Along similar lines, Tad Williams dedicates each of his Otherland books to his dad but notes his dad doesn't read his books so probably won't know about it. By the 4th book his dad still doesn't know and he mentions something like "I'm thinking of creative ways to let him know like getting all my family in a room and saying 'Everyone that hasn't had a book dedicated to them take three steps forward...oops actually dad...'
They let you sign up for an annual discount but still pay monthly. The cancelation fee is if you try to end the annual commitment early. If you just sign up monthly(seriously always do this when you see these offers) there is no cancellation fee.
I had been paying monthly for 13 years straight and they still demanded a cancellation fee because it turned out I was on an annual commitment (which by the way they hiked the price of by 50% with a month’s notice and by the time you notice the larger payment go out you are in a whole new 12 months).
Ok so you were on an annual plan to save money and when you cancelled you had to pay an exit fee to account for the annual discount. Seems reasonable to me.
They gave you a months notice of the price increase and you didn't cancel until after it went into effect?
An annual plan shouldn't require a termination fee. If I purchase an Annual Subscription, I should be able to cancel it whenever, with no fee whilst retaining the benefits for my subscription, as I paid for a whole year up front anyways....
Adobe software being a subscription service is nonsense too, but thats for another discussion.
Yes, and if you get an annual plan from adobe and pay up front there is no fee for cancelling. The fee is if you get an annual plan with a monthly payment and cancel early.
I remember when it was like $600 for photoshop for a single version(like 25 years ago so what would that be today?). The subscription pricing is a steal.
If the subscription pricing was a "steal" and the perpetual licensing was genuinely more expensive and worse, they'd still offer the perpetual licensing.
Instead they killed it, they clearly do not want to cannibalize their subscription offing. It clearly makes them more money.
Your first point is valid, I was misunderstanding the yearly subscription pricing, they offer an upfront payment as well as a monthly (but with year commitment).
I believe still however, if you pay for a year, cancel, you still get access cut off. Which is absurd.
The subscription pricing makes it more accessible to consumers where as previously the only people that paid for licenses were companies(and probably only large companies given it was basically always the most popular warez). So they charge less per release but they dramatically increase the possible consumer base and release lumpy revenue based around semi-regular annual releases with constant cash flow. So on a per user basis it is without a doubt cheaper but overall they can still make a lot more money.
>I believe still however, if you pay for a year, cancel, you still get access cut off. Which is absurd.
I've not seen anyone claiming this actually happened but maybe I just missed them? Everyone I've seen has said the opposite.
It’s perfectly normal to have a fee for breaking a lease. And that’s what an annual subscription paid monthly is anyway. It’s a commitment for an extended period of time.
If you could just stop paying and retain the discounted rate, what is an annual subscription vs a monthly one?
Varies by jurisdiction. Residential leases typically require notice, and inedequate notice (both by time and by method) nullifies the agreement. This is because the legal world generally agrees that contracts that would expose consumers with practically zero legal access or knowledge to one-sided contracts providing one party unilateral control would be unconscionable.
Even if it were technically legal it should distress you.
Because it is not obviously theft. If you are getting a discount for making a year-long commitment, and then cancel, breaking that commitment, isn't a cancelation fee appropriate?
Appreciate the suggestion but I'm terrible at editing so I just stick with PS because the cost for a month or two when I need it isn't much and it's really easy to find videos walking through exactly what I need to do. Even a single hour spent trying to translate a tutorial would more than wipe out the savings.
No, the complaint with Adobe is that if you cancel, they terminate access immediately rather than at the end of the billing period. There is no explanation for this other than a predatory one; they’re betting you’ll forget to cancel by the time your bill comes around. The immediate termination is effectively depriving you of the next N months of access for which you already paid.
This isn't true though. Again like with the annual plan people are confusing things. I just looked it up and checked a few reddit posts to confirm and heres what's happening.
If you cancel in the first 14 days they terminate immediately and refund you. After the 14 days the subscription is cancelled and you keep access until the point you paid for. If you signed up for an annual contract you have a cancel fee of 50% of the remaining agreed amount.
