I will never use Xfinity/Comcast again in my life if I have a choice and will try to make sure everyone knows how shitty they are. Unfortunately they have monopolies in many areas and can be as shitty as they want, but if you have a choice I recommend never using them.

I can't believe that in 2021 these tactics are still legal. It's also stupidly shortsighted because in the long term I'm pretty sure they lose money by making everyone hate them. If it was easy to cancel, I would happily sign up again in the future without giving it much thought and would think positively of the company.

Edit: I also want to add that I was paying extra to not have a contract so I could easily cancel.

For a time, I resorted to having an attorney cancel my Comcast service to ensure it actually happened.

But once, months after the attorney forwarded my Comcast cancellation confirmation, I received a notice from a collections agency for the exact Comcast account I had cancelled. The attorney took care of that too.

My new (and best) method for dealing with Comcast is to use a fake name and social. I've been using the cats' names for the past few years, and it works great!

I recently wanted to quit Comcast service at one of my properties, so I went online to chat. No agents available, so I just removed my credit card from the account and stopped paying. They'll figure it out eventually. And good luck of they're going to try to collect from Westley the Cat. He's unemployed.

I will never willingly use Comcast (and they don't care, because monopoly).

Like shibboleet, but for cancellations.

They let you use a fake social security #?

"Why are you cancelling?"

"I'm moving overseas."

"Where to?"

"I'd prefer not to say."

"North Korea"

Ask me a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

1. You have all the necessary data and

2. You are interpreting it correctly and completely

This is almost never true, so instead “data driven” is mostly “data covering-your-ass.” Maybe the future will yield leaders more capable of wielding data less like a cudgel, but I’m not optimistic.

I was able to switch to a new company with transparent simple billing and I will never go back to Comcast even if they offer me a better deal on a better product.

Their customer service policies were horrible and anti consumer. They also routinely throttle certain types of traffic. BitTorrent and Xbox were both verifiably throttled for me during different periods of being a customer of theirs. They increase billing every few months until you complain.

I had to constantly fight to prove that my modem was owned by me. And they just kept adding it back as their equipment and charging me a monthly fee for it. They wanted me to prove I bought it. Wanted to know where I bought it. Etc. I had to call and prove that I indeed bought and paid for it myself numerous times.

Point being. I will never go back. I suspect many others will not go back either once given another option. And options are coming through community fiber projects, 5G and Starlink to some of the areas where Comcast has been the only option.

I'm a fan of Serious Eats for cooking content. Again, ATK was great except for the subscription thing. Looking at their Support page, it looks like nothing has changed with their cancellation policy[1] (the fact that you can cancel your physical magazine subscription online, but not the website subscription is hilarious). I would LOVE to know if they have support for online cancellation for California customers, that they just disable for non-California customers. I've heard of companies doing things like that.

Not sure if Playstation did the same, but Xbox doesn't make this difficult this anymore anyways. In fact, recently I started a Game Pass Xbox subscription on my xbox account and used it for a couple days. Then I realized I should do it on my main microsoft account instead (so I don't have multiple accounts anymore), so I cancelled. They gave me a full refund automatically without me needing to ask or do anything. So companies do change, although I imagine it's just easier to implement it this way anyways. Phone-based customer service is really expensive.

[1] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/support#change-membershi...

Now I use a privacy card for all subscriptions to avoid the hassle

I'm mad that it works.

The crazy thing is they replied, but refused to take me off the list unless I sent them an actual physical letter in the post. A few emails in they claimed it was due to a "technical" issue. That BS annoyed me so much, I am now into the 3rd decade of my own personal British Airways boycott

Edit: I realise that's insane but it makes me giggle everytime I deliberately don't book BA, and I wonder to myself how much money I would be willing to loose by going for the next most expensive ticket, just to keep my boycott going

Even if it’s PEANUTS to them. I feel better, because at least I’m not participating in perpetuating a shitty system.

I feel especially good about it when those companies are ubiquitous and hard to avoid, because I feel rather righteous against an all encompassing behemoth that likely would have got my money otherwise.

I just use Gmail's "Report as Spam" feature in these cases. If enough people do it when they can't unsubscribe easily, it's gonna start eating into their deliverability.

I end up engaging in the same type of behaviour with companies that also do not make unsubscribing obvious, or, worst of all, have slightly annoying GDPR-mandated tracking-denying UIs. Trying to get me to go through two sub-menus and not having a "Deny all" toggle ? Good, good, good. See how petty I can get, $COMPANY !

I'm surprised BA even had email in 1991 or earlier. Since britishairways.com doesn't even make an appearance in the Wayback Machine until late 1998, perhaps we can forgive them their anachronistic practices of the day.

If someone says they are "into the 3rd decade of" something (for example, programming experience), I would generally assume that means 30 years or more.

But what you're saying is that it could mean as little as 11 years, e.g., from 2010 to 2021 (yes, 2010 is still part of the '00 decade¹ and 2021 marks the beginning of the '20s, strange as that was to me).

¹ https://www.farmersalmanac.com/new-decade-2020-or-2021-10090...

It's much more fun for me to think of that as "in to the 3rd decade", rather than just over 20 years ago.

And the English version of the government website about it: https://business.gov.nl/regulation/automatic-renewal-subscri...

Which says: "Consumers must be able to cancel their agreement in exactly the same way as they signed up for them."

As well as disallowing an automatic fixed term renewal. After an initial contract the customer must be allowed to cancel at any point not just yearly. This one had a big impact on the telecom industry a couple of years ago.

No it's not. The VP is maximizing their bonus and career growth within the company. That is likely tied to relatively short term metrics and especially to not having drops in metrics.

On the other hand, it's quite well-known how easy it is to stop/start a Netflix subscription.

I haven't been in this situation, but I always imagined that there is a simple way out: send them a certified letter instructing them to cancel your subscription. If they continue charging after that, it's chargeback time.

Any opinions on whether or not this would work?

And digital "purchases" aren't really purchases.

I'm pretty sure a business that accepts credit cards cannot decide to 'opt-out' of chargebacks!

Says all purchases are final. You may only request a refund and they reserve the right to deny it. Forcing it via chargebacks basically locks your account.

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psn-terms-of-service...

Reserves the right to suspend and terminate accounts associated with chargebacks.

> How many people decided to get the new Playstation next time because of a frustrating experience cancelling their xbox subscription

If you make it hard to unsubscribe when people are short on time/money/interest, they will probably be less likely to resubscribe when they have the time/money/interest.

Long-term customers on something like Xbox Live have a larger incentive to resubscribe to recover access to their game library.

On the other hand, random web site X is probably just looking to churn through subscribers.

It's something of a tragedy of the commons; the incredible difficulty of unsubscribing from (everything that's a monthly bill) makes people wary of subscribing to anything.

If you are optimizing for money made in the next month - or even next two years - then by definition making it hard to cancel will bring in more money. But it does hurt the brand long term (which is harder to measure)

Companies rely too much on analytics.