Dish did do something sort of similar years ago though, don’t know if they still do, but they did some thing where your DVR would automatically record all primetime shows, so in that way, as long as you were ok waiting for the next day, in a sense, “everything was on demand.” https://www.reddit.com/r/dishnetwork/s/e0wspFb7zq
To be fair, satellite TV has always been one of these even when it was a healthy business. High cost of acquisition, high commission for sales, high barrier to cancel.
Made the mistake of buying a boost mobile sim this year. It was “expired” upon opening it. Retailer refused to refund it.
Having not learned my lesson yet, I went elsewhere and ripped it open to check the expiration date this time before I bought it.
Well “it’s prepaid for 90 days and comes with 35 gigs” it says on the card.
Go to activate it, it puts a further $100 on my credit card and congratulates me for activating my 30 gig service plan.
Hokey frauds.
Their aggressive data throttling always rubbed me the wrong way, along with the Extreme data pricing, considering it was on Sprint's terrible network.
But you repeat yourself.
Shit flows downhill. Their owner, Charlie Ergan, wakes up every day thinking of new ways to defraud the government with DISH and Echostar: https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/us-news/doj-moved-to-dismiss-3...
I usually complain about his spectrum squatting with DISH, but there's so much more if you dig a little.
What percent? (Citation needed if it's anything greater than 1%) What does "virtually" mean? This statement has no details and just comes across as political dogwhistling as a result.
> What does "virtually" mean?
virtually /vûr′choo͞-ə-lē/ adverb Almost but not quite; nearly.
I expect people to not make claims without evidence. I never asked for a study, either - that's you misreading my comment. I asked for a citation, which could be a public poll - some empirical evidence, as opposed to none.
> virtually /vûr′choo͞-ə-lē/ adverb Almost but not quite; nearly.
This is an intentional misinterpretation of my question, as well as being sarcastic to mock and emotionally attack me. Any reasonable reader would have known that I meant "what value does virtually mean here?"
You're intentionally being deceptive and emotionally manipulative to push a political agenda. Don't do that.
This is a mischaracterization of the criticism.
Suppose we all agree that Dish sucks and making it hard to cancel is malicious. A rule is proposed to require customers to be able to cancel any subscription on the vendor's website. Is that a completely reasonable rule that will have no negative consequences?
A lot of small businesses don't even have a website, or if they do it's fully static content that just provides information about their offering and if you want it you call them. Some two-person landscaping service doesn't have an IT department to implement this and having to call them to cancel isn't a real problem because they actually answer their phone.
And if this was only one rule they would just suck it up and pay someone a thousand bucks to make them a website where you can cancel, but it's not. So when you propose yet another piece of red tape they have to take food off their table to make go away, they line up with rotten tomatoes, and anyone proposing to pare some of it back gets their vote.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
Except that's not the proposed rule. The way this works in California (and the way the rule the FTC recently published works, I believe) is that a business is required to allow customers to cancel "in the same medium" that they subscribed. That doesn't require anyone to start running a website.
The rest of your post is just arguing against something that's not even happening.
But then you're not really fixing it anymore. "Must be able to cancel directly via website" (i.e. without waiting for a customer service rep) might have been useful. Require only the same medium and soon Dish has both sign up and cancellation happen via a customer service chat window on their website, but if you choose sign up the chat has representatives/acceptance bots appear instantaneously to approve your sign up, whereas cancellation has a four hour queue and if you fail to wiggle your mouse every 30 seconds you get timed out.
You have to come up with a rule strict enough to defeat the corporate lawyers without making it so complicated or comprehensive that it puts significant compliance costs on smaller entities. Which is really hard to do, with the result that most of the rules that actually pass don't do that, which is why people get irked.
Corporations act strategically. They typically don't immediately thwart new laws because the coalition that passed them is still intact and would try to do something about it. So they wait a minute, maybe take the time to buy some more legislators, before testing the fences again.
If people have forgotten about them by then you lose, and if people haven't forgotten about them by then, California passes the 2024 law and you lose the other way. Because they pass the new law in addition to rather than instead of the old one, even though the old one has stopped working, so you have a ratchet of ever-increasing compliance costs that also apply to all the companies that were never doing anything wrong to begin with but still have to hire lawyers to evaluate their activities against an entire bookshelf of rules to see if any of them require something they're not doing.
Is there something in the proposed rule that actually says this? And if so, what happens to the small business that does cancellations over email/phone and therefore requires human interaction?
> And if the process takes time (there are times I think confirmations are warranted) once that's been done the cancellation takes place at the time of your original request. (Which you can screenshot.)
The issue isn't that you care if the cancellation happens at 9AM or 9PM, it's that if you have to wait twelve hours to speak to a representative you give up before reaching the point you can make the request.
Otherwise people who signed up under the wife's name may try to cancel under the husband's name and you don't know who they are, neighbors who don't like the racket from the equipment see your website on the trucks and try to cancel the service even though they're not the customer because you have no authentication, people want to cancel because they've moved and give you their new address instead of the one they're subscribed under, people make ambiguous or incomplete requests and you don't know what they're asking to do. But if you have to contact them to clarify you're not satisfying the requirement that they can cancel via the website.
What do you mean?
You go to the website, it has a form where you fill in your name and address and what service you want. They don't need any further information to send you an invoice. As soon as you pay it, landscapers come to your house and mow your lawn, and then each month you get another invoice until you cancel. That's a subscription; you signed up on the website using the form.
If you have a cancel form it does matter, because it has to match the one used to sign up or they don't know who you are, even if the customer doesn't remember which one they used. Or any number of other issues with matching the request to a subscription.
Humans can sort this out, but then you can't cancel on the website. Computers can also sort this out, but then you need sophisticated programming instead of a basic form. It's not symmetrical.
They do this to increase profits.
A certain portion of the population is pro-profit at virtually any cost.
It might seem like Dish employees wake up every day and say, "What can we do today to screw our customers even more?" But usually they're just trying to find ways to make more money.