Yeah, I’m in the pound sand camp here, and I feel morally fine about it.
If your product is worth $1 million and I use it I will pay you. If I don’t want to use it I’ll call you and tell you to come pick it up. Let me know how your business model works out.
Of course, that’s exactly why they have laws (at least in the US) that you can keep unsolicited products, so stuff like in Bone’s scenario does not happen.
Again, that is not how newspaper delivery contracts work IME. Your order is a separate thing from your payment method. If your CC is rejected, that’s just like your check bouncing. It doesn’t get you out of paying for your order. And newspaper delivery orders are like orders for trash pickup, or electrical service. Once they’re activated, they typically stay active until canceled.
In other words, the “courtesy” here is the same courtesy that your power company will give you if your monthly payment is late, or the payment method is rejected. They don’t instantly cut off your electricity, and you are assuredly still expected to pay for it.
Subscriptions for the paper are not the same as your electrical utility. Every time I have ever subscribed to the paper, it has been for a set period, it is not an evergreen agreement. Once the set period is near ending, the paper has sent me a renewal notice. At that point, I get to decide whether to renew or not. This works the same way for magazines and other periodicals.
ETA: the other difference between your utility and the newspaper is that with your power, gas and water, you pay in arrears, meaning after you use the service. With the paper and other periodicals, you pay in advance before you receive the paper.
When did you tell them you wanted to stop the subscription?
It sounds like you only did this AFTER they had been delivering to your house for two months without any payment from you?
You don’t mention that you ever told the paper you only wanted the subscription to last for as long as the card.
I’d say you owe the money, and are now just trying to be a jerk about it
I’ve seen, and been a party to both ways - one was a 12 month prepayment and the other was a month to month payment with an open ended termination date.
In any case - the OP never mentions that this was a fixed term contract, but only that he decided not to continue when the card expired - it doesn’t seem as though this was communicated to the paper till two months later.
Local as in small town?
Pay them, they won’t be around much longer.
What does morality have to do with a contract? The contract specifies what remedies are available to both parties if non-payment occurs. There is no reason either party is morally obligated to do any more than what is specified in the contract.
The only agreement I am morally obligated to honor is one that is concluded with an oral pact and a handshake. As soon as lawyers are involved and terms are written, I have no moral obligation beyond what is written in that contract.
Oral pacts sealed with a handshake can be legal contracts too. Much harder to prove but not impossible.
But in this case I think he has the legal and moral obligation to pay. His agreement (it seems, not sure) was that he was to keep getting the paper until he cancelled his subscription. Having your CC on file expire isn’t cancelling his subscription.
IANAL, but I was a paperboy. We had many customers fail to pay some months and we’d bill them for it the next month. Unless they cancelled, they were on the hook to pay. If it appeared that they were no longer living there or hadn’t paid after repeated efforts we’d stop their paper delivery but they still owed us for the months they didn’t pay for yet.
That’s not how one cancels subscriptions.
I can see by feedback the onus was probably on me to get the paper absolutely cancelled so I’ll cough up the dough, but re your point about subscriptions *it is *the way, on a practical basis, I’ve have cancelled a number of online services for things that tried to auto-renew to an expired card that I really wasn’t all that interested in continuing like virus program renewals, or various memberships (consumer reports etc. ) that had lost their utility. In some cases the card expiring and their notices to me that the card was invalid for re-upping reminded me I was enrolled and made me stop and think if I really wanted or needed the service. In all these cases the service stopped dead when the card did not renew and no one chased me for courtesy extensions.
Realistically, even if he had explicitly told them, five times each verbally and in writing, with a notary and Fair Witness, that he intended to end his subscription, he probably would have still continued to get the paper for six months afterwards. In the newspaper business, you are not the customer, you are the product. The only reason they charge for subscriptions at all is to prove to their customers that their product is actually reading the papers, and the longer they can pretend you’re still subscribing (and hence a viable product), the better.
You can’t actually cancel a newspaper subscription. All you can do is stop paying for it.
In pound sand camp. This is also a horrible and possibly predatory business model which can create misunderstandings. Once the card doesn’t work the service should stop and the customer immediately notified.
A few years ago, the local newspaper started leaving a Sunday copy in my driveway for about a month. I called them and they told me it was a promotion to attract new subscribers and that they hoped I would enjoy it with their compliments. There was no obligation on my part.
I said I didn’t think he had a legal obligation to pay. And I qualified it with a version of YMMV. I believe within some reasonable boundaries that people have a moral obligation to pay for things of value that they receive in error and then use. The reasonable boundaries part makes it tricky in this case, we are right at the edge. Look at **Chronos’ **comments, and also consider that a modern newspaper is next to worthless, perhaps the paper it’s printed on would be worth more before ink was splattered all over it. I don’t think the OP had “the onus was probably on [astro] to get the paper absolutely cancelled” either, he just had to make some minimal effort.
And I’m not proclaiming myself as a greatly moral man either, pride makes me pay for the things I receive and use more than morality does.
Count me in as “pound sand”.
Supplying a card for reoccurring bill is an authorization to use that method of payment once monthly (or whatever) for that service. It is a convenience to the vendor, so that they do not need to to unnecessary paperwork. But functionally it’s the same as pre-paying every month-- the only difference is each transaction is pre-authorized.
And just like pre-paying every month, if the service isn’t paid for it, it doesn’t happen and the merchant should reach out to see if another form of payment can be provided. If my card is declined at the grocery store, they ask if I have another way to pay, not just hand me the groceries.
It’s not hard for them to send you an email confirming what you want. They decided not to. M
You are assuming rather a lot here. The OP seems to rather freely admit that he didn’t look at the online account management system or whatever the newspaper uses and if he’s anything like me he probably has billing emails for auto-pay accounts sent to spam.
The subscription did not lapse. The subscription is for a set period. The method of payment lapsed. If the credit card you used to pay your power bill expired, would you rather (a) have your power shut off immediately, or (b) have your service continue while the utility attempts to contact you?