I'm listening to hold music right now, 30 minutes into my attempt at cancelling 3mbps home DSL service (not a typo), for which the price has crept up to $71 USD/mo.
I first spoke with a customer service agent whose accent I couldn't understand very well. I have him ALL my account information. He mumbled something about being unable to forward me to the actual customer service agent (then what is your role, dude?), then came back on and said he couldn't forward me and so I would have to call them myself.
He gave me the same number I had already called. I pointed this out to him and he gave me some other number, which is where I'm listening to on-hold music now.
Right now the on-hold music is interrupted to sell me shit.
Non US Call centers can't handle cancellations. If they can't convince you to postpone, they have to transfer you to some US Call center specifically for Retention or something like that.
The transfer process impacts the metrics of the agent. You know, like call length, customer survey, customer callbacks, etc
Well transfers are also a metric. That specific agent might prefer a "callback" over a "transfer" that month.
W/e Your best strategy is to open the call with:
"hi, I want to cancel my service" And don't give details about any problem, you just want to cancel. Period.
If the agen't "can't transfer" ask for a supervisor. Could be 5 - 15 more minutes but at least you don't have to call again.
If you ask for "an American" or "someone who can speak english", depending on the call center company, you can get a call drop, a soft retention, a transfer to the agent beside, or a transfer to a call center in the US. YMMV
Sorry, this sucks as someone who has experienced this themselves. As a former customer support person, ask for a supervisor. Also be firm and serious without being rude or berating. Lastly never buy the "our systems are having trouble". That is support speak for "I have no clue, call back and talk to someone else".
Done, and done. 14 + 44 minute phone calls, gave all of my information to 3 redundant people, including explaining to confused agents that I don't recall the account pin, well you have to have the account pin, well actually the previous person accepted my answer to my personal security question and the person before that texted me a temporary pin but now for some reason those alternate methods don't work for you?
> Right now the on-hold music is interrupted to sell me shit.
Jesus Christ, this is like those gasoline pumps that blare ads at you while you pump. On that little screen right above the plaque that says "you better not go in your car or this whole place will fucking explode or something".
Since when is it chill to hold people hostage for ads, let alone LOUD ads? I don't want to hear this!
PS: little tip for gasoline pump ads: one button always mutes them. Think it's a compliance thing. Almost never labeled, so just try all the buttons.
I don't think this is true anymore. I've pushed all 8 buttons on a pump near me, and it didn't mute. Almost purchased a car wash though. Thankfully my primary car is electric.
You know, I actually haven't encountered this at a gas station in a year or two. I hadn't realized until now that my local gas stations just don't have those little TV interludes anymore. I haven't heard the dulcet tones of Maria Menudo or Mario Lopez in so long.
Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
The whole point of "click to cancel" was to deal with the fact that a business, by contract law, can make it almost entirely impossible to stop owing them money through entirely legal means. The courts do not consider being on hold for 18 hours onerous enough to void a contract, so it's perfectly legal to require you to follow the "cancellation process", whatever that is.
Welcome to a world without consumer protections beyond basic contract law! American courts have long held the position that, if you agree to a contract, it really doesn't matter how onerous it is. Fuck you, caveat emptor and all that.
If you want to improve the situation without new regulation, we should push for courts to take a more reasonable stance: That contract law does not protect absurd contracts. This is supposed to be the current situation, but what it takes to get your contract declared null because it's unfair or onerous is just insane right now, because our courts have spent at least 50 years praying at the alter of "let businesses do literally anything they want under contract law"
>Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
Is this your personal exerience, or are you making assumptions?
I would love to hear how this process possibly fails to unsubscribe anyone:
1. Go to your state's corporate website and get/buy the name and address of the corporate registered agent for your ISP or whatever. In Texas that costs $1.
2. Write or ask ChatGPT to write a demand letter that they cancel your service as of the date of your letter. If they don't, threaten to sue them in small claims court. In Texas, threaten triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (ChatGPT will help you write demands using the "laundry list" of deceptive acts.)
3. Send letter return receipt requested.
4. A lawyer on their side is now involved. They will neverever show up in any small claims court for this. And if they do, the judge is so on your side for this!
Heck, this works for a bunch of things, once you assert your rights. For example, I made a Coinbase account when they first existed and played with $10 of bitcoin. There it sat for six years or so, and then I tried to log in again. Their identity bullshit was demanding to use a phone number from an older phone and they stonewalled. So I sent a demand letter as above and, surprise!, my account was magically re-enabled for my $3 of bitcoin.
You'd spend far longer in the post office and the courts than you would on the phone.
All the company has to do in that court room is show that you mailed the form to someone whose job has nothing to do with account services, or who doesn't even have access or authorization to access people's private account information, or that they tried and failed to reach you in order to verify your identify since they sure as hell won't cancel the account of someone and shut off their service all because an anonymous letter showed up somewhere nobody was expecting to get it. What a great way to DoS an enemy or competitor if that worked. Just mail off some letters to a few store's webhosts right before Christmas or black friday.
I wonder what would happen if one sent a cancellation letter via certified mail, then just stopped paying. If they come after you, well - you canceled.
But frustratingly, the AT&T website appeared to allow you to replace your current (auto-pay) billing method with some other billing method, but I didn't see any way to remove all current billing methods, which makes just stopping paying nigh impossible. :-(
Genuine question. Why country with so much freedoms tolerates this particular injustice so much.
Freedom to pay is very fundamental for free speech, I think courts and legislatures made this very very clear multiple times.
There are whole countries where you don't need Apple as intermediary to cancel any subscription without notice. In these countries it is up to companies to sue you if they think you are in wrong, and "they made it hard to cancel subscription" is basically all defence consumer ever needs.
most credit cards allow you to create a temporary card number. Create one, set it to be the billing method, and then revoke it. crazy that we need to resort to that sort of thing, but it does work!
Canceling your credit card doesn't magically get you out of owing money that you're contractually obligated to pay. It might get them to eventually cancel your service for non-payment, but it's not a guarantee. They might just keep billing you until it's worth thousands and then mess up your credit or pursue you in court for payment.
I've talked to my rep about the idea of "credit card cancellation": the idea that you should be able to go through your bank (or you credit card provider's web app) go to a recurring charge and click "cancel" from there. I'm pretty sure most major credit card companies would be on board; what's stopping them is the legal thicket of contracts that are in the way. What the CC providers need is a clear framework from the legislature to support them. The FTC ain't enough.
Actually that is probably one thing that credit cards could do without legislational changes, by modifying their merchant agreements. Businesses would be salty about it, but the value of being able to accept credit cards would mean they'd have to suck it up and accept it. They'd have to put something about how by accepting cards, they agree that that agreement supersedes any other and that a payment cancelation or chargeback constitutes acceptance of cancelation for whatever service was being paid for by that card or something along those lines.
I have several credit cards, none of the providers allow me to create a temporary number. Plus, one wouldn’t be enough because you’d need one for every vendor you might want o cancel in the future.
It's more like a 9 sheep and a wolf with a great PR firm who convinced 5 sheep to vote against the other 4 for lunch plans. Those 5 sheep aren't going to come out of this any better than the 4 of us.
One party doesn't actually have a platform and they've abandoned all the principles in their past platforms. Now it's just agree to whatever one deranged person cooks up in his head after watching TV.
One of the biggest accolades Biden got for a lot of people was they got 4 years of being able to turn off the news and nothing was on fire. His critics might have called him sleepy Joe (despite his administration being quite prolific) but it terms of normalcy and the government not constantly meddling in your life and business he did a bang up job.
No, just genocide as usual, a few proxy wars, typical neoliberal US foreign politics, and then a threat to the American public that if we didn't allow business as usual to continue unabated, we would experience domestic hardship through Trump.
> what we're seeing today is an extra thick layer of daily bshit on top of the usual layer
No, as far as foreign politics it's really same shit different day, we're siding with dictators and meddling with other countries' affairs, economically bullying other countries... Just more out in the open now, and with a somewhat different set of dictators. The only material difference is that Trump's mission is to weaken our global supremacy, which is a mixed bag, as some of that supremacy should indeed go away, but tariffs etc are not the fucking answer.