Your deceptive design link is literally outlining the plan discussed in the rest of this thread.
The first one in your deceptive design was:
Adobe: Unclear yearly subscription terms and cancellation fees
"Apparently monthly subscriptions, but you are signed up for a year. Cancelling early results in a 50% of remaining months subscriptions being applied as a cancellation charge."
Then you click through to look at it and the button the user selects says
Annual, Paid Monthly
Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days
With an information popup.
Scrolling through the rest all of it is them just selecting this option without reading the details then being upset when the Annual plan is an annual plan.
I have no clue why they decided to settle that lawsuit since they still have the same plan. I'm not a lawyer.
You are describing the current state of Adobe subscription. If you check out the post linked on the deceptive.design page [1], one of the replies states [2]:
after the original thread a year or so ago, team made a clearer way to show pricing options to give ppl/teams who buy an annual sub a discount w/o paying it all up front
So the clear language is new. And that doesn't touch on the losing access during the current billing period either.
> I have no clue why they decided to settle that lawsuit
Because they have changed their subscription page as part of the settlement. All the posters telling you how Adobe ripped them off are describing Adobe from before the settlement.
This screen shot is too heavily cropped for me to know exactly what the page explained. I'm going to go ahead and assume this was intentional on the part of the x poster. I've been using Adobe subscriptions on an off for several years so before this point and somehow manage to continue to be able to cancel.
Nowhere did anyone say people were unable to cancel. What they said was that cancellation fees were hidden, and that access to Adobe products was disabled as soon as a subscription was cancelled, even for periods that were already paid for.
>No, the complaint with Adobe is that if you cancel, they terminate access immediately rather than at the end of the billing period. There is no explanation for this other than a predatory one
This is exactly what Shutterstock does. What's maddening is that you can be getting a monthly charge, but are locked into a year contract. If you cancel, they'll continue to charge monthly but without being able to use the service. It's absurd.
Yup, you save a few dollars per verification on shipping in exchange for spending tens of thousands on training each employee to verify items. Mind you these are retail employees so turnover is going to be high. Also since they need to be able to verify everything they won't have time to be in store since they'll constantly need to be studying new products. That or you just have them work off checklists for each product in which case the value of the verification isn't great since counterfeiters will just buy those check lists and manufacture to them.
The end result is much much higher cost per verification, and a less trusted quality of verification. But you save a few bucks on shipping.
Gamestop in Canada isn't owned by Gamestop in the US. They were also historically unprofitable so people might be in the stores but they aren't buying enough.
>A fraction of that profit does come from interest income.
More than half of it came from interest income.
Gamestop has been unable to grow revenue since Cohen took over, failed initiative after failed initiative. The only thing saving them is their meme stock nature and a legion of people willing to throw good money after bad allowing them to dilute shareholders to build a warchest.
They have increased profit by closing something like 50% of their stores but you can't grow a retail company by constantly closing stores at some point you have to find a way to make the stores more profitable and in 5 years with tons of different attempts they've not found that. Revenue is down almost 50% in the past 3 years.
Having a pile of cash doesn't matter if you have a leader who has no good ideas for how to invest it to improve returns for shareholders, all it does is allow you to die for longer.
Not growing revenue would be one thing, they're shedding revenue at pace - 50% decline since 2020.
> Shareholders seem to agree
First, it's a meme stock. The market can remain irrational for long periods. Another way to analyze it - almost all of the market cap of ~$10b is the $9b in cash. The shareholder pricing tells you they value the business at it's cash assets.
Gamestop's business of physically selling video games, consoles, etc is a dying/dead industry. Nothing can change the trajectory of the market that is almost completely disappeared.
It's a Blockbuster or Tower Records, a dead business running on fumes and memestock valuation.
A strong cash position business like that is effectively a finance sort of business, in other words, exactly the kind well positioned to go conduct an LBO.
