When I had an account with Beer52 I them and said, effectively, "This is my notice to cancel and the main motivation to cancel is because of anti-consumer behaviour like having to call to cancel. I do not authorise any further payments and any payments you do take will be subject to a dispute with my credit card company".

To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone.

How did you contact them, email?

Hah, literally saw the title of the post and came to comments to find beer52 (after dealing with them over a year ago)... must say something about a company.

But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel the subscription. I misread that and thought I'd cancelled, then got stung with a bill, but they didn't send as they couldn't take payment. So I retried to cancel and realised what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it sound like you _have_ unsubscribed.

For a 'hip' beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to ANYONE, even though I actually quite liked the beer.

Sometimes I wonder what little things differ between countries. But this is new to me. Is it true that you find that hold time to be annoying/out of place in the UK? I once was on hold with an insurance company for ten hours... I began to wonder if 1. something happened that got me stuck in the queue, or 2. if they even had a single person working the lines.

Not OP but also from the UK. Whilst a 10 minute hold time isn't too unusual for large companies, especially if you call at a busy time like midday when everyone takes a lunch break, anything over 20 minutes would certainly warrant complaining about to anyone unfortunate enough to ask how your day is going.

A big selling point for companies for a while was quick answering of calls. My bank has genuinely answered faster than 999 (our 911 equivalent) on occasion. Although during COVID hold times have gone up dramatically for some reason.

I thought of beer52 too, but not because I was thinking of cancelling (I quite like beer52)

But because they offered a free month to wine52. Easy to sign up, phone up to cancel

This is the FTC, not the EU (as far as I'm aware theres no EU legislation planned or in place for this).

Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, but you could say the same about the UK.

That being said I thought it already was against UK law. Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or its just not heavily enforced. Who knows

The EU regulation on this was already passed several years ago, and is already enforced in some countries, it should be universally enforced by the end of the year.

Any chance of a reference here please? I've been unable to find the law (in my case the UK, but an EU regulation reference would help) which enacts this, and I'm dealing with a dispute at the moment where this would be helpful.

I can't find anything about the EU implementing this. Here is a UK document from July 2021 discussing why the UK might want to do it, and thus implying that it hadn't yet - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Usually Germany is pretty snappy on enforcing EU regulations, but at least in this case it would appear not as I've heard Germans more than any other EU national complaining about this issue in particular. Again though, maybe there are loopholes (just look at GDPR, or to an extent even TPD).

Do you have a regulation reference by any chance?

It was implemented in German law via

    Gesetzesänderung des § 309 Nr. 13 BGB vom 1. Oktober 2016

See the news stories about it: https://www.pcwelt.de/news/Ab-1.10.-Kunden-duerfen-Online-Ve...