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586 points gausswho | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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John23832 ◴[] No.44509670[source]
What consumer does this serve at all? What citizen does this serve at all?

This only serves to allow firms to erect effort barriers to keep rent seeking fro their customers. The "gotcha" that the Khan FTC didn't "follow the rules making process" is parallel construction.

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hiAndrewQuinn ◴[] No.44510095[source]
The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel.

It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often the difference between the life and death of a company.

A harsher way of phrasing it would be this serves the consumer who actually pays attention to their bills. I've had a cheap gym membership sitting around for a few months that I haven't gone to. I don't want to go to the effort of cancelling it, because that's hard. My sloth subsidizes the gym goers who actually do use the service every day and pay less than they otherwise would for the privilege. Poor, lazy, stupid people like me should still be given the option to spend our money in poor, lazy, stupid ways.

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1. jemmyw ◴[] No.44516344[source]
That wouldn't be the standard capitalist response. After all, you still have the option to spend your money in stupid ways, the ease of cancelling is not related to that. A more standard capitalist response is that this is a market inefficiency. You're spending $20 on the gym, you're not using that service, and so presumably a humble cake maker is missing out on that $20.
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2. hiAndrewQuinn ◴[] No.44516519[source]
Incorrect, strictly speaking I'm spending $20 on the option to visit the gym for a month, just like how you might sound $20 for the option of using Netflix for a month.

Options provide value to the purchaser even when they are not exercised. It is a common but grave error to model options the same way one would model a simpler pay-per-usage style service for that reason. We might as well start telling people they can't buy monthly bus passes if they don't use them every day.

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3. jemmyw ◴[] No.44519537[source]
But as I noted, there is nothing stopping you keeping that option. It is perfectly fine for you to pay for the option if you want to keep paying for it, even without using it. That is perfectly efficient. The inefficiency is when you want to cancel in order to spend the money elsewhere and you're unable to do so because the subscription is hard to cancel. At that point you no longer want the service, you want to spend your money on cakes, but you cannot.