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Fully 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 t
by QuikAccount 4y ago
Fully 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.
- dataflow 4y agoI think the point here was "see if you might already have enough space to spare", not "get extra space for the sake of a home gym".
- jjeaff 4y agoAnd the next commenter's point is that space is so expensive in SF, that no one just has an extra room on hand that they don't already use.
- dataflow 4y agoThe Bay Area is way bigger than SF, and it said "space", not "dedicated room". Obviously not everybody will have any room whatsoever but some folks in the Bay will be able to spare a bit.
- kornhole 4y agoThis takes creativity. Gymnast rings cost ~$10 which you can hang from a tree branch. Someone gave me a barbell, but I had no weights. So I screwed rings into some heavy logs and am now deadlifting ~400lbs. I get to do all this in my bikini in the sun while maintaining my garden between sets. I look like a fitness model and spent about $30 on my yard gym.
- dunefox 4y agoIf you can afford to live there you can surely afford weights, but the space for storing logs (of all things) just isn't practical.
- WalterBright 4y agoYou can go pretty far with: 1. dumbbells 2. screw a pullup bar into the ceiling joists 3. burpees
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> I'm never paying for a gym again. I believe for most gymgoers, a primary purpose of going to the gym is to hang out with your gym friends. If you just want exercise, you can do body weight exercises for free; a couple hundred dollars is overkill.
- jlawson 4y agoNo, not the case. I've been going to gyms for years. Have never spoken more than a single sentence to anyone there and 99.5% of the other people I see there are also training and not socializing. In fact I can specific remember one pair who were socializing in the gym once; I saw them about 10 months ago, it was very irritating and so unusual that I still remember it now. Bodyweight workouts can't come close to the effectiveness or satisfaction of a proper set of weights.
- johnqian 4y agoThis doesn't ring true to me; most people at the gyms I've been to don't talk to anyone. I think most people actually want the equipment, mainly the squat rack, bench press, and treadmills. I personally love bodyweight exercises but I still feel I'm missing something without heavyweight squats and deadlifts.
- WalterBright 4y ago> treadmills Just go out for a jog. Fresh air is far better for you anyway than stinky gym air.
- TylerE 4y agoTell that to my allergies.
- WalterBright 4y agoBeing in or outdoors made no difference to my hay fever. It was miserable for 6 weeks of the year, the rest was fine. I use the past tense, because getting older means my allergy has abated. It only gets bad if I mow the lawn, so now I wear a mask doing that.
- wrycoder 4y agoCost me $1000 for a rack and weights, but I’ve already saved it back in gym fees.
- UweSchmidt 4y agoSame. Also better music, relaxed dress code and light chores in between sets.
- wrycoder 4y agoAnd the women are friendly.
- LegitShady 4y agoI've had issues with gyms and also a cable internet provider where the employees say they've processed your cancellation but I found later that for some reason it hadn't worked and I was still subscribed. A cable provider sent me a bill for $300 of equipment I had returned three months earlier and I was only lucky I kept the receipt from returning the equipment that I could prove I had done it. Since the items had been scanned into their systems on return I could only assume malice or complete incompetence.
- tcoff91 4y agoSounds like Comcast for sure. That’s their go to move to punish people for canceling.
- jwally 4y agoRandom observation: Everything NBC / Universal / Comcast gives me an ick vibe...maybe its just me?
- dvtrn 4y agoI used to have a gym membership that I only discovered later on could be canceled by mailing a letter to their HQ four states away. Not an email. Not a phone call to some retention agent in a call center. A signed letter via postage. From the tales I've read in my local city sub, I got lucky in that the billings did in fact stop quickly; others have had resort to threats of legal action after numerous letters, some even sent via certified mail to get the charges to stop.
- Shared404 4y ago> Not an email. Not a phone call to some retention agent in a call center. A signed letter via postage. Like in the civil war! Did you go acquire stamps and paper so your children and grandchildren could also cancel their gym subscriptions? (For anyone who can watch content from Netflix and likes comedy, do yourself a favor and watch Happy Face).
- dheera 4y agoOne thing you can do is just tell them you're deaf, cannot do a voice call, and need to cancel by e-mail.
- gruez 4y agoSounds like an opportunity for a SaaS company to provide text to speech service for companies, so all the "deaf" people can be subjected to upsells as well!
