Good morning, John.

I recently got a letter in the mail from a business that I subscribed to and I'm not gonna tell you who they are because that's not important, but the letter said that the price of my subscription was going to increase from $25 a month to $35 a month. And I don't actually use that subscription that much and $420 per year seemed like kind of a lot of money to pay for that. And the letter was very explicit that I could manage my subscription online at their website or I could call them on the phone. So I went to the website because I'm a normal human. And the website had a little button that said "Cancel Subscription" and I clicked on it, and it said call us on the phone.

I don't know exactly why you didn't just say that in the first place, but ok. Now I subscribed to this service on the Internet so I am confident that they are capable of allowing me to unsubscribe online. I don't think it's, like, beyond their technical abilities. So of course we know what's going on here. They don't want me to unsubscribe because they like getting money from me once a month, but I want to unsubscribe so they are doing everything they can to make it as hard as possible, and guess what it's worked. It's now been more than a month since I got that letter and I still haven't canceled and I got my first $35 payment. Now you're probably thinking to yourself, "Yeah, that's bad behavior. A business's goals should be to keep you happy," but that stops being their goal the moment you have made up your mind that you want to cancel. If making it harder for you to cancel makes your relationship with that business worse, that doesn't matter to them because they've already lost your business the moment you decide you want to cancel, their economic incentive switches from trying to keep you happy to trying trying to stop you from cancelling at all costs.

This is obviously bad. I would argue it's probably bad for this company because perhaps I wanted to cancel for now and I might resubscribe later but now I'm never going to resubscribe because I no longer trust that company cares about its subscribers at all. And it's also bad for all other subscription businesses because now I am going to be more wary of signing up for subscriptions forever because I don't want to be in a situation where I'm stuck paying for something that I don't want anymore. And, of course, obviously, it's bad for me because I have to waste my time clicking through menus on my phone and then talking to a real person and then having to tell them over and over that I want to cancel even as they try to tell me not to.

But I'm gonna do it. And as a way to actually get myself to do it, I'm gonna do it as part of this video. That way, I have another reason to do it, so let's do it.

"Our representatives are available Monday through Friday from 6:30 A.M. 'til 4:00 p.m. Saturday, Sunday' Well, it's 4:30. Alright, I'll call you tomorrow. It's tomorrow. Let's do it. 

"Thank you for calling and have a nice day. Bye now." Bye.

I think it would be better for absolutely everyone for me to not have to do that, with the possible exception of the company that, on average I suppose, is making more money doing it this way than another way. But, there is good news. It probably isn't gonna be this way for long. Already, California has passed a law making this illegal so most companies have a special page for Californians so they can cancel more easily, and then, they could send the rest of Americans to the phone number meaning sometimes you can use a VPN to pretend you're in California to cancel automatically though I tried this with this subscription, and apparently they don't have that—which I think could get them in trouble, but I imagine there's higher priorities for, like, the legal system in California. But additionally, the FTC—which is the part of the U.S. government that protects consumers—has proposed a rule change that will make this illegal.

The FTC is a piece of the federal government that has five commissioners that are nominated by presidents and approved by Congress, and they serve rolling 7-year terms and no more than three of them can be from the same political party. Making this rule change became possible when Joe Biden nominated Lina Khan, who has been broadly seen as like, I think the nicest way of saying this is, very pro-consumer in a way that has made a lot of big businesses angry and uncomfortable.

For example, this FTC board also created a rule that bans non-compete agreements, so hell yeah. But this new rule has not yet gone into effect and there's an upcoming meeting where a bunch of businesses will argue against it being put into effect and we can hope that they will be ignored because this is a pretty simple case where companies are intentionally making life worse for their customers, which is not something I would ever want good.store to do.

Cancelling at good.store is super easy. You can just log in and manage everything right in one place. You could skip upcoming orders if you want to do that or you can cancel completely. Just click on "Manage Subscription" and there's a big button at the bottom. Interestingly, the subscription management service that we use to run good store actually had the cancel button, like, hidden in tiny print and we made them make it big for us. But also, you can swap your subscription for something else. If you'd rather get ankle socks instead of crew or herbal tea instead of English breakfast, I think it's a very good system. A system I hope Lina Khan would be proud of. We want to make it easy for people to do what they wanna do because our incentive is to maintain a good relationship long-term rather than lock you in for, like, one extra month.

Which reminds me, it turns out the product we have that is growing most organically with customers coming back over and over again is Sun Basin Soap. if you have not tried it, you gotta try it. It's very good. Katherine and I actually worked together to create a seasonal soap for this summer called Garden Party which confidentially was inspired by the British drink the Pimm's Cup, which we both love. Unfortunately, we don't have any kind of official relationship with Pimm's brand so shhh.

I have been using versions this soap for literally 9 months as we have gone through various iterations, and I love what we came up with. It's my fave. We also have shampoo bars, which I also use and they are also great. If you wanna eliminate a little bit of plastic from your life, you can save a little bit by buying the Garden Party with the Dew Drop Shampoo Bar. When you subscribe, you get it cheaper. You can also use the code Welcome25 to get 25% off your first order of any subscription and shipping is free on all subscriptions, which is usually like six bucks. So you're saving money like five ways. They both smell absolutely delightful, they're all natural ingredients, 100% biodegradable packaging, and 100% of the profit goes to charity.

And yes, you can subscribe and it's very easy to manage that subscription. So if you wanna try out different flavors of soap–they're not flavors. Don't eat soap. You can just log in and switch them out and if you end up with too much soap, cancel with the button. It's very easy. You don't have to talk to anybody.

John, welcome back. I'll see you on Tuesday.