> which turned out to be even more true than anyone thought was possible
I thought it was going to be even worse. We still have 4 years to find out how bad it gets.
On this issue there is no difference between the previous admin and the current one. The FTC voted 3-0 to postpone. Even though Trump fired two of the original five, if those two had both voted against postponing they would have still lost 3-2 and the same decision would be reached — and I don't think there's much evidence that the two he fired would've voted against postponing, anyway.
This is incorrect. The party makeup of the 5 people changed with the new administration. Lina Khan (D) left and Mark Meador (R) was appointed, changing the balance from 3(D)-2(R) to 2(D)-3(R).
Ah, I hadn't realized that. Still, given that it was 3-0, all three of the former FTC commissioners would have had to be unanimous against deferral — and given that all of them voted for deferral on Jan 19th [1] (the original deadline, when none had been fired and Lina Khan was still onboard) — I don't think there's much change here.
This administration is making a pattern out of 1. Creating a rule or executive order to score easy political points with their base, and then 2. Immediately walking it back or “postponing” it once those points were scored and their base are not paying attention. Trolling-As-Governance.
I agree, though I think it is worth giving some credit to the people who chose her & appointed her. They didn't have to do that. It was one of the more impressive moves by the previous admin, and won them a lot of points from me.
> It's absurd if you believe the point of government is to be by, for, and of the people.
> If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.
No I actually think it's important for people to square views like "government is a way to enrich the owner class" with actual reality, such as the fact that the government when administered by a different party did the exact opposite.
Nihilism is useless. We've made enormous progress since the first human stepped on this planet so I would say we've disproven nihilism for good. Modern governments are definitely not purely tools for the owner class to enrich themselves.
I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress".
There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").
> There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").
Those economic theories are not proper economic theories. As in, mainstream economists don't support them. That theory is propaganda in service of some specific political parties.
> I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress".
"There has been some progress" is a gross understatement considering the age we're living in. There has been tremendous progress and the lifestyle difference between the poorest members of a developed country and the richest ones is much, much smaller than that between the poorest and richest members of a country 200+ years ago.
I might just be arguing to argue, but it did read to me like "nothing has really changed"-style cynicism. (I don't personally agree, but that's a different question.)
"owner class" is too outdated and myopic. It's also incorrect, as plenty of people born into low income households go on to become elected representatives.
It's better to think about it in terms of "people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person".
With any other disadvantaged/discriminated class (skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc.), getting elected in power doesn't change the disadvantage. So the incentive is still there to fight for that equality.
This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.
Let's follow the money. A policy that pumps stocks by dumping labor + consumer rights delivers a roughly equal cost to everyone but delivers benefits in proportion to net worth. Suppose it pumps assets by 1%.
A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.
A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.
A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.
A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.
If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.
In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.
Just because they weren’t born into the owner class (or “capital class”) doesn’t mean they didn’t work their way into it. That’s kind of the American dream.
You can only become wealthy later in life at which point you can’t advantage your past self. Thus new money receives fewer benefits than old money from the exact same policies.
Further having 100m at 40 doesn’t suddenly bring the kind of social connections that going to the right schools and the right parties would. At the extremes, the average lottery winner is surrounded by people asking for help, the average Fortune 500 CEO’s social circle aren’t. So if they suddenly fall on hard times the lottery winner is stuck but that CEO may very well claw their way back.
It’s still possible for poor people to succeed and 3rd+ generation wealth to fail, but the odds are wildly different.
Services have been making it hard to cancel subscriptions for many years, under many parties and administrations. Many things are Trump's fault, this is not one of them.
It seems like this was pushed off to give businesses more time to comply.
Many kinds of businesses have subscriptions, each with a different situation. Some small businesses don't even have a programmer.
Requiring a phone call is not always (although often is) to make it difficult to cancel. Often it's because a company doesn't have the proper infrastructure for the frontend.
So I think it's reasonable that they are giving companies some time.
In the end, I hope that on July 14th this goes through, it will be a big win for consumers.
EDIT: My answer didn't fully address the question, so let me add: I don't think is the result of Trump trying to be friends with billionaires for their money. I understand why it seems that way - because he literally does that. But this doesn't seem special or extraordinary. Enforcement of laws gets pushed off all the time.
It would be good if folks actually read the FTC letter rather than having a visceral negative reaction.
The Biden admin had put the May 14 deadline for certain things even though the rule as a whole went into effect in Jan 2025. Trump's commish is defending that by another 60 days.
Visa/Mastercard have enough power to enforce this on their own. Although obviously regulation would've been better.
If a bunch of elected officials wrote letters to execs and a couple of NYT articles were written about the issue, Visa/Mastercard might be motivated to help.
Chargebacks might upset that being a big benefit, and being the firm that takes a stance for customer care could be good advertising fodder. Though I don't see it working unless they both do it in step which minimises the useful effect of that against each other. It could still be a benefit vs other payment methods, what is PayPal's policy on such things?
Visa and MasterCard suffer from charge backs already, and don't seem to mind. They try to avoid it with AI in the fraud department, and they push some of the cost onto the merchants.
They could do so much more. We still don't even have chip and pin in the US. They seem to think that the current levels of fraud loss are cheaper than the business lost from stopping it.
How are they suffering when they recover funds, charge merchants per chargeback and charge higher rates for merchants with higher than avg chargebacks? Seems like something they benefit from.
Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being instead of letting few hundred in forgotten subscription is larger than I previously thought. By that sense, without any data, I suspect that chargeback amount is wayyyy smaller headache compared to txn fees from forgotten uncancelled subscriptions.
It has nothing to do with fear. Have you ever tried to call in and cancel one of these services? If you're even able to find the right number to reach anyone, or after you've already waited an absurdly long time to do so, you'll be transferred around until you get frustrated and give up, or be subjected to extremely aggressive sales tactics trying to pressure you to stay on. I got to the point with one of those DNA sites where I had to ask about next steps for legal action to the representative before they'd even consider getting to the step where I could cancel my subscription - and even after that, still got charged and had to call again.
It's maybe comforting to think "oh, people just don't want to call, they'd rather eat the fees" when this is way over simplifying the problem and giving way too much credit to sites that operate this way.
(in the UK) it really depends on your bank and even the type of card you use. the debit card chargebacks I did when I was with Natwest were always very simple. fill out a form, send it off, get a response by email. for the one CC chargeback I did I think it required a call and a lot more trouble. when I tried a (debit card) chargeback with a different bank, it was an incredible amount of trouble and then I think they rejected it anyway
>Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being
Try to call comcast and actually speak to a customer service representative. Try it. I dare you. I bought a new modem last year and simply needed to provision it on the service. I got caught in bot limbo so long my only recourse was to scream 'cancel my account!' over and over until I actually got a human on the line. I'm sure that will be automated away at some point too.
> Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being
It isn't fear of the call or the human being (though for some that can be part of the problem.
It is that some or all of these, and other irritations, will be true:
* The call has to be in their working hours, which is possibly your working hours too. I can get away with sitting on hold for a personal matter in work time, but many can't.
* The call will not be short…
* You will need to interact with irritating menu systems to get onto the relevant queues, and if you hit the wrong thing or an issue causes a disconnect, you will be right back where you started.
* The interminable hold muzak and/or staticy silence…
* When you finally get to that human they will have a long script, and it can be hard to divert them from it to just let you cancel. They will try to dissuade you from cancelling with various offers, and occasionally lies, no matter how much you insist that you just want to cancel.
* If you call at the start of a period they'll tell you that if you cancel now, you'll lose the remaining X weeks and try get you to call back later to not lose that “investment”. If you do call back a couple of weeks later you'll be told there is a notice period and you'll be billed for another period. There are other underhand tricks similar to this.
* After all the upsell/resell the first person you get won't be able to process the cancellation. You'll be put back into the queuing system for some more lovely muzak/static.
* The second person might not be able to either. Lather, rinse, repeat.
* All this time, any technical issue that causes a disconnect puts you right back at the start.
* If you get exasperated by all of this and start sounding to aggressive in your irritation, they will sometimes state that you are being rude (maybe I am, but not as rude as them wasting my time and trying to con me…) and hang up, meaning you have to call back and restart at a later time.
