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‘Click to Cancel’ legislation introduced in Pennsylvania
- conroy 4y agoFull text of the proposed bill: https://legiscan.com/PA/text/HB2511/id/2569740/Pennsylvania-2021-HB2511-Introduced.pdf https://legiscan.com/PA/text/HB2511/id/2569740/Pennsylvania-...
- vba616 4y ago"This section shall not apply to a business entity that is subject to the act of December 21, 1989 (P.L.672, No.87), known as the Health Club Act" (in reference to disclosure of material changes to a service) What is it with health clubs?!
- smt88 4y agoIt appears that health clubs are already highly regulated when it comes to memberships, so perhaps it seems like this law would be confusing to overlay on top of those regulations: https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/protect-yourself/consumer-advisories/what-are-my-rights-as-a-consumer-when-i-join-a-health-club/ https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/protect-yourself/consumer-ad...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> health clubs are already highly regulated when it comes to memberships I had thousands of dollars of prepaid training with 24 Hour Fitness in New York City when they potted that LLC into bankruptcy. Class counsel negotiated a $50 gift card for anyone with claims over $200, or something stupid like that. Bought home equipment and work with my trainer over Zoom. TL; DR Even in highly-regulated markets, the protections are B.S.
- iratewizard 4y agoThat's how gyms subsidize costs. January firsters are often make or break gyms. Mostly due to the fact that leases on those spaces are expensive and the insurance for them is a complete racket (all insurance is a racket, though).
- pc86 4y agoWhile this is accurate (for "globo-gyms" like Anytime or PF, not gyms that actually having training components and charge $150-250/mo), that doesn't explain why it made its way into legislation. Legislators don't care about business models and let's be honest most of them aren't smart enough to understand it even if they did care.
- reillyse 4y agoObviously someone has bribed the lawmakers for that exemption. Simple.
- pc86 4y agoIt's not obvious unless you're more interested in scoring political points online than actually figuring it out. Gyms don't have a huge lobbying presence. I used to live in Pennsylvania and I used to work very close to the lobbying industry. Nobody from Planet Fitness or any fitness-related association is walking around the halls of the capitol twisting arms.
- shakna 4y ago> Nobody from Planet Fitness or any fitness-related association is walking around the halls of the capitol twisting arms. The CEO of Planet Fitness was a contributor to Trump's campaign fund in 2016. I think you're underestimating how politically connected these groups are.
- reillyse 4y agoI mean a lazy google search shows this https://www.clubindustry.com/commercial-clubs/ihrsa-adds-lobbyists-to-increase-fitness-industry-power-congress-during-covid-19 https://www.clubindustry.com/commercial-clubs/ihrsa-adds-lob... Clearly there is plenty of big gym money bouncing around. Exceptions in laws don’t write themselves. I’m cynical but I’m also right.
- jschlesser 4y agoThey have a business plan that is predicated on people signing up for a service that they want to use but don’t and fail to unsubscribe because it’s like giving up on reaching their perceived potential best selves. It’s simple.
- fy20 4y agoThe gyms could still offer online cancellation and continue to make bank from this behavior if they sold you a contract with a minimum term, and heavy cancellation fees if you try to cancel early.
- YPPH 4y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20220418022008/https://pahouse.com/InTheNews/NewsRelease/?id=124404 http://web.archive.org/web/20220418022008/https://pahouse.co...
- QuikAccount 4y agoFully in favor of this. I recently had to cancel a subscription that had no "cancel subscription" button and instead forced you to contact customer service so they could try to sell you on discounts and etc. No, just let me cancel and get on with my day. Unfortunately, it seems health clubs(and I assume gyms?) are exempt from this when they are like 80% of the problem.
- Victerius 4y agoDuring the pandemic, I built a home gym in a spare space at home for a couple hundred dollars. I'm never paying for a gym again.
- LegitShady 4y agoduring the pandemic a couple hundred dollars wouldn't even buy me enough weights for a bench press, let alone the rest of the necessary equipment.
- m463 4y agoI was going to say there is always used gym equipment available (used a handful of times), but then I never tested the market in the middle of the pandemic.
- LegitShady 4y agoduring the pandemic (and somewhat even now) the price of used equipment was extremely elevated. Even basic weights were expensive. Used plates in my area went from 50c/lb to $1/lb+. The prices of equipment similarly jumped. It was a bad time to build a gym, financially, but necessary.
