
Try small claims court in _your_ jurisdiction. You can then present this in evidence.
They also let me use a credit card for payments too.
You can open another checking account at your bank easily, online. I use that for my book expenses and (cough) royalties. Close the account after notifying the gym in writing that you're canceling, and voila they can't charge you anymore.
(that's if the gym draws from your bank account and not by charging a credit card. You could also tell the bank to reject charges from the gym, if that works.)