Some years ago I cancelled a magazine subscription, that I signed up for in seconds online, in a call that lasted nearly an hour. I've been very wary of subscribing to anything that needs payment details ever since, a stance that has done me well. The only way they will stop doing this sort of crap is if enough people simply stop subscribing to things because of it, or if relevant legislation without easy loopholes is passed.
The rule should be simple. Canceling a service should not be more difficult than starting it. It should be possible to do it in the same channel you started it. No "we only do cancellations over the phone, during business hours on tuesdays, with an hour long waiting time"
with chargebacks there's also the concern that doing a chargeback for a few small things now makes you more likely to be rejected for something more important down the line
Those transactions might have a higher than normal chargeback rate which could motivate them to get rid of them. It could also be a perk of the card, they could provide a subscription cancellation portal on their website.
I honestly would use a card that promises me easier subscription cancellation. In fact, I sort of do already: I use Apple's in app payment system to handle as many subscriptions as possible because of how easy they make it to cancel. I know Apple increases the cost to the service provider and they in turn charge me more but the ease of cancellation is worth it to me.
Now if a bank or card came along and provided the same (and maybe easy subscription management in general) they can have all my subscription revenue.
They do have that power, and have abused it in the past. For example, refusing to do business with cannabis distributors or porn creators.
If you take that past into account, and consider the fact that they aren't using that power the way you want, it becomes immediately clear that they never will.
They absolutely don't have the power to excuse debt. Just because a company can't charge your credit card, doesn't mean you don't still owe them money on paper.
I really don't want unelected corporations with no accountability to anything other than profit margins to be policing payments, subscriptions, business behaviour, or anything else.
These companies provide an utility that is essential for participation in the economy. There needs to be some due process if you want to exclude people or corporations from that.
"If you can sign up online, you must be able to cancel online, too."
That leaves a lot of room for the "Cancel" option to be buried in an obscure hard to find part of the website. I'd have hoped there was a requirement for it to be as prominent and as easy to find as the "Subscribe" option (and maybe there is, just not mentioned in this piece?)
The one line description, of course, leaves tons of holes the actual rule does patch. The impulse to believe a rule or law has been implemented in the most smooth brained way possible is rarely correct. The actual rule includes language that say it should be as easy as the original sign up.
The solution my country had to this is to simply have a unified government website for contract cancellations, where you provide your contract details and they're forwarded to the provider.
Would you want a "click to subscribe" function that works like that?
I wouldn't, I would like some form of confirmation before buying a subscription.
I don't see the problem in a unsubscribe function having a symmetrical confirmation in any service that doesn't try to trick me into a subscription. And actually, even more so for services that try to trick me...
I'm going off my experience with cookie banners, and how that whole thing seemed like a great idea at the time but turned out to mostly be an incredible annoyance.
In the same way, I don't think I'd enjoy a cancel button being front-and-center and cluttering up an interface at all times, given that I don't want to perform a cancellation action the vast, vast majority of the time when I am using a subscription service.
95% of the services I use already stick a cancellation button in either a "billing" section or a "user" section, which is generally quite easy to find and use in the rare instances I need it.
It's ok that you don't need something. That's fine. That said, we don't define policies based on your need. So, I won't disqualify your need. I would ask you to think more than you.
> Do you actually want there to be a big "Cancel" button in the top right corner of every subscribed service?
Yes, since the alternative is what you have now: impossible to find and if you find it highly annoying. Even if you have the law which says "canceling must be as easy as subscribing" like where I live it still isn't even close due to efforts of government creating a law but failing (by design) to fund the agency tasked with keeping the companies in check.
I would like that, as would many here, but let's consider an alternative:
What if the subscription was just as difficult as your ideal cancellation UX flow? I would like that, too. Let the homepage just describe your product, and maybe some pricing.
4. Somewhere on the billing management screen there should be some easy to figure out way to cancel.
Details will vary but in general cancelling logically makes the most sense as part of payment management, so it belongs where other payment management goes such as adding or updating a credit card.
If the site wants to it would be fine to have a separate subscription management section that is linked to on the account page parallel to billing management. That might make sense if it is a service where there are options users can add to or remove from subscriptions.
For example a streaming service might have separate paid options such as higher video resolution, more simultaneous streams allowed, removing ads, and adding specialized content (e.g., porn, foreign language videos).
That wouldn't really belong under billing so putting it in a separate subscription management section would be better, and then cancelling would best fit there too. Billing management would then just be managing your payment methods.
Wherever the site has a link to "Subscribe" or "Upgrade" there should be a link to "Manage My Subscription" and that should take you to someplace where "Cancel" is easy to find.
I want to see a candidate run largely on a consumer protection platform. We've been letting companies get away with more and more bullshit and it needs to stop.
I have seen the results of these A/B tests closely on a major consumer site and I can tell you it definitely hurts the business to make cancelation really easy.
This is the danger of data-driven decision making.
You can only gather a very, very small subset of all data. So now you're basing your decisions off of a tiny picture, so you end up with sometimes strange conclusions. Conclusions that, intuitively, make no sense. But the data says so, so I guess that's what we do.
I mean, doing it wrong is a danger in any process. Data driven decision making should do every meaningful thing it can to ensure that its small subset of data is representative of the whole picture. If you're careful about being random you can do that pretty accurately with a shockingly small subset of data.
In my experience, data-driven decision making is typically a reverse engineered process.
Typically the decision is already made, usually based on a combination of experience, ego, and emotions. Then you have to find and structure data to justify it to other people. You can find data to justify almost any decision.
Believing that "reputation" actually matters for American businesses is laughable.
Craftsman tools are STILL riding the reputation they had half a century ago, despite being made out of the cheapest chinesium and losing their impressive warranty stance.
The American consumer has demonstrated an absurd inability to consider past events as useful information to predict future results.
Things continue to enshittify because the 3 consumers who recognize that quality is going down are vastly outweighed by the increase in consumption by the rest of your market.
Kitchenaid still sells plenty of mixers that die after a year. Hell, American car brands are still successful businesses even though they have made only a few reasonably competitive vehicles since the 50s.
Disney and Netflix are still making plenty of money despite making it difficult to share accounts.
Yep... I've been in a meeting where we were shown the result of moving a cancel button's position on the page to a more crowded place so it would be noticed less. It actually works people click on it less. I couldn't believe it. Thankfully, the feature got vetoed and cancelled (the end result was really visually horrendous).
Reminds me of that one time I ordered a super shuttle to the airport, and the website had an offer to get 15% off if I subscribed to that random thing (first month free, cancel anytime). I’m good at immediately marking my calendar to cancel as soon as I got what I want, so I thought this would be a walk in the park. And surely enough, as soon as I was out of the shuttle and got my discount, I immediately cancelled that subscription.
Fast forward to 18 months later when I notice a $16.99 charge I do not recognize. I look at my previous statement, it’s there too, the one before, it’s there. I go back 18 months and I see I have been charged $16.99 per month ever since. Bonkers. I try to look up the merchant but I don’t find anything in my emails that match.
I forgot how I made the connection but at some point I find that subscription. I call the guys and I ask what’s going on since I cancelled 18 months ago. They say “oh, but actually when you accepted the terms, you also agreed to sign up to that completely unrelated subscription, so yes, you cancelled with us, but you did not cancel that other business”.
I call that second business and tell them I’ve never used whatever service they offer, and that sneaky scheme is unacceptable. They say “ok, we can refund the last 3 months”, I say “no, you refund me the entire 18 months”, they say “no”, I say “let me talk to a manager”. Manager picks up, I say “refund the entire 18 months or I report you to the FTC”. And finally they refunded the whole thing.
Would not recommend.
Don’t shut yourself in with a less healthy body because you’re worried about one of the Internet’s meme topics. It would take less than an hour to google/call/visit a few local gyms to learn which have better customer service. I recommend the local YMCA if you’re in the US. Your membership is reciprocal nationwide now, too.
What’s with this rising trend of authoritative comments on HN thinking their individual rationale/experience generalizes. It wasn’t this bad just a few years ago, but now I’m seeing just outright absurd generalizations like this.
I picked my gym based on their cancellation procedure. 200 pounds is 200 pounds, customer service is pretty much where gyms differentiate themselves afaic
Most, if not all of these service are billed before you get access. Ergo, if they cannot bill you, they can immediately revoke access.