- tshaddox 4y agoUnfortunately in most of the Bay Area, even just the floor space to have anything remotely usable as a home gym would cost many hundreds of dollars per month.
- conroy 4y agoSurprisingly, the proposed bill exempts gyms and health clubs, which have some of the worst cancellation policies.
- winrid 4y agoThe result of lobbying, maybe?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 4y agoAlmost certainly, imo. Were I a VC, part of my model to identify industries ripe for tech disruption would be to find those that get legislative sweetheart deals that don't benefit the taxpayer.
- dwighttk 4y agoOoo I just had an idea: Uber but for lobbying
- pnt12 4y agoMost features apply: a map to select available lobbyiees nearby, lobby sharing, low cost lobbying. Even price jacking for peak lobbying hours!
- lapetitejort 4y agoYou have a bootstrap problem though: how do you lobby for the erosion of worker's rights in the lobby gig economy without first creating the uber for lobbying app?
- tomrod 4y agoProstitution is already illegal in most areas of the US; there are no rights to erode. (/s, just in case)
- Lamad123 4y agoWe all need this!!
- logicalmonster 4y agoThis is one of those things that sounds really good on the surface, and hopefully it is so, but I'm always wary of unintended consequences when it comes to legislation. Are there any loopholes or bad behavior this might enable? Just something to keep in mind and consider, but on the surface I'd have to say that this does sound pretty good.
- jxf 4y ago> Are there any loopholes or bad behavior this might enable? Yes; if you're a company that doesn't like Click to Cancel, and your company's Pennsylvania business is small relative to your total business, the logical choice is simply to stop serving Pennsylvania citizens.
- LegitShady 4y agoRemoving unethical companies from your territory benefits people immensely. This is an unintended benefit, not a negative result.
- gnopgnip 4y agoCA has a similar law allowing online cancellation, and is a larger market that is hard to ignore
- duxup 4y ago> unintended consequences What do you think might happen?
- bombcar 4y agoOne thing I can think of immediately is that smaller companies may have to implement something now that wasn't there - whereas larger can easily absorb the cost. I've seen "subscription forms" that don't actually process anything, they just save the info in a database for someone to manually do stuff with later. These companies will now have to work out how to do a cancel button. Arguably, they should have to anyway, and it's not likely to be a big issue, but these types of legislation are often used to make a "moat" for established players that new ones find hard to cross.
- caiob 4y ago
- datadata 4y agoThe effect of this bill is probably that it will either never be enforced or companies will terminate business in Pennsylvania, at least until more jurisdictions adopt compatible rules. At best companies would only offer these rights for Pennsylvania residents. Local legislation seems incompatible with the economies of scale of internet commerce. I wish that rather than creating laws like this that only govern a tiny percentage of people, local jurisdictions would enter a pact to do so in unison before making an actual law. In the mean time, global companies are getting more brazen about ignoring compliance when there are literally hundreds of authorities they must in theory obey.
- kijin 4y agoThe state of Pennsylvania governs a much larger population than just a bunch of local jurisdictions acting in unison. Unless you mean entire countries by "local jurisdictions."
- datadata 4y agoPennsylvania is less than 4% of the US population. That's a really small piece and it wouldn't be sustainable if every jurisdiction that small enacted different rules
- bombcar 4y agoAmazon would love it, as it would begin to crush smaller retailers and they have the capacity to handle dealing with various law differences.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe federal government is too dysfunctional to pass this sort of obvious legislation. They protected their video rental records within a year after Bork was smeared. Dark financial patterns? That's just too hard to do.
- pishpash 4y ago
- zja 4y agoNot to excuse companies that make you jump through hoops to unsubscribe, but is there any reason you can't just call your credit card/bank and cut off transactions to a company that's giving you a hard time? I've heard horror stories about people trying to cancel gym memberships, and wondered why they don't just stop paying, and let the gym figure it out.
- izzydata 4y agoI remember seeing a website here that let you create prepaid cards that you could use for things like this. I'm not sure if you were able to refill the balance on them though, but it would be convenient to be able to just let them attempt to charge an empty debit card.
- kornhole 4y agoI use virtual cards from privacy.com for just about everything I buy online. It allows you to set limits, cancel with a click, and be anonymous by giving the vendor any name and address you want. It is a good service, but I wonder if any competing services exist.
- incompleteCode 4y agohttps://privacy.com https://privacy.com - I don't use them as often as I should, but they do a great job.