> A strong cash position business like that is effectively a finance sort of business
You are conflating companies that make a lot of cash (and therefore can afford debt service) to a company that has limited cash flow, but has a large pile of cash.
The shareholders would be best served by a special dividend of the cash. Management has shown zero ability to grow a business.
In this case, the shareholders don't want a special dividend and prefer to own a company that has a strong cash position. There is nothing at all wrong with shareholders choosing that.
There are plenty of other stocks to invest in if one wants a highly-leveraged company that is trying to grow really fast.
Tightening your belt is a good thing. No disagreement there but it has a hard limit. You can't just keep tightening the belt and growing profit, at some point you have to start revenue expansion again and from what I've seen Gamestop has no way to do that.
At $2.50 they had massive amounts of debt they couldn't service and a very real chance of going out of business. Then through pure luck they became a meme and were able to extract $10b from investors so of course they are worth more today. There is no growth story though so as meme investors get bored and move on it will move back down to it's asset value unless they find a way to grow again.
The meme investors can stay irrational long before gamestop gets a growth story. If they haven't given up on their get rich quick scheme that's lasted over five years now, I really don't think they're going to jump ship now.
The sad part is that gamestop is offering 55 billion, yet only has 9 billion in cash. The only way they come up with that much capital to buy ebay is to dilute the existing shareholders to a point that "to the moon" will just be moondust.
Well hey, what do you think about them buying eBay? eBay seems to think a lot of the value is in verification - grading cards, authenticating watches, shoes, handbags. GameStop has a similar business in collectibles and could provide eBay with a physical footprint that would let a lot of that verification happen easier, in-store.
I honestly don't know anything about ebay these days to comment on them but many many people have tried to make a business of providing a storefront for ebay in the past and they've basically all failed so I don't think that bodes well for the main offering Gamestop has.
Also Gamestops verification business is not done in stores AFAIK. I'm pretty sure they've just partnered with PSA to allow you to drop off cards at stores but they are sent away to be authenticated. The stores don't really add any value for most people in this transaction and add a potential downside in that there are multiple reports of Gamestop store employees stealing cards handed over for grading.
Training retail employees to be proper verifiers seems like a huge risk and a huge cost since you need to train them up on how to handle everything where with centralised grading locations you can have specialists(think antiques roadshow).
The verification stuff is minimal. That's not where eBay makes it's bulk of money but it's a reasonable growth area. There's a huge opportunity though for eBay or someone to tie several loose ends and concepts together and have a serious competitor to Amazon.
I have a list in reminders called names so when someone tells me their name as soon as I can use my phone without it being impolite I open it up and add a quick note with the names.
- neighbour watering lawn Jack, wife Gemma, daughter Jane
Then I try to remember it later in the day and confirm with the note. I do that the next couple days and it's locked in and I can delete the note.
I've found that the same works for me when I put forth the tiny bit of time and effort to actually do it.
Just a quick note somewhere (phone is easy-enough, or for a long time I carried a waterproof Field Notes notebook with a Fisher Space Pen and that worked a bit better), to be reviewed later.
Maybe that review happens an hour from now. Maybe it happens in a week, or a month. Or maybe all of these. Refreshers are good.
I don't even have to write much, if anything, about the person; the mere act of taking down the names usually helps a ton with my ability to recall the context later.
If I can remember when and where I took that note (which I can often do very easily), then the rest of the details fill themselves in quite nicely.
(I don't erase the notes, so as to let them remain useful to me later. I don't care if that creeps anyone out; my intentions are pure and the problem I'm trying to solve is very real. Its creep-value is really no worse than the contact lists that I've transferred between cell phones, pocket computers, and now pocket supercomputers for nearly a quarter of a century.)
The creep-value of keeping your lists is zero. It's no different to a journal or the options you gave.
I just delete the ones from mine after a while since they aren't needed and makes it more likely to lose focus on the new ones I'm still actively remembering.
In that case though Paramount offloaded 25% to foreign wealth funds and had Larry Ellison willing to provide guarantee on(according to google) almost $50b of debt.
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