New York Times. Last year I wanted to cancel my Athletic subscription and not only do they use the positively colored buttons to cancel the cancellation flow rather than continue with cancelling, once you get to what seems like a final confirmation, it doesn't show anything to confirm it actually was cancelled. I ended up needing to wait until the next bill date to make sure I wasn't charged again. Their support was useless too.
Several years ago, the only way to cancel was over the phone. Hallmark of scumbag business.
Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for cancellation (unless you “move” to California which legally requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can sign up online)
My local gym ducked my calls, ignored my emails, and then after finally canceling, actually restarted my membership two months later. Gyms thrive on those bad with finances, people who don’t know what services they subscribe to.
Ugh that pissed me off so much! Thankfully I used paypal to subscribe, and Paypal allows me to just not pay anymore for a subscription, so I just did that.
Good to know that's not a thing anymore, i don't know how that was ever legal to allow someone to subscribe through one medium, and not allow them to unsubscribe through the same medium.
Stories like this make me thankful for my locally-owned gym, which won't even renew your membership without explicit verbal permission over the phone or in person.
It was a standard subscription from their website -- I had been a subscriber there since The Athletic first started (before NYT bought them and long before they had an iOS app).
I was just having a terrible experience trying to uninstall the "Adobe Creative Cloud". I have used it and paid for it. It's full of anti-patterns to make it difficult to uninstall, and now that I don't pay for it any more it just exists on my computer to nag me to renew my subscriptions.
They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use. But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite to use.
Audible is similarly bad. The only notification of my 12mth subscription renewal was after it had occurred. If I cancel, I lose any unused credits plus access the the included-in-subscription content immediately. There's no way to cancel auto-renewal - you're either subscribed or you're not. I have a reminder set to cancel close to the renewal date.
I find it strange because the rest of Amazon seems pretty good in this regard.
I never paid them, but used to receive their mailers.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I called them at.)
One time I was at a mall with my dad. There was a nice new car on display and he wanted to go look at it. The salesman said if Dad filled out a postcard to register to win, we could sit in the car and check it out. Dad took the card and filled it out as “Tom” something-or-another. I watched this and kept my mouth shut.
Afterward I asked him about it. He laughed. Tom was Dad’s favorite cousin’s ex-husband. Whenever something like this came up, Dad would give them Tom’s info. He’d been doing this for years, and occasionally updated the address as needed.
Dad’s no longer with us but I still Tom up for things to this day. Should I ever start getting SiriusXM spam, so will Tom.
Sirius is easy these days, it’s a 2 minute phone call. They’ll offer a discount rate, decline it, canceled and refunded.
Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will only cancel in-person, even if you move away.
A lot of people, including myself, consider a phone call an extremely unwanted barrier. If you can sign up without speaking to a person then you should be able to cancel without speaking to a person, no matter what.
Phone call anxiety is a real thing. No idea why I have it, but I do
Not at all. You can go to a website and click a button in less than a minute, and you don't have to do it during business hours, sit on hold, or deal with a pushy sales rep trying to convince you not to cancel (well, unless they do what Adobe is getting sued for).
There is no legitimate reason to limit the options for canceling a subscription or adding barriers to the process. It's always an anti-consumer move. If you don't want your customers to cancel, then don't give them a reason to.
I successfully canceled a newspaper subscription in like 2005, but for a few months, they'd call. The first couple times, I said I wasn't interested and hung up. Then I just stopped answering, but they still called. Then I finally answered once and said "Stop calling me" and they tried to say "If you want to be removed from our call list, you'll need to call our customer service line" and I said "No, that's not how this works. I asked you to stop calling me, so stop calling me." and hung up.
Surprisingly, they actually did stop calling.
SiriusXM never called me, but I got mail from them every damn week. I had even tried telling them to stop sending me mail, but still got it until I just changed my address to some bullshit fake address that didn't exist.
Canceling SiriusXM is pretty easy via phone. Adobe makes the process confusing to make you believe you canceled even you haven't yet. It also charges high cancellation fees and has threatening wording.
I did so at the beginning of last year. I was on and off the phone within 5 minutes and they refunded the last month.
I was canceling a several years old standalone radio subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference experience.
I feel like something must have changed, because when we went to cancel ours on a previous car ~3 years ago it was a long-ish process, but only because they kept offering more and more discounts until it was essentially free.
A couple months ago when the trial ran out on a different car it was like you said, over and done with in 5 minutes.
It’s not hard at all. In fact, I use an iPhone, and they have an iMessage “service” or whatever it is called where I just text them for account related things. Every year I text them for a discounted renewal on my wife’s car. Last year I cancelled service on my car because I just wasn’t using it often enough. Of course they started offering a discounted price, but when I countered that I’m just not using it, they completed the cancellation without issue. Guess I’ve been lucky.