- core-utility 4y agoThe issue still comes in with obligation to pay. If the gym has enough info on you, they can send you to collections as some others have pointed out.
- rwha 4y agoYes, but if a social security number wasn't provided then the collection agency can't do more than call and send some letters; it won't impact a credit score or anything.
- 4y ago
- bloodguard 4y agoNeeds to be nationwide and have real teeth in it. Before I subscribe to anything I check out the cancel procedures. If I can't cancel online or have to "chat" with a retention specialist 20 times before I can finally be shut of a company (looking at you SirusXM) I'm not subscribing.
- slvrspoon 4y agothere's already something like this (no surprise) https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/statutes/restore-online-shoppers-confidence-act https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/statutes/restore-on... i'm guessing pretty much only CA enforces it and generally to make $ the way police do from ticketing. credit cards are the market solution here. they work. virtual cards are even better. more effective and efficient legislation would be to simply enforce processors to accept and not differentiate virtual mastercard / visa / amex cards!
- klabb3 4y agoCredit cards have worse privacy than bank accounts, and not everyone can or want to get one. They're also very popular for fraudsters. But yes virtual ones are a lot better.
- hackernewds 4y agoWhat is a virtual card?
- klabb3 4y agoHaven't used one myself but iirc a credit card number is generated on the fly for each transaction (or maybe a set of transactions). So someone trying to charge you again will fail if it's no longer valid, and you can't correlate it easily with other data.
- CSSer 4y agoAnother comment gave you the gist, but it's also worth noting they can give you control over how much can be debited, how often it can be debited, etc. You can even use them to make budgets for yourself. The leading provider that I know of for this is https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/
- ResNet 4y agoThis sounds great. Devil's advocate: Would this (or existing states' legislation, like California's) have any means of protecting against e.g. a non-CA user just changing their location to CA and immediately canceling? It sounds like an easy loophole for non-CA folks.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI saw on HN that someone changed their address to CA for a day to cancel their NYT subscription. But ideally those sorts of loopholes won't be necessary if more states add the same requirement
- kube-system 4y agoI don’t see why legislators would have a desire to prevent that. But businesses might, and some require some proof of living in CA for things like CCPA requests, like a mailing address or ID in CA.
- hahnchen 4y agoI usually just block them from the credit card if there are too many hoops to cancel
- _qua 4y agoThat may work, or it may result in a referral to collections.
- notimetorelax 4y agoI wouldn’t advise it. Did this once, ended up paying for an extra year of subscription when they came to collect.
- spacexsucks 4y agoAbsolutely necessary. Looking at you NYtimes and economist
- balls187 4y agoI've done a lot of work with gym owners (mostly boutique gyms 1 maybe 2 locations). It's an interesting industry for certain. I can say that making it hard to cancel for most small gyms isn't because they want to engage in shady business practices, it's just making it easy to cancel takes work, and it's a very low priority for a gym owner. The easiest solution for an owner to implement is to "contact for cancellation."
- makecheck 4y agoThere are lots of variants of this kind of unnecessary “friction” and I wish that legislation would be able to ban all of these awful behaviors instead of just specific examples of them. For example, my cable company peppers its web site with ways to “upgrade” your plan easily online. Great, guess what’s missing: an easy way to downgrade anything, e.g. to fewer channels or slower Internet. Obviously they do this for exactly the same reason as the call-us-to-cancel crap but it is just different enough that they could probably keep doing it and still be in compliance with a poorly-written law. And on the off chance something actually requires talking to a human, it is well past time to end this wait-hours-on-hold crap. Why can’t I log into my profile on the company web site, type in my phone number, describe my issue and then say CALL ME whenever the hell you manage to find an employee who is free to discuss? Furthermore, such calls could be punctuated with texts, e.g. “thank you for contacting us, please expect a call in about 10 minutes” or whatever. That stuff would have been straightforward to implement 10 years ago, much less now.
- londons_explore 4y agoCompanies will just make cancellation online possible but very hard. Eg. You have to click the "learn more" link and then log in separately to a support forum where you will be DM'ed the one time use link for cancellation, which will only be valid for 5 minutes and require verifying your email and SMS number
- CogitoCogito 4y agoIn Sweden you’re allowed to cancel by phone call, email, letter, etc. Point is they don’t get to stipulate how you cancel the service. The US needs a similar consumer protection. Click to cancel is a good step, but really just providing multiple simple methods that legally work for all services is the correct approach.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ostenning 4y agoI wish this was more commonplace in Germany, here its not uncommon to have to send a physical letter to cancel a service
- grobie 4y agoThe legislation is just about to change in that regard https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamation/kundenrechte/gesetz-fuer-fairere-vertraege-mehr-schutz-bei-kosten-und-laufzeiten-55274 https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege-reklamat...
