We need to have a better way to uphold consumer rights.
How moving online & more subscription models will ruin us.
I don’t understand ‘Convenience Fee’ in Cinemas. Am I supposed to pay more because I made you convenient? To be able to pay less staff maintaining the conventional ticketing booth?
Consumer rights and pricing have gone way off nowadays. Many complex pricing structures, fine prints, default auto-renewal option (that is difficult to cancel), quota-restricted freemium models, you name it. All the methods confuse you and lure you into their product and build an IKEA-like maze to make it difficult to cancel.
Have you seen some of these?
‘BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month’
‘Volkswagen refused to track car with kidnapped child until owner renewed GPS Subscription’
That’s how SAAS (Software-as-a-service) or Subscription model has evolved (and gone wrong) over years.
Will we need to pay a flat membership of X dollars in order to select middle seats in Cinema in the future? At this rate, I don’t think we are far.
I believe the Subscription model started with good intentions - to continue servicing the client at a high-quality service level, with more potential for relationship building and upselling. However, businesses have found ways to make it more profitable, yet the public and regulations are slow to react.
1) Default opt-out (auto-termination) by end of the trial
2) One pager Privacy Policy highlighting ‘Things you may want to be reminded about’.
3) ‘Can we collect your data’ instead of ‘Agree-ing to cookie’
Those should be the standard practice and consumer rights.
Most people don’t read 60 pages Agreement, Privacy Policy & Terms & Conditions. Even if we do have the time, we have difficulty understanding all the ‘legal’ / ‘official terms’.
Current laws and regulations have not been updated fast enough to include most new services, terms & conditions, privacy policies, and pricing plans that are poisons disguised as honey.
Maybe a button on every online checkout page that everyone could click ‘I think this requires scrutiny.’, once certain numbers have reached the Trade and Consumer Affairs will conduct an official check.
I don’t know, as an average consumer myself, I need a better way to check and raise concerns if I think something is off.