The system is built in such a way that they get a lot of information about you (e.g. SSN for internet access) subsequently used to ensure cancellation is extremely painful.
If they didn't have this information, failure to bill would be immediate service pausing/termination, so it's not even that non-payment results in money lost for the company.
For email accounts I create burners. I wish I could do the same in real life.
It seems like delaying enforcement of anti-scam(ish) behaviors like this increases the average profitability of scam(ish) behaviors, and therefore creates an incentive to engage in scam(ish) behaviors in the first place.
It seems (to me) as if such behaviors were stamped out more rapidly not only would fewer customers be affected, there would be less incentive to try the scam(ish) behaviors in the first place.
My perception is that consumer protections are much weaker in the U.S. than in the E.U. It would be interesting if anyone has made any attempt at quantifying this.
We all know that there are other countries where far, far worse abuses of power take place, but I've wondered if the U.S. might be at some really unfortunate nexus of strong contract law enforcement + particularly poor consumer protections that leads to these particularly madding subscription cancellation-type services discussed in this thread.
> Add in the random percentage increase in price when you try to buy something in a store from hidden taxes.
It's not random.
Those of us with a state tax are familiar with the rules and the rates. Those with a modicum of arithmetic ability have a pretty good idea what the total is coming to.
Not saying "this is better" just that it is not as bad as you apparently think.
I’ve only been to the US as a visitor, and found the percentages varied between shops and goods. I’m sure there is a pattern, but it really does seem crazy that it isn’t shown on the price tag.
Yeah, there's unprepared food vs prepared food (apparently this is why Subway makes a big deal about toasted vs untoasted sandwiches), also bottle CRV, also sales tax can differ between cities. I wouldn't want those taxes secretly baked into prices on receipts, but they should at least be in the advertised price.
Why do regular people like this? For real, is it all "Those People Have it Worse", or do they just like the government making things worse for it's own sake?
There's people who like this who will never benefit at all, does anyone know why?
I don't get it. Then again I don't get the appeal of tearing the wings off of flies either.
> Why do regular people like this? For real, is it all "Those People Have it Worse", or do they just like the government making things worse for its own sake?
Could you explain what you’re referring to? Isn’t the FTC trying to make it better (with key staff getting fired as they try)?
POTUS fired two Dem members of the FTC, and the remainder voted to delay enforcement.
Some people like this, where companies get to effectively scam people by deliberately not enforcing rules preventing it. I don't know why people like this. I speculated that it was due to some dumb new bigotry of some sort, as a wild guess as to why people like it when the gov't harms people for no reason.
Ugh, this is something the current admin's electorate could greatly benefit from. How significant of a revenue cut was this gonna cause businesses to justify immediately taking an anti-consumer stance?
Now every service will be spamming you notifications and emails even more desperately to bait you into "using" the service so they can bill you. More clickbait and scare tactics on news subscriptions. Also goodbye monthly subscriptions.
It only works for Kagi because they're pretty decent folk.
With all the dark patterns and bullshit in every service, it has become too difficult to pay for things. Even services I like, and I think are run by ethical people—you never know who’ll get bought.
Of course, like everybody else, I block ads. Although, when I didn’t I didn’t click on the things anyway.
I dunno. For a while I felt bad consuming stuff without paying. But in the end, the internet has become so hostile and manipulative, I guess… I’m just going to wait it out. Eventually hopefully it will all collapse and a viable business model will be discovered.
This just in: consumer protection is "woke" and "cultural marxism". Americans elected the most corrupt president ever, that just received the largest bribe in history [1], and then act surprised when this administration fucks over consumers.
This is something that should be governed by legislation (law) —passed by lawmakers, as we've seen in California - not by executive agencies. The FTC, as part of the executive branch (kinda independent but heavily influenced by the administration in power), shouldn't be in the business of creating new laws.
But I get it now: when Biden directs the FTC to act, it's considered legitimate use of executive power. When Trump directs an agency not to act, it's authoritarian overreach.
I'm listening to hold music right now, 30 minutes into my attempt at cancelling 3mbps home DSL service (not a typo), for which the price has crept up to $71 USD/mo.
I first spoke with a customer service agent whose accent I couldn't understand very well. I have him ALL my account information. He mumbled something about being unable to forward me to the actual customer service agent (then what is your role, dude?), then came back on and said he couldn't forward me and so I would have to call them myself.
He gave me the same number I had already called. I pointed this out to him and he gave me some other number, which is where I'm listening to on-hold music now.
Right now the on-hold music is interrupted to sell me shit.
Non US Call centers can't handle cancellations. If they can't convince you to postpone, they have to transfer you to some US Call center specifically for Retention or something like that.
The transfer process impacts the metrics of the agent. You know, like call length, customer survey, customer callbacks, etc
Well transfers are also a metric. That specific agent might prefer a "callback" over a "transfer" that month.
W/e Your best strategy is to open the call with: "hi, I want to cancel my service" And don't give details about any problem, you just want to cancel. Period.
If the agen't "can't transfer" ask for a supervisor. Could be 5 - 15 more minutes but at least you don't have to call again.
If you ask for "an American" or "someone who can speak english", depending on the call center company, you can get a call drop, a soft retention, a transfer to the agent beside, or a transfer to a call center in the US. YMMV
my two cents
Sorry, this sucks as someone who has experienced this themselves. As a former customer support person, ask for a supervisor. Also be firm and serious without being rude or berating. Lastly never buy the "our systems are having trouble". That is support speak for "I have no clue, call back and talk to someone else".
I feel your pain. This is extremely annoying. I wish you the best of luck!
Done, and done. 14 + 44 minute phone calls, gave all of my information to 3 redundant people, including explaining to confused agents that I don't recall the account pin, well you have to have the account pin, well actually the previous person accepted my answer to my personal security question and the person before that texted me a temporary pin but now for some reason those alternate methods don't work for you?
> Right now the on-hold music is interrupted to sell me shit.
Jesus Christ, this is like those gasoline pumps that blare ads at you while you pump. On that little screen right above the plaque that says "you better not go in your car or this whole place will fucking explode or something".
Since when is it chill to hold people hostage for ads, let alone LOUD ads? I don't want to hear this!
PS: little tip for gasoline pump ads: one button always mutes them. Think it's a compliance thing. Almost never labeled, so just try all the buttons.
> gasoline pump ads: one button always mutes them
I don't think this is true anymore. I've pushed all 8 buttons on a pump near me, and it didn't mute. Almost purchased a car wash though. Thankfully my primary car is electric.
I leave one star reviews for those places with the text "gas pump ads can't be muted." Hopefully others will too... one can dream anyway.
You know, I actually haven't encountered this at a gas station in a year or two. I hadn't realized until now that my local gas stations just don't have those little TV interludes anymore. I haven't heard the dulcet tones of Maria Menudo or Mario Lopez in so long.
Why not send a registered letter?
Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
The whole point of "click to cancel" was to deal with the fact that a business, by contract law, can make it almost entirely impossible to stop owing them money through entirely legal means. The courts do not consider being on hold for 18 hours onerous enough to void a contract, so it's perfectly legal to require you to follow the "cancellation process", whatever that is.
Welcome to a world without consumer protections beyond basic contract law! American courts have long held the position that, if you agree to a contract, it really doesn't matter how onerous it is. Fuck you, caveat emptor and all that.
If you want to improve the situation without new regulation, we should push for courts to take a more reasonable stance: That contract law does not protect absurd contracts. This is supposed to be the current situation, but what it takes to get your contract declared null because it's unfair or onerous is just insane right now, because our courts have spent at least 50 years praying at the alter of "let businesses do literally anything they want under contract law"
>Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
Is this your personal exerience, or are you making assumptions?
I would love to hear how this process possibly fails to unsubscribe anyone:
1. Go to your state's corporate website and get/buy the name and address of the corporate registered agent for your ISP or whatever. In Texas that costs $1.
2. Write or ask ChatGPT to write a demand letter that they cancel your service as of the date of your letter. If they don't, threaten to sue them in small claims court. In Texas, threaten triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (ChatGPT will help you write demands using the "laundry list" of deceptive acts.)