- Smaug123 4y agoText relay is a thing in the UK, by the way. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice-for-consumers/accessibility/text-relay-guide https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice...
- dheera 4y agoOne thing I have wanted is a transcribing system so I can take voice calls in a chat interface. Some systems e.g. doctors, banks often still insist on phone calls so if I can present as a phone call on their end but it is chat interface for me, that is ideal.
- dhzhzjsbevs 4y agoOr you can just say if you don't cancel by email you'll issue charge backs.
- bgro 4y agoI wonder if this will turn into the "Do Not Call" list situation, which advertisers seem to download and use as their "Call List" because it's just so easy and accessible. Confirm your email is valid, and then add it to the list of "continue to spam" accounts.
- jwally 4y agoI'm sure there's a better way to do it but I try to give each vendor (especially slimy ones) a unique email address: Dailyburn@mylastname.io When they start spamming I set up a filter to hard block anything going to that address. Good lord! This is my second "opsec" reply on this - what a statement on how shitty it is to try and engage in commerce when you need to cover your tracks like you're committing a crime...barf.
- hackernewds 4y agoClassPass has a very lengthy flow for this, where you have to talk to a live agent after a long wait that tries to upsell you to stay. Poor those agents much have the worst interactions.
- willio58 4y agoI had this same experience with For Hims. Super shady business practice that made me recommend against them ever since
- cromka 4y agoThey were shady to begin with by pushing finasteride.
- collegeburner 4y agoAgreed. The number of people acting like an antiandrogen is something that should be taken casually to slow a cosmetic issue is ridiculous, especially with how much I've heard about post-finasteride syndrome.
- cromka 4y agoI am surprised it still hasn't been added to the controlled substances list. My allergy drug (Allegra) had been recently as a result of the number of depression and suicides reported, while finasteride can still be bought over the counter, sigh.
- thallium205 4y agoGeico insurance is like this. You have to call to cancel the policy.
- kube-system 4y agoI recently switched away from Geico and my new insurer offered to mail them a letter to cancel on my behalf.
- whizzter 4y agoA friend of mine has more or less developed a niche for his business on handling cancellations via verified digital signatures (Lawyers of the companies on the receiving end tried to put up roadblocks and deny this initially but all of them seems to have relented afaik).
- Razengan 4y agoThis imbalance between customers and corporations of how easily and quickly they can take your money but how long and difficult it is to get your money back (or stop giving them money) is one of the worst things in the world.
- WalterBright 4y agoHealth clubs rely on 90% of their members never showing up. If they all cancelled, there'd be no more health clubs.
- eastbound 4y agoOr they would be more expensive. Or the same price and dividends lower. Or they would see a price per session, or a price per session tier (0-2 sessions per month, 3-5, then 5-15, then 15+).
- WalterBright 4y ago10x more expensive. I bet that'd do wonders to the willingness of customers to sign up.
- CogitoCogito 4y agoI’m confused by this line of posts. Are you saying making it easier for people to cancel services they don’t need is a bad thing?
- WalterBright 4y agoI'm not actually making a value judgement on that. Just pointing out the consequences maybe not what was intended.
- CogitoCogito 4y agoThe consequences would be that more people would be able to cancel services they didn’t want. I find it highly unlikely that those people would agree to continue paying for services they don’t need simply to subsidize other users of the services. So no I’m pretty sure that the result would be many clubs closing, the consequences would be exactly as intended.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
- jwithington 4y agoHealth clubs don’t appear exempt. They are exempt from section 4 of the bill, not the entirety of the bill. Section 4 deals with changes to terms of service. https://legiscan.com/PA/text/HB2511/id/2569740/Pennsylvania-2021-HB2511-Introduced.pdf https://legiscan.com/PA/text/HB2511/id/2569740/Pennsylvania-...
- everdrive 4y agoThere's a pretty easy lesson here: don't sign up for services. Or more realistically, sign up for as few services as possible, and treat every service with suspicion until proven otherwise. If you can't obtain a company's goods without signing up for a service, then seek an alternative. Services generally have two business models: - Spread a large cost over monthly payments so that customers will spend more than they otherwise would. - Trap a customer, either via coercion or convenience into keeping a service they don't really want. For the business, the benefit to service offerings is clear: regular, reliable income. To the customer, there is often no benefit.
