I Can't Quit You! Oh, Yes, I can!

 Read this morning that the FTC is suing Amazon for deceptive practices with their Prime membership. Evidently, they were signing people up for Prime- I think- by offering them the *free* Amazon store card. Pretty sure that's how they got me. I know I didn't sign up for Prime because I know me and I couldn't recall agonizing over whether to part with $139 dollars for *free*delivery. Earlier this year when I was still receiving Prime delivery, I thought it might be a holdover from when I had Prime membership when I was on my late mom's account. At NO point did Amazon advise me that my membership was ending, nor ask if I wanted to renew. They just took it upon themselves to renew me and put it on that store card. I didn't begin to suspect anything until I started getting email bills telling me to pay like $23 and change on that card. Emails. Not bills or statements. I assumed I used the card once, bought something small, and never used it again. I had quickly reasoned that Discover, with their cash-back made more sense. I thought I had paid off whatever purchase I had made as that is my policy at this stage of adulting. Why were they still sending me email bills? On their website I asked them to send me an itemized final bill. I was still thinking I had bought something and I wanted to get that over with and off the books.

Well, of course, I hadn't bought anything. Unbeknownst to me, they had sold me Prime. Sneaky fuckers. 

The way the country is going, I decided to cut costs wherever I could. I got on Amazon to see when Prime was ending and with the intention of ending deliveries. They don't provide info on that. I guess it's counterproductive to their money-grubbing practices to let people leave. I had first eliminated their store card from my queue and promptly got an email wondering what card they should use to take out the money for the Prime membership I hadn't agreed to. Words not to that effect... That was a head's up to me that I should purge any other cards I was using with them. I appreciated that. Stupid fuckers. But again, there was no option on their site to quit, so no longer using Amazon was the only way to go. Oh, and they were emailing me to update my street address so they could find me. They had been delivering packages to me here for damn near a year and they didn't know where I lived?? Stupid fuckers.

Regarding the recent Jimmy Kimmel kerfuffle with Disney/ABC, I saw a post on Bluesky that hundreds of thousands of folks were quitting Disney- and having a hard time doing it. The post said that you had to jump through this hoop and then that one and tell them three times that you wanted to cancel- and why. Stupid fuckers. Big mistake there! "Because you're fascists!" was probably in the top ten. After spending 20 minutes running in their circles trying to quit, were they going to be like George Costanza's girlfriend and not accept the reasons for breaking up? No, but boy if they could...

This is the way corporations do business now. The runaround is designed to wear you out; make you give up. YouTube TV is similar, but more low-key. They have a "cancel now" button on their site that seems to make it easy, but it doesn't work. It sends you to a page showing all their various packages which I took to mean, "Yeah, you're done, but look what we've got for you if you want to be undone!" 

Well, you are not done. Nothing has been done. My first clue was I didn't get a "Sorry to see you go" email. Stupid fucker me- I wasn't gone! I just didn't know it yet. Why would they send me one? I tried the "cancel now" button again and googled to see if I was doing something wrong. Google told me to click that "cancel now" button. Oh. 

My bank handles those scheduled payments, so it finally occurred to me that my best, and perhaps only, option was to get with the bank and tell them to stop further payments. This might work. Not sure yet. You know how streaming services are. You are basically renting. You stop paying; they stop streaming. It's supposed to be easy. I wish they'd fucking tell you that from Jump Street, but then you'd quit when you wanted to instead of when they want you to, which is never. And that would cost them money. Fucking Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world and he certainly has the capacity to make money honestly, but he and other wealthy corporations still feel the orgasmic need to fuck people to get more. Smart fuckers. That's why they make the big money, I reckon. $12 billion a year in subscriptions alone. 

Here's the link to the article: A jury will look at whether Amazon tricked customers into joining Prime and made it hard to leave | WGN-TV