3. Send letter return receipt requested.
4. A lawyer on their side is now involved. They will never ever show up in any small claims court for this. And if they do, the judge is so on your side for this!
Heck, this works for a bunch of things, once you assert your rights. For example, I made a Coinbase account when they first existed and played with $10 of bitcoin. There it sat for six years or so, and then I tried to log in again. Their identity bullshit was demanding to use a phone number from an older phone and they stonewalled. So I sent a demand letter as above and, surprise!, my account was magically re-enabled for my $3 of bitcoin.
You'd spend far longer in the post office and the courts than you would on the phone.
All the company has to do in that court room is show that you mailed the form to someone whose job has nothing to do with account services, or who doesn't even have access or authorization to access people's private account information, or that they tried and failed to reach you in order to verify your identify since they sure as hell won't cancel the account of someone and shut off their service all because an anonymous letter showed up somewhere nobody was expecting to get it. What a great way to DoS an enemy or competitor if that worked. Just mail off some letters to a few store's webhosts right before Christmas or black friday.
Why should it be so difficult to cancel a service?
It shouldn't be, but it is, and until someone else heads the FTC, so it shall remain.
That will work. Because it's registered.
I wonder what would happen if one sent a cancellation letter via certified mail, then just stopped paying. If they come after you, well - you canceled.
Perhaps the letter alone would be adequate.
But frustratingly, the AT&T website appeared to allow you to replace your current (auto-pay) billing method with some other billing method, but I didn't see any way to remove all current billing methods, which makes just stopping paying nigh impossible. :-(
Genuine question. Why country with so much freedoms tolerates this particular injustice so much.
Freedom to pay is very fundamental for free speech, I think courts and legislatures made this very very clear multiple times.
There are whole countries where you don't need Apple as intermediary to cancel any subscription without notice. In these countries it is up to companies to sue you if they think you are in wrong, and "they made it hard to cancel subscription" is basically all defence consumer ever needs.
So they never win.
So they never sue.
> Why country with so much freedoms tolerates this particular injustice so much.
My naive take - it's because we give corporations just as much freedom if not more than the average person.
most credit cards allow you to create a temporary card number. Create one, set it to be the billing method, and then revoke it. crazy that we need to resort to that sort of thing, but it does work!
Canceling your credit card doesn't magically get you out of owing money that you're contractually obligated to pay. It might get them to eventually cancel your service for non-payment, but it's not a guarantee. They might just keep billing you until it's worth thousands and then mess up your credit or pursue you in court for payment.
I've talked to my rep about the idea of "credit card cancellation": the idea that you should be able to go through your bank (or you credit card provider's web app) go to a recurring charge and click "cancel" from there. I'm pretty sure most major credit card companies would be on board; what's stopping them is the legal thicket of contracts that are in the way. What the CC providers need is a clear framework from the legislature to support them. The FTC ain't enough.
Actually that is probably one thing that credit cards could do without legislational changes, by modifying their merchant agreements. Businesses would be salty about it, but the value of being able to accept credit cards would mean they'd have to suck it up and accept it. They'd have to put something about how by accepting cards, they agree that that agreement supersedes any other and that a payment cancelation or chargeback constitutes acceptance of cancelation for whatever service was being paid for by that card or something along those lines.
It might be worth trying if you keep a close eye on it, because there's a chance they cancel you after a couple of non-payments.
Does this fix whatever method companies use to continue billing you monthly when you are issued a new card because the old one was lost/expired/etc?
I have several credit cards, none of the providers allow me to create a temporary number. Plus, one wouldn’t be enough because you’d need one for every vendor you might want o cancel in the future.
>If they come after you, well - you canceled.
Then you have to go court to decide which of you is right, much easier to sit on the phone for a couple hours.
Can you do a fraude dispute on your CC?
That symmetrical registration/cancellation is being slow-walked like this is absurd (but under this admin, certainly not surprising).
It's absurd if you believe the point of government is to be by, for, and of the people.
If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.
It’s almost as if the previous administration was focussed more on the former, and the current administration more on the latter.
I guess you get the government you vote for.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch.
It's more like a 9 sheep and a wolf with a great PR firm who convinced 5 sheep to vote against the other 4 for lunch plans. Those 5 sheep aren't going to come out of this any better than the 4 of us.
This is a lazy argument. It only serves to dissuade the masses from doing critical thinking and analyzing party platforms.
It also explains why blue collar Americans vote for tax breaks for billionaires and union busting legislation.
One party doesn't actually have a platform and they've abandoned all the principles in their past platforms. Now it's just agree to whatever one deranged person cooks up in his head after watching TV.
I'm getting tired of this whataboutism.
We did not have an almost daily turmoil of shit happening in 2021-2024.
One of the biggest accolades Biden got for a lot of people was they got 4 years of being able to turn off the news and nothing was on fire. His critics might have called him sleepy Joe (despite his administration being quite prolific) but it terms of normalcy and the government not constantly meddling in your life and business he did a bang up job.
No, just genocide as usual, a few proxy wars, typical neoliberal US foreign politics, and then a threat to the American public that if we didn't allow business as usual to continue unabated, we would experience domestic hardship through Trump.
> just genocide as usual, a few proxy wars, typical neoliberal US foreign politics
that's all terrible stuff but the reality is all that has been happening almost non-stop since the 50s. US foreign policy has always been a shit-show.
what we're seeing today is an extra thick layer of daily bshit on top of the usual layer
> a threat to the American public that if we didn't allow business as usual to continue unabated, we would experience domestic hardship through Trump
which turned out to be even more true than anyone thought was possible
> US foreign policy has always been a shit-show
Yes, that's why I said as usual and typical.
> what we're seeing today is an extra thick layer of daily bshit on top of the usual layer
No, as far as foreign politics it's really same shit different day, we're siding with dictators and meddling with other countries' affairs, economically bullying other countries... Just more out in the open now, and with a somewhat different set of dictators. The only material difference is that Trump's mission is to weaken our global supremacy, which is a mixed bag, as some of that supremacy should indeed go away, but tariffs etc are not the fucking answer.
> which turned out to be even more true than anyone thought was possible
I thought it was going to be even worse. We still have 4 years to find out how bad it gets.
Are king wolves any better?
Well, you being collective.
I'm happy to see the waste reigned in and corruption exposed.
On this issue there is no difference between the previous admin and the current one. The FTC voted 3-0 to postpone. Even though Trump fired two of the original five, if those two had both voted against postponing they would have still lost 3-2 and the same decision would be reached — and I don't think there's much evidence that the two he fired would've voted against postponing, anyway.
This is incorrect. The party makeup of the 5 people changed with the new administration. Lina Khan (D) left and Mark Meador (R) was appointed, changing the balance from 3(D)-2(R) to 2(D)-3(R).
Ah, I hadn't realized that. Still, given that it was 3-0, all three of the former FTC commissioners would have had to be unanimous against deferral — and given that all of them voted for deferral on Jan 19th [1] (the original deadline, when none had been fired and Lina Khan was still onboard) — I don't think there's much change here.
1: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/10/ftc-delays-enforcement-of-...
Then explain why the rule was created in the first place?
This administration is making a pattern out of 1. Creating a rule or executive order to score easy political points with their base, and then 2. Immediately walking it back or “postponing” it once those points were scored and their base are not paying attention. Trolling-As-Governance.
Democrats see government differently than Republicans.
I would be even more specific and say that Lina Khan sees government differently than most Republicans and Democrats.
I agree, though I think it is worth giving some credit to the people who chose her & appointed her. They didn't have to do that. It was one of the more impressive moves by the previous admin, and won them a lot of points from me.
Well yes, I agree. But GP was saying "government" writ large behaves XYZ.
Which absolutely does not imply a monolith of people all working in perfect lock step.
It seems like you're looking to fight on the internet - would you consider a different activity instead?
> It's absurd if you believe the point of government is to be by, for, and of the people. > If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.
No I actually think it's important for people to square views like "government is a way to enrich the owner class" with actual reality, such as the fact that the government when administered by a different party did the exact opposite.
Nihilism is useless. We've made enormous progress since the first human stepped on this planet so I would say we've disproven nihilism for good. Modern governments are definitely not purely tools for the owner class to enrich themselves.