- jwally 4y agoI can't advocate privacy.com enough for these shenanigans! Issuing a credit card for each vendor - with spend caps or close the card whenever. If I can't find your cancel service page within five minutes of searching; I just close the card and am done.
- nikanj 4y agoThey are allowed to send your bills to collection. They probably won’t, but don’t count on it. Not paying your bills is not a legally protected way of cancelling.
- core-utility 4y agoOn fixed-cost memberships, I'd love to see legislation forcing the hand to say that payments are for future services, not past, and that failure to pay means being cut off from future services until payment is made. This way these companies couldn't send you to collections since you're paid up for everything you've "consumed".
- mdp2021 4y ago> Not paying your bills is not a legally protected way of cancelling In normal relations, when you pay you get the goods or service, and when you do not pay you do not get it, without presumptions. If you buy a carrot - or more relevantly, newspapers - everything but the cash is redundant: not everyone would accept to subscribe to a different model, if not on very exceptional services.
- poisonta 4y agoI wish gyms had similar legislation.
- tempnow987 4y agoInteresting - a decade later - we are just starting to see some legislation that replicates what Apple has been doing on their app store (that they are being sued over with claims that their policies are anti-consumer). Long long overdue. People chose apple because regulation and developer practices on the broader web are so horrible (despite claims that there is no fraud and the focus of the DOJ on apple, billions are literally stolen outside of apple with crickets from law enforcement). The Apple model (if followed) would be as follows: Subscription terms in exact same font as trial terms (ie, no newspaper $1/week offers with the silly super fine print) right next to trial terms. Required notice in advance of subscription renewals, particularly annual or other long term renewals. Click to cancel (after login / authentication etc) Alert to cancel on disuse / uninstall - Apple will actually suggest cancelling a subscription if you do things like delete an app. Clear subscription terms indicating auto-renewal or one time purchase. Cancel anytime and use through end of current term, with end of term disclosed (you can still use through XXX). No requirement to cancel within some days of end of term or 30 days before end of term (some do no earlier than 90 days, no later than 30 days before end of term).
- jscipione 4y agoIf you mess up your subscription order the company can’t help you because the subscription is through Apple, all they can do is direct you to Apple. Apple also can’t help you because they don’t have access to the company’s services to make the correction. So as a consumer you have your hands tied by Apple if you use their subscription service.
- tempnow987 4y agoCan you provide a more specific example? The order has a detailed confirmation. If you don't like it it is easy to cancel. If you really don't like it you can get a refund. I've done a lot of subscriptions and purchases and have never had a problem with them, including getting things sorted in a few odd cases. Apple has support phone numbers with real people in a surprising number of countries. You can setup ask to buy if you have a kid and are worried about them purchasing accidently.
- bikenaga 4y agoThe issue with cancelling magazine subscriptions has been discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22426102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22426102 The FTC issued a statement about ramping up enforcement against consumer entrapment last year: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-ramp-enforcement-against-illegal-dark-patterns-trick-or-trap-consumers-subscriptions https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/... From the FTC statement, they require companies to: * Disclose clearly and conspicuously all material terms of the product or service, including how much it costs, deadlines by which the consumer must act to stop further charges, the amount and frequency of such charges, how to cancel, and information about the product or service itself that is needed to stop consumers from being deceived about the characteristics of the product or service. The statement provides detail on what clear and conspicuous means, particularly noting that the information must be provided upfront when the consumer first sees the offer and generally as prominent as the deal offer itself. * Obtain the consumer’s express informed consent before charging them for a product or services. This includes obtaining the consumer’s acceptance of the negative option feature separately from other portions of the entire transaction, not including information that interferes with, detracts from, contradicts, or otherwise undermines the consumer’s ability to provide their express informed consent. * Provide easy and simple cancellation to the consumer. Marketers should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the consumer used to buy the product or service in the first place. This was issued Oct. 28, 2021. Has anyone who has tried to (e.g.) cancel a magazine subscription noticed any difference?
- flerovium 4y agoDidn't the FTC require "click to cancel" if you clicked to buy?