How to Make Customers Hate You

Exhibit A:

Soak ’em when they don’t know they’re being soaked.

Wecome to negative option billing at work. Other labels include “sludge,” “dark patterns,” “gotcha pricing,” “subscription trapping,” and “bait-and-default.” Works like this: offer a service a discount that jumps up to a high “regular” price after the discount runs out, and count on the customer forgetting when the jump happens. It’s a hugely common practice. In One example of how subscriptions suck, I described how The New Yorker does it. Every year, I call them to renew by not renewing. Instead I get the promotional price for new customers, rather than the higher price reserved for suckers who don’t bother to get the discount (which you can only get by calling them).

SiriusXM is a special case, however, because the “regular” price is more than 5x the promotional price, as we see above.

Let me explain that billing list, briefly.

$10.91 is the promotional monthly price I got in December 2023. It was due to run out a year later, but I didn’t get an email notice, because I had opted out of marketing emails, which had been a deluge. But I should have set my own reminder and didn’t, because I’m not very organized.$28.19 is a renewal fee.The customer service person at SiriusXM couldn’t explain exactly what the $40.03 or the $54.95 were for, but I suspect the first was the charge for having one car’s SiriusXM service activated, and the second was for having two cars activated, because I get the second car in March of 2024. Note that the $10.91 price was for two cars. When I added the second car, they told me there would be no additional charge with the promotional plan I was on.

Here is the page on the SiriusXM website explaining various plans. It doesn’t include the “deal” (if that’s what it was) that I got by calling customer support on the phone.

I have been a SiriusXM subscriber since 2005, when the company was just Sirius. And I have been calling them every year to get the lowest possible rate, which they always say is for new customers. There are no rewards for being a long-time customer. Instead, there are punishments.

I was so infuriated by all this today (when I learned about it) that I came very close to just saying “screw it,” and canceling. But I didn’t because I wanted to listen to the Knicks-Celtics game, which is going on right now. I also like the huge selection of SiriusXM  “stations” on the car radios and on the app. In number, variety, and quality, they far exceed what we ever had on the old-fashioned radio dial.

Sound from the app is better than sound from the satellite. On the app you can also easily pause, go back and forward through a show’s timeline, and enjoy other conveniences. But the user interface is annoying. It opens to “Discover,” which has stuff “based on your afternoon listening,” or whatever. Where in the past your selection of “Favorite” channels was displayed on a nice stable vertical grid that looked the same every time you opened the app, they are now sidelined to a list called “Library.” The list is different every time you open the app, also based on some algorithm. The whole thing is full of guesswork like that. It’s not textbook enshittification, but close enough.

Anyway, here is my new deal:

Now the discount promotional new customer monthly fee is $10.99. It doesn’t say what it will be after the Renewal Charges hit, which (it also doesn’t say) will come a year from now. But you can bet it will be more than $54.95. And not worth it. SiriusXM knows that, but they also know a lot of us are suckers. They rely on us being suckers, rather than just coming up with a good flat-price deal (like, as I recall, they had in the first place)—one that signals what the service is worth, and anyone can respect.

Naturally, there are moves afoot to fight sucker-baiting. For one, check out the FTC’s Negative Option Rule page. It’s proposed, of course. Will it ever happen? Not holding my breath.

In the meantime, SiriusXM is earning my hate.

I still like some of the channels and shows (especially Howard Stern’s and the NBA shows). But it’s hard not to hate the service.

This kind of shit won’t be fixed from the inside, and not by any of the many services selling subscription systems to companies. (Even advice on playing nice recognizes that negative option pricing is still a form of baiting and switching.)

We have to fix it from the outside. From our side: the customers’ side.

That’s what we’ve been working on for nearly nineteen years with ProjectVRM. I also have more faith than ever that we’ll succeed, through personal AI and related work.

If you want to help, let me know.