- Workaccount2 4y agoSaaS is an absolute cancer. I know a lot of those fat six figure salaries are contingent on people paying $9.99/mo for a grocery shopping list app, but its getting out of hand. Sorry HN.
- arbitrage 4y agoWho are you apologising to? You're being more than a bit hyperbolic & disingenuous. I pay $15/year for a grocery list app that solves several problems for me. That is, I pay money for concurrent access, web-scraping that works, and an organisational system to help me feed my family. This is a great value to me: the $1.25 a month that I pay for my grocery list app has made my life easier.
- dazc 4y agoI'm not sure whether this a joke or not?
- imtringued 4y agoIf it saves you 2 hours per year it will be worth it even if you are paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25. If it takes 2 hours to cancel it, it could definitively be a net negative though.
- 4y ago
- DeWilde 4y agoCan't you just opt to pay in cash (or Credit Card) for every month you want to have a gym subscription?
- steelbrain 4y agoI don't know how it works in other countries but most bigger gyms in Estonia make you sign a contract with them when you join. If you stop paying without cancelling the contract (which they have ridiculous terms around), they sell you off to a collection agency which then proceeds to harass you until you pay. A friend recently went through this experience and warned anyone against the big-name gyms. (Looking at you myFitness)
- DeWilde 4y agoThat sucks, in Bosnia in most gyms you pay up-front for the month you are intending to use the gym.
- OutsmartDan 4y agoThe NY Times is notoriously the worst at this. It's almost impossible to cancel without wasting a couple hours of your time. Interesting how I can subscribe with a click but can't cancel with one.
- collegeburner 4y agoPrivacy.com and delete the card when you want to cancel. Screw these people, I may not be able to cancel but I can sure stop paying.
- geoffeg 4y agoI started signing up for privacy.com, right up until the point where they asked for my username and password for my bank. Why can't they just do electronic funds transfer like Paypal? Seems like a strange user experience.
- cycomanic 4y agoWTF! ? How does anyone sign up for a service that asks for that, especially anyone here on HN? Are banks OK with this?
- scottLobster 4y agoI use Mint.com to track my finances. I granted it read-access to all my bank accounts (access that I can revoke at any time from the bank's side). Yeah I'm the product, but it's free, saves me a ton of time, and actually syncs with literally all my accounts, from credit cards to my 401k to utilities. That's something I can't say for the privacy-focused options I tried before it. Also I think HN and the technosphere in general is a little blind to the cost/benefit analysis of privacy for most consumers. People here have intimate knowledge of the technology and what can be done with information, so that's where they focus. Simple fact is there's a lot theoretical damage that could be done, but relatively little damage actually being done on an individual level for most consumers. Unless you're famous/important enough to be targeted by someone with resources, odds are even with zero privacy protections you'll get lost in the noise, or at most suffer trivial damage (having to cancel a stolen credit card or something) I went through a phase where I tried to lock down my identity as much as possible, installed anti-fingerprinting browser extensions, forbade all cookies I didn't explicitly approve, individually selected sites to approve in NoScript, etc. It chewed up a ton of time, and when life happened and I was forced to re-prioritize my time and stopped maintaining it... nothing happened. It was the digital equivalent of installing steel shutters/doors and reinforced door frames so you can withstand a SWAT team with a no-knock warrant. Simple fact is the odds of encountering a SWAT team with a no-knock warrant are so low that it's statistically not worth the effort unless you're actually an outlaw.
- dominotw 4y agosign up with a one time generated credit card?
- NotTheDr01ds 4y agoMost of them have discontinued the service. I think there's one left, maybe Citi IIRC? I've hesitated on opening an account since it seems like only a matter of time before they discontinue as well. Apple Card allows you to generate a new card number, but it replaces the existing number. And you either have to tie your bank account to them to pay, or use your card number (which you might change) on payment correspondence.
- xydinesh 4y agoAbsolutely! Once I tried to cancel SiriusXM for an old car it was a nightmare.I had to call and wait for hours to get someone. Never signup for SiriusXM since then.
- dixie_land 4y agowhenever I call they keep offering me to renew with “new customer” offer, which is/was good price when I used to commute and do enjoy many channels and play by play. long story short I have many Echo Dots (free for “new” customers) lying around in the house now.
- r0rshrk 4y ago> health clubs are expempt Hmm, does one sign up for an automated monthly subscription for health clubs in the US?