Thus the thing to do, for funsies, is to subscribe, and then cancel, and give the poor customer service person on the other end of the line, a piece of your mind, every time you cancel. Boycotts generally don't work. But the goal is to make a signal that gets noticed by the C-suite. Unfortunately, the routes I see are in the pocketbook, the customer service department, and via Twitter, if they do actually happen to be there. A sustained prolonged boycott would work, but most people don't care. Screaming at the customer support person is just shitty to a low level employee that doesn't have the ability to affect change so empathetically thats horrible to do to them, so that's a no go as well. But that is by design. Thus, one way is to overcome that and be horrible to the CSR. But that sucks.
Yay, American "capitalism".
Re:The desperation of NYTimes
by somewhatgoated on Thursday June 04, 2026 @03:48PM
(#48403714)
Being horrible to the CSR will never be noticed by the C-suite.
If you think they give one flying fuck about what customers think I have news for you: the only thing that matters is what the board thinks and if revenue is rising but everyone hates the product/company they won’t even blink.
If they sent out a survey about "why you're no longer a customer" I suppose it would provide one channel for explaining one's actions. Oddly, I seem to get those constantly when I am a customer, but essentially never when I'm a former or inactive customer.
On privacy grounds I like the idea that non-customers would be left alone, but on boycott-impact grounds it seems like having some kind of predictable "what are we doing wrong?" channel would be nice too.