I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress". There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").
> There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").
Those economic theories are not proper economic theories. As in, mainstream economists don't support them. That theory is propaganda in service of some specific political parties.
> I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress".
"There has been some progress" is a gross understatement considering the age we're living in. There has been tremendous progress and the lifestyle difference between the poorest members of a developed country and the richest ones is much, much smaller than that between the poorest and richest members of a country 200+ years ago.
He's talking about the trump administration, not making a general point about all governments.
GP made no indication it was about this specific administration and not about government in principle.
It’s abundantly clear from context.
I don't think it was. Certainly that's a position that people have held since long before Trump.
It was very clear. You're just arguing to argue, and in bad faith.
I might just be arguing to argue, but it did read to me like "nothing has really changed"-style cynicism. (I don't personally agree, but that's a different question.)
"owner class" is too outdated and myopic. It's also incorrect, as plenty of people born into low income households go on to become elected representatives.
It's better to think about it in terms of "people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person".
With any other disadvantaged/discriminated class (skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc.), getting elected in power doesn't change the disadvantage. So the incentive is still there to fight for that equality.
This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.
Elected officials should make the average salary from the year prior. If it's not enough to survive then they'll need to do something about it!
Let's follow the money. A policy that pumps stocks by dumping labor + consumer rights delivers a roughly equal cost to everyone but delivers benefits in proportion to net worth. Suppose it pumps assets by 1%.
A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.
A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.
A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.
A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.
If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.
In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.
owner class: people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person
There now it’s both. They want to own agency if the idea of owning stuff is too gauche for modern audiences.
Just because they weren’t born into the owner class (or “capital class”) doesn’t mean they didn’t work their way into it. That’s kind of the American dream.
You can only become wealthy later in life at which point you can’t advantage your past self. Thus new money receives fewer benefits than old money from the exact same policies.
Further having 100m at 40 doesn’t suddenly bring the kind of social connections that going to the right schools and the right parties would. At the extremes, the average lottery winner is surrounded by people asking for help, the average Fortune 500 CEO’s social circle aren’t. So if they suddenly fall on hard times the lottery winner is stuck but that CEO may very well claw their way back.
It’s still possible for poor people to succeed and 3rd+ generation wealth to fail, but the odds are wildly different.
> but under this admin, certainly not surprising
Services have been making it hard to cancel subscriptions for many years, under many parties and administrations. Many things are Trump's fault, this is not one of them.
Choosing not to enforce the click to cancel rule is not Trump's fault? How so?
Laws get pushed off for all kinds of reasons.
It seems like this was pushed off to give businesses more time to comply.
Many kinds of businesses have subscriptions, each with a different situation. Some small businesses don't even have a programmer.
Requiring a phone call is not always (although often is) to make it difficult to cancel. Often it's because a company doesn't have the proper infrastructure for the frontend.
So I think it's reasonable that they are giving companies some time.
In the end, I hope that on July 14th this goes through, it will be a big win for consumers.
EDIT: My answer didn't fully address the question, so let me add: I don't think is the result of Trump trying to be friends with billionaires for their money. I understand why it seems that way - because he literally does that. But this doesn't seem special or extraordinary. Enforcement of laws gets pushed off all the time.
Everything you're saying makes sense if you assume you're dealing with good faith governance.
But we're not.
So maybe you're right. I don't know. But I sure as hell wouldn't assume as much based on the words of these people. We'll see in July I guess.
It would be good if folks actually read the FTC letter rather than having a visceral negative reaction.
The Biden admin had put the May 14 deadline for certain things even though the rule as a whole went into effect in Jan 2025. Trump's commish is defending that by another 60 days.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/negative-option...
> the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose
With no consideration given to how consumers may be harmed by non-enforcement meanwhile.
In any case, service providers are handling the burden of easy signup just fine...
Yeah, they can always make signing up impossible just like cancelling is impossible.
Disable the easy sign-up button and force customers to call to sign up.
Seems like no burden at all to implement.
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And increasing amt banks are allowed to charge for bounced checks... :/
And there's no longer a CFPB to help you when it happens...
Visa/Mastercard have enough power to enforce this on their own. Although obviously regulation would've been better.
If a bunch of elected officials wrote letters to execs and a couple of NYT articles were written about the issue, Visa/Mastercard might be motivated to help.
The NYT itself uses the dark patterns for cancellation that would be forbidden by this rule.
They should be punished, the same as every other company that does this.
Why? They get revenue from unwanted transactions too.
Chargebacks might upset that being a big benefit, and being the firm that takes a stance for customer care could be good advertising fodder. Though I don't see it working unless they both do it in step which minimises the useful effect of that against each other. It could still be a benefit vs other payment methods, what is PayPal's policy on such things?
Visa and MasterCard suffer from charge backs already, and don't seem to mind. They try to avoid it with AI in the fraud department, and they push some of the cost onto the merchants.
They could do so much more. We still don't even have chip and pin in the US. They seem to think that the current levels of fraud loss are cheaper than the business lost from stopping it.
How are they suffering when they recover funds, charge merchants per chargeback and charge higher rates for merchants with higher than avg chargebacks? Seems like something they benefit from.
Fees are not refunded and additional chargeback fees are levied regardless of the outcome of the dispute.
How exactly are they suffering?
Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being instead of letting few hundred in forgotten subscription is larger than I previously thought. By that sense, without any data, I suspect that chargeback amount is wayyyy smaller headache compared to txn fees from forgotten uncancelled subscriptions.
It has nothing to do with fear. Have you ever tried to call in and cancel one of these services? If you're even able to find the right number to reach anyone, or after you've already waited an absurdly long time to do so, you'll be transferred around until you get frustrated and give up, or be subjected to extremely aggressive sales tactics trying to pressure you to stay on. I got to the point with one of those DNA sites where I had to ask about next steps for legal action to the representative before they'd even consider getting to the step where I could cancel my subscription - and even after that, still got charged and had to call again.
It's maybe comforting to think "oh, people just don't want to call, they'd rather eat the fees" when this is way over simplifying the problem and giving way too much credit to sites that operate this way.
(in the UK) it really depends on your bank and even the type of card you use. the debit card chargebacks I did when I was with Natwest were always very simple. fill out a form, send it off, get a response by email. for the one CC chargeback I did I think it required a call and a lot more trouble. when I tried a (debit card) chargeback with a different bank, it was an incredible amount of trouble and then I think they rejected it anyway
>Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being
Try to call comcast and actually speak to a customer service representative. Try it. I dare you. I bought a new modem last year and simply needed to provision it on the service. I got caught in bot limbo so long my only recourse was to scream 'cancel my account!' over and over until I actually got a human on the line. I'm sure that will be automated away at some point too.
> Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being
It isn't fear of the call or the human being (though for some that can be part of the problem.
It is that some or all of these, and other irritations, will be true:
* The call has to be in their working hours, which is possibly your working hours too. I can get away with sitting on hold for a personal matter in work time, but many can't.
* The call will not be short…
* You will need to interact with irritating menu systems to get onto the relevant queues, and if you hit the wrong thing or an issue causes a disconnect, you will be right back where you started.
* The interminable hold muzak and/or staticy silence…
* When you finally get to that human they will have a long script, and it can be hard to divert them from it to just let you cancel. They will try to dissuade you from cancelling with various offers, and occasionally lies, no matter how much you insist that you just want to cancel.
* If you call at the start of a period they'll tell you that if you cancel now, you'll lose the remaining X weeks and try get you to call back later to not lose that “investment”. If you do call back a couple of weeks later you'll be told there is a notice period and you'll be billed for another period. There are other underhand tricks similar to this.
* After all the upsell/resell the first person you get won't be able to process the cancellation. You'll be put back into the queuing system for some more lovely muzak/static.
* The second person might not be able to either. Lather, rinse, repeat.
* All this time, any technical issue that causes a disconnect puts you right back at the start.
* If you get exasperated by all of this and start sounding to aggressive in your irritation, they will sometimes state that you are being rude (maybe I am, but not as rude as them wasting my time and trying to con me…) and hang up, meaning you have to call back and restart at a later time.
