AARP Hearing Center
You’ve been seduced with free trial offers and goaded into subscriptions for everything from dietary supplements and gym memberships to magazines and video streaming services.
Now you’re trying to trim your expenses or get out from under those too-good-to-be-true deals.
Visiting many businesses to cancel in person is nearly impossible, and you reckon hell will freeze over before you reach a live customer service representative on the phone. In the meantime, recurring charges keep piling up for products and services you don’t even remember agreeing to pay for.
To make matters worse, the last line from the Eagles’ “Hotel California” is playing in your head: “You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
More transparency is ahead
The FTC wants to make it just as easy for you to bail on these subscriptions as it was for you to sign up for them. On March 23, by a vote of 3 to 1, the agency proposed “click to cancel” rules that it claims will go a long way toward rescuing consumers from the never-ending struggle to cancel unwanted subscription plans.
Marketers often fail to make adequate disclosures to consumers about their payment obligations and bill them repeatedly without their consent, the FTC says. The agency receives thousands of consumer complaints about these practices each year.
The new rules “would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties,” FTC chairwoman Lina M. Khan said in her statement.
The FTC isn’t the only government agency trying to bring more transparency to consumer pricing. A day before the FTC announcement, chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission unveiled a customer protection proposal that would require cable operators and direct broadcast satellite providers to specify their all-in price “clearly and prominently” for video services that show up in promotional materials and on subscribers’ bills.
“Consumers deserve to know what exactly they are paying for when they sign up for a cable or broadcast satellite subscription. No one likes surprises on their bill, especially families on tight budgets,” Rosenworcel said in her statement.
Negative option rules under scrutiny
One key component under the proposed FTC rules: Businesses that let you sign up for a subscription through a website must afford you the opportunity to cancel that subscription on the same website with the same number of steps.
