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The Future of Shopping: Trapping You in a Club You Didn't Know You Joined (bloomberg.com)
Just a word of caution: the next time you spot a great deal on a shopping portal, you will want to carefully look for all the radio buttons, and tick boxes -- and perhaps also skim through the ToS -- before placing the order. Bloomberg has an in-depth piece on the ordeal of a customer who purchased a lingerie item from an e-commerce website called Adore Me. Little did the customer know that the $19.95 she was spending to purchase a piece of cloth would end up costing her -- partly because of her own ignorance -- more than $300. Adore Me, you see, maintains a subscription model in which it charges users a fee of around $40 a month, even if they don't purchase anything. It might surprise many, but Adore Me isn't the only shopping portal or service that runs this sort of tactic. "It's the new thing," says Francisca Allen, the deputy district attorney of California's Santa Clara County. "There's thousands and thousands of companies that do this." What's more, these companies have made it frustratingly difficult to cancel these subscriptions -- it often requires you to sit through a one-hour call to the customer representative and listening to a bunch of funky songs that you suddenly don't adore as much. Bloomberg reports:Hundreds of customer complaints against Adore Me and other subscription e-commerce businesses are stacking up at the Federal Trade Commission, according to records obtained by Bloomberg. They follow a pattern: Shoppers believe they've been tricked into signing up for recurring credit card charges, often for a relatively small amount that can be easily overlooked in a monthly bill. Then companies make it an exasperating hassle to quit and get a refund.
...telling us that it's "your own fault for not reading the smallprint", even though
1) Capitalism is philosophically based upon perfectly informed rational consumers, which these guys aren't, by definition;
2) It's made deliberately hard, but not impossible, to cancel, by the company purely being a bunch of shitlords without necessarily technically breaking any law (not everything can be reduced to clear rules);
3) Society gains no benefit from protecting a ridiculous contract, so it would be irrational to do so.
Adore Me Prime
It is shit like this that makes me glad I use disposable credit card numbers for every single online purchase. In 15 years, I've never had a case of fraud or any other problem. But they have saved my butt a bunch of times. My bank emails me for every rejected authorization so I've seen every time some lowlife 'merchant' tried to charge me without my consent. Most recently Angie's List was trying nearly every day for about two months to "renew" a subscription.
If you have a Bank of America or Citibank credit card account then you already have access to disposable numbers. There are other smaller banks (especially outside of the US) who support disposable numbers too.
Dude, moral agency of that level does not apply to the young. They lack both the experience and the economic freedom to make principled decisions in almost all cases except those of life and death.