Some years ago I cancelled a magazine subscription, that I signed up for in seconds online, in a call that lasted nearly an hour. I've been very wary of subscribing to anything that needs payment details ever since, a stance that has done me well. The only way they will stop doing this sort of crap is if enough people simply stop subscribing to things because of it, or if relevant legislation without easy loopholes is passed.
The rule should be simple. Canceling a service should not be more difficult than starting it. It should be possible to do it in the same channel you started it. No "we only do cancellations over the phone, during business hours on tuesdays, with an hour long waiting time"
with chargebacks there's also the concern that doing a chargeback for a few small things now makes you more likely to be rejected for something more important down the line
How does that work when you’re deaf?
Those transactions might have a higher than normal chargeback rate which could motivate them to get rid of them. It could also be a perk of the card, they could provide a subscription cancellation portal on their website.
That would definitely be a huge perk to me!
I honestly would use a card that promises me easier subscription cancellation. In fact, I sort of do already: I use Apple's in app payment system to handle as many subscriptions as possible because of how easy they make it to cancel. I know Apple increases the cost to the service provider and they in turn charge me more but the ease of cancellation is worth it to me.
Now if a bank or card came along and provided the same (and maybe easy subscription management in general) they can have all my subscription revenue.
They do have that power, and have abused it in the past. For example, refusing to do business with cannabis distributors or porn creators.
If you take that past into account, and consider the fact that they aren't using that power the way you want, it becomes immediately clear that they never will.
Regulation? Unfortunately this administration is going in the opposite direction.
They absolutely don't have the power to excuse debt. Just because a company can't charge your credit card, doesn't mean you don't still owe them money on paper.
Visa/Mastercard can demand merchants meet certain standards of consumer care in order to participate in their networks.
No consumer business can operate without access to those card networks.
I really don't want unelected corporations with no accountability to anything other than profit margins to be policing payments, subscriptions, business behaviour, or anything else.
These companies provide an utility that is essential for participation in the economy. There needs to be some due process if you want to exclude people or corporations from that.
I, for one, do not want to encourage Visa/Mastercard to use their market position to enforce policies. What they have already done is damage enough.
"If you can sign up online, you must be able to cancel online, too."
That leaves a lot of room for the "Cancel" option to be buried in an obscure hard to find part of the website. I'd have hoped there was a requirement for it to be as prominent and as easy to find as the "Subscribe" option (and maybe there is, just not mentioned in this piece?)
The one line description, of course, leaves tons of holes the actual rule does patch. The impulse to believe a rule or law has been implemented in the most smooth brained way possible is rarely correct. The actual rule includes language that say it should be as easy as the original sign up.
https://www.swlaw.com/publication/ftc-click-to-cancel-rule/#...
I understand the sentiment, but this kind of thinking is why you have to click away a cookie dialog 50 times a day in Europe.
Note that you do not on websites that are not trying to use your data without your consent. Rephrased: the issue might not be the law.
The quest for perfection stalls progress.
The solution my country had to this is to simply have a unified government website for contract cancellations, where you provide your contract details and they're forwarded to the provider.
Do you actually want there to be a big "Cancel" button in the top right corner of every subscribed service?
I personally don't want that. Click to cancel? Sure. But perfectly symmetrical is not something I need and in many cases not something I want.
Would you want a "click to subscribe" function that works like that?
I wouldn't, I would like some form of confirmation before buying a subscription. I don't see the problem in a unsubscribe function having a symmetrical confirmation in any service that doesn't try to trick me into a subscription. And actually, even more so for services that try to trick me...
>Do you actually want there to be a big "Cancel" button in the top right corner of every subscribed service?
ABSOLUTELY YES
Even better would be a little field showing the rate and due date:
Fair enough.
I'm going off my experience with cookie banners, and how that whole thing seemed like a great idea at the time but turned out to mostly be an incredible annoyance.
In the same way, I don't think I'd enjoy a cancel button being front-and-center and cluttering up an interface at all times, given that I don't want to perform a cancellation action the vast, vast majority of the time when I am using a subscription service.
95% of the services I use already stick a cancellation button in either a "billing" section or a "user" section, which is generally quite easy to find and use in the rare instances I need it.
It's ok that you don't need something. That's fine. That said, we don't define policies based on your need. So, I won't disqualify your need. I would ask you to think more than you.
If this suggested policy isn't based on consumer need, what is it based on?
> Do you actually want there to be a big "Cancel" button in the top right corner of every subscribed service?
Yes, since the alternative is what you have now: impossible to find and if you find it highly annoying. Even if you have the law which says "canceling must be as easy as subscribing" like where I live it still isn't even close due to efforts of government creating a law but failing (by design) to fund the agency tasked with keeping the companies in check.
>Do you actually want there to be a big "Cancel" button in the top right corner of every subscribed service?
Yes.
I would like that, as would many here, but let's consider an alternative:
What if the subscription was just as difficult as your ideal cancellation UX flow? I would like that, too. Let the homepage just describe your product, and maybe some pricing.
I want the big cancel button
I think realistically three clicks would be fine.
Click to settings Click to cancel Click to confirm cancel
Usually signing up takes more effort than that! I didn't even have to type anything.
If it's directly on the account profile page that's probably a reasonable compromise.
Could you describe your ideal cancellation workflow?
I'd be happy with this.
1. Login
2. Go to your account page.
3. That should have a link to billing management.
4. Somewhere on the billing management screen there should be some easy to figure out way to cancel.
Details will vary but in general cancelling logically makes the most sense as part of payment management, so it belongs where other payment management goes such as adding or updating a credit card.
If the site wants to it would be fine to have a separate subscription management section that is linked to on the account page parallel to billing management. That might make sense if it is a service where there are options users can add to or remove from subscriptions.
For example a streaming service might have separate paid options such as higher video resolution, more simultaneous streams allowed, removing ads, and adding specialized content (e.g., porn, foreign language videos).
That wouldn't really belong under billing so putting it in a separate subscription management section would be better, and then cancelling would best fit there too. Billing management would then just be managing your payment methods.
Wherever the site has a link to "Subscribe" or "Upgrade" there should be a link to "Manage My Subscription" and that should take you to someplace where "Cancel" is easy to find.
Yes, I am happy with this flow and this is the flow on 90% of subscribed services I use.
Yup
I want to see a candidate run largely on a consumer protection platform. We've been letting companies get away with more and more bullshit and it needs to stop.
Do you mean Bernie Sanders or AOC?
I wish businesses would realize this actually hurts their sales.
I’ve put off joining a gym for years because I don’t want the hassle of I want to cancel.
Also I never do free trials assuming they’ll be hard to cancel.
I have seen the results of these A/B tests closely on a major consumer site and I can tell you it definitely hurts the business to make cancelation really easy.
How do you A/B test your company's reputation as being difficult to cancel? You can't exactly serve up different word-of-mouth to different users.
This is the danger of data-driven decision making.
You can only gather a very, very small subset of all data. So now you're basing your decisions off of a tiny picture, so you end up with sometimes strange conclusions. Conclusions that, intuitively, make no sense. But the data says so, so I guess that's what we do.
I mean, doing it wrong is a danger in any process. Data driven decision making should do every meaningful thing it can to ensure that its small subset of data is representative of the whole picture. If you're careful about being random you can do that pretty accurately with a shockingly small subset of data.
In my experience, data-driven decision making is typically a reverse engineered process.
Typically the decision is already made, usually based on a combination of experience, ego, and emotions. Then you have to find and structure data to justify it to other people. You can find data to justify almost any decision.
How are you sure this isn't a data-driven opinion?
Believing that "reputation" actually matters for American businesses is laughable.
Craftsman tools are STILL riding the reputation they had half a century ago, despite being made out of the cheapest chinesium and losing their impressive warranty stance.
The American consumer has demonstrated an absurd inability to consider past events as useful information to predict future results.
Things continue to enshittify because the 3 consumers who recognize that quality is going down are vastly outweighed by the increase in consumption by the rest of your market.
Kitchenaid still sells plenty of mixers that die after a year. Hell, American car brands are still successful businesses even though they have made only a few reasonably competitive vehicles since the 50s.
Disney and Netflix are still making plenty of money despite making it difficult to share accounts.
The "Toyota tax" is entirely based on reputation, and Amazon and Costco both benefit a lot from customer trust.
Comcast
Yep... I've been in a meeting where we were shown the result of moving a cancel button's position on the page to a more crowded place so it would be noticed less. It actually works people click on it less. I couldn't believe it. Thankfully, the feature got vetoed and cancelled (the end result was really visually horrendous).
How do you A/B test the OP when they won’t sign up due to a perception that they can’t cancel?
Reminds me of that one time I ordered a super shuttle to the airport, and the website had an offer to get 15% off if I subscribed to that random thing (first month free, cancel anytime). I’m good at immediately marking my calendar to cancel as soon as I got what I want, so I thought this would be a walk in the park. And surely enough, as soon as I was out of the shuttle and got my discount, I immediately cancelled that subscription. Fast forward to 18 months later when I notice a $16.99 charge I do not recognize. I look at my previous statement, it’s there too, the one before, it’s there. I go back 18 months and I see I have been charged $16.99 per month ever since. Bonkers. I try to look up the merchant but I don’t find anything in my emails that match. I forgot how I made the connection but at some point I find that subscription. I call the guys and I ask what’s going on since I cancelled 18 months ago. They say “oh, but actually when you accepted the terms, you also agreed to sign up to that completely unrelated subscription, so yes, you cancelled with us, but you did not cancel that other business”. I call that second business and tell them I’ve never used whatever service they offer, and that sneaky scheme is unacceptable. They say “ok, we can refund the last 3 months”, I say “no, you refund me the entire 18 months”, they say “no”, I say “let me talk to a manager”. Manager picks up, I say “refund the entire 18 months or I report you to the FTC”. And finally they refunded the whole thing. Would not recommend.
You should have reported them to the FTC anyway, if you didn't. I don't think this is even legal.
Don’t shut yourself in with a less healthy body because you’re worried about one of the Internet’s meme topics. It would take less than an hour to google/call/visit a few local gyms to learn which have better customer service. I recommend the local YMCA if you’re in the US. Your membership is reciprocal nationwide now, too.
What’s with this rising trend of authoritative comments on HN thinking their individual rationale/experience generalizes. It wasn’t this bad just a few years ago, but now I’m seeing just outright absurd generalizations like this.
Ironically, this is quite the generalisation of HN users.
I’m my own villain
It doesn’t though. They’ve done the math and the profit gained by adding friction to cancel outweighs the loss of business
How do you measure those you never see? Qualitative?
I'm definitely in the newer-touch-something-if-it-seems-hard-to-cancel camp. How do you measure that I didn't sign up?
I picked my gym based on their cancellation procedure. 200 pounds is 200 pounds, customer service is pretty much where gyms differentiate themselves afaic
Most, if not all of these service are billed before you get access. Ergo, if they cannot bill you, they can immediately revoke access.
The system is built in such a way that they get a lot of information about you (e.g. SSN for internet access) subsequently used to ensure cancellation is extremely painful.
If they didn't have this information, failure to bill would be immediate service pausing/termination, so it's not even that non-payment results in money lost for the company.
For email accounts I create burners. I wish I could do the same in real life.
It seems like delaying enforcement of anti-scam(ish) behaviors like this increases the average profitability of scam(ish) behaviors, and therefore creates an incentive to engage in scam(ish) behaviors in the first place.
It seems (to me) as if such behaviors were stamped out more rapidly not only would fewer customers be affected, there would be less incentive to try the scam(ish) behaviors in the first place.
Hi, European here.
To hear these horror stories how hard it is to cancel a service in the US makes me wonder how the Americans put up with this.
My perception is that consumer protections are much weaker in the U.S. than in the E.U. It would be interesting if anyone has made any attempt at quantifying this.
We all know that there are other countries where far, far worse abuses of power take place, but I've wondered if the U.S. might be at some really unfortunate nexus of strong contract law enforcement + particularly poor consumer protections that leads to these particularly madding subscription cancellation-type services discussed in this thread.
One of our defining American neuroses is an extreme aversion to anything remotely paternalistic.
Fellow non-American:
Add in the random percentage increase in price when you try to buy something in a store from hidden taxes.
Also add the culture of tipping, rather than paying staff.
> Add in the random percentage increase in price when you try to buy something in a store from hidden taxes.
It's not random.
Those of us with a state tax are familiar with the rules and the rates. Those with a modicum of arithmetic ability have a pretty good idea what the total is coming to.
Not saying "this is better" just that it is not as bad as you apparently think.
I’ve only been to the US as a visitor, and found the percentages varied between shops and goods. I’m sure there is a pattern, but it really does seem crazy that it isn’t shown on the price tag.
Yeah, there's unprepared food vs prepared food (apparently this is why Subway makes a big deal about toasted vs untoasted sandwiches), also bottle CRV, also sales tax can differ between cities. I wouldn't want those taxes secretly baked into prices on receipts, but they should at least be in the advertised price.
Why do regular people like this? For real, is it all "Those People Have it Worse", or do they just like the government making things worse for it's own sake?
There's people who like this who will never benefit at all, does anyone know why?
I don't get it. Then again I don't get the appeal of tearing the wings off of flies either.
> Why do regular people like this? For real, is it all "Those People Have it Worse", or do they just like the government making things worse for its own sake?
Could you explain what you’re referring to? Isn’t the FTC trying to make it better (with key staff getting fired as they try)?
POTUS fired two Dem members of the FTC, and the remainder voted to delay enforcement.
Some people like this, where companies get to effectively scam people by deliberately not enforcing rules preventing it. I don't know why people like this. I speculated that it was due to some dumb new bigotry of some sort, as a wild guess as to why people like it when the gov't harms people for no reason.
A better system idea - every data point of user data needs a datetime stamp and source.
Any request for your own private data will then come with datetime stamps and source origins for every piece of data they have of you.
Thereby allowing you to cut off at the source and request deletion, which they must then propagate upstream or risk a fine per data point.
I suspect they have that already. They're not the types to let any potentially useful bit of data just vanish.
But they're not required to give it to you, and they won't.
Sounds like an incredible vector of regulatory capture for Big Tech.
Official release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/05/...
Ugh, this is something the current admin's electorate could greatly benefit from. How significant of a revenue cut was this gonna cause businesses to justify immediately taking an anti-consumer stance?
Call me crazy, but it’s almost as if the administration is not acting in the interests of its electorate.
Of course they did, everything pro-consumer gets canceled or put off during republican administrations.
How about 'click-to-bill'. If I don't touch your service you can't charge me.
Kagi's policy is in the direction of that:
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/plan-types.html#fair-pricin...
Kagi is doing it the right way...
The finger on the monkey's paw curls.
Now every service will be spamming you notifications and emails even more desperately to bait you into "using" the service so they can bill you. More clickbait and scare tactics on news subscriptions. Also goodbye monthly subscriptions.
It only works for Kagi because they're pretty decent folk.
With all the dark patterns and bullshit in every service, it has become too difficult to pay for things. Even services I like, and I think are run by ethical people—you never know who’ll get bought.
Of course, like everybody else, I block ads. Although, when I didn’t I didn’t click on the things anyway.
I dunno. For a while I felt bad consuming stuff without paying. But in the end, the internet has become so hostile and manipulative, I guess… I’m just going to wait it out. Eventually hopefully it will all collapse and a viable business model will be discovered.
This just in: consumer protection is "woke" and "cultural marxism". Americans elected the most corrupt president ever, that just received the largest bribe in history [1], and then act surprised when this administration fucks over consumers.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/11/trump-accept...
This is something that should be governed by legislation (law) —passed by lawmakers, as we've seen in California - not by executive agencies. The FTC, as part of the executive branch (kinda independent but heavily influenced by the administration in power), shouldn't be in the business of creating new laws.
But I get it now: when Biden directs the FTC to act, it's considered legitimate use of executive power. When Trump directs an agency not to act, it's authoritarian overreach.
Do you not think the Trump administration is more authoritarian?
The Trump administration can arguably be seen as less authoritarian, given its efforts to reduce the size of the federal government and its agencies.
His style is certainly authoritarian, but that’s not the same as the actual impact on me, my family, and my community.