It’s long overdue. Seems like a common sense thing but it’s different than the typical type of legislation so it seems unexpected.
My mom told me about her bank “it’s impossible to get anyone on the phone anymore” and I didn’t believe it. I tried myself and wow, she was right. The fraud department, sure . Just basic customer service, though, they’d take you in circles with their robot phone menu, make you repeatedly verify your information, then just hang up on you. Pretty wild that’s how a major bank can get away with treating their customers.
Major bank is probably the problem. I’ve never had issues contacting a live person at our credit union, nor with any customer service at all, from resolving card issues to working with us to make a loan doable.
Credit Unions are one of the easiest examples of how socialism works in the best interest of the general public. There is a reason that they provide great customer service, and it is because they are not run by malicious capitalists.
A credit union is a financial cooperative, owned and controlled by the people who use its services. Credit unions call their owners “members.” That means that all of the money they make goes back to you, the members. It’s your money to begin with, and it’s pooled with the resources of all other credit union members.
Credit unions don’t have any outside stockholders. As non-profit organizations, credit unions are exempt from certain tax requirements. All of the money that’s deposited in accounts, all of the interest collected on our loans, every dollar that comes into a credit union stays with the credit union. That money is used to keep loan rates low and savings rates of return high.
Crazy idea, but imagine if we took that idea and expanded it to other public services.
I know, madness. Never mind.
Same. I had terrible issues with BoA, Chase, and Capital One but since switching to a local credit union I’ve been really happy with my service.
I’d like to see the wording before forming an opinion. I think it’s an awesome idea on the face of it. However, I would hate for it to kill off the CLI button a lot of credit card companies have put out. That’s exactly the kind of thing a bad actor would put in to either kill it off or make it suck so that they could point and say “See, the Dems suck and hate you!”
It’s long overdue.
It’s not “business friendly” so it’ll be DOA in Congress.
-
Dems won’t fight for it, because there’s no donor money coming in as a reward for passage.
-
Republicans will fight it aggressively, because they’ve got an enormous financial incentive to be seen as on the side of these corrupt business interests.
-
State and municipal governments will claim they don’t have jurisdiction to set these rules locally, so we’ll never see a localized attempt to implement these rules and prove them out as useful.
-
Any compromise that does squeak through will die in the courts. Judges will throw up injunctions and gut the language, because they see a path forward in their careers by siding with big business.
-
Customers getting exploited by these laws will remain more fixated on immigration and foreign wars and abortion and national debts as hot-button issues, because the candidates in their districts simply won’t talk about this part of the platform.
-
YouTubers, AM Radio shock jocks, and other shill influencers will make up elaborate conspiracy theories about why the rule is bad, because that’s what they’re paid to tell people.
Its the same fucking game every time.
Pretty wild that’s how a major bank can get away with treating their customers.
None dare say the words “Break up the monopolies”
I was in the Investment Banking Industry during the 2008 Crash and its aftermath and paid a lot of attention to what was done in the places with the largest Financial Industry companies (which most definitely includes the US) and the Democrats (at a time Obama was POTUS) were almost as much to given large Financial Institutions whatever they wanted with no restructuring and no conditions, as the Republicans.
Further, remember how Hilary Clinton suffered when running against Trump because just before starting her campaign she was personally paid half a million dollars to go give a speech to a bunch of Goldman Sach’s types.
(Interestingly, after his unconditional rescue and support for the Finance Industry, Obama too made a lot of money giving speeches to these types).
Even more, remember that the 2008 Crash was the result of Bill Clinton repealing the Glass-Steagal that kept Investment Banking separate from Retail Banking (and the consolidation you can see in that chart would not have been possible without it, since all of those you see above joining are Investment Banks that merged or bough Retail Banks or are Retail Banks that opened Investment Banking divisions).
The Democrats might be less prone to Fascism (though Biden’s undying love and military support for Genocidal ethno-Fascists shows it’s hardly a line they won’t cross so long the Fascism happens abroad) and indulging in Ultra-Conservative Moral Proms, but very few of them are there representing “The People” rather than representing those who can afford to buy them with non-executive board memberships, gold-plated consulting positions and millionaire speech circuit gigs.
Here’s a tip: you can go to a branch and have someone there dial the number for you. They have a special line for some problems with lower wait times. Plus, if they have to dial the normal line they know that exact buttons to press to get a person.
Having worked for a major bank before in one of their customer service departments, I would typically get the brunt of it from people who had to navigate that labyrinth, it was sometimes just as easy for workers to get lost on the inside as people on the outside. Sometimes I thought it was just all poorly planned out and not necessarily out of any ill intent, but other times it seems like the whole thing was just designed that way to get people to quit trying. Sometimes we would go through with the customers through the whole dumb system ourselves just to make sure they were getting to the right place, but still run into all sorts of road blocks or find out later from the account notes that wherever we got them to still couldn’t help them. And it doesn’t help when customer service reps are being graded by their time on the phone, staying on a call longer than whatever the designated cycle time counts against customer service reps, so the motivation is to get people off your phone as quickly as possible.
Gyms are ridiculous with their requirements to quit. When my Dad was alive, I needed to cancel his gym membership because he could barely walk and it just wasn’t necessary anymore. They required that he show up in person to cancel the membership. So I had to get my Dad out there in a wheelchair or walker or whatever we were using at the time just to cancel something that we should’ve been able to cancel over the phone.
Lucky you got to it while he was still alive. They probably would have still enforced this policy if he had died and not yet canceled.
I can’t think of anything that would get them to end the policy faster than the manager having to deal with someone dragging a corpse in there.
Telecommunications industry reform plz
There would be nothing to print since many of these laws are squashed with the automatic filibuster threat and the general US system built on obstruction so they never make it to a vote.
The majority of laws that end up getting passed are either because horrible people are angry enough to stick with it or it sounds like a positive thing, but is bad enough to get the horrible votes (Patriot Act).
What I want to see them tackle is automatic renewals for subscriptions. It should be the law that when you sign up for a subscription service, you have to opt in if you want automatic renewal. What every service does is make you sign up for automatic renewal, and then you have to remember to cancel. And even though most sites will extend your subscription to the date you’ve paid thru so you can go cancel right away, that’s never stated clearly on their site.
I like what they recently did with the phone contracts here in Germany. The initial contract is 2 years and still renews automatically but you can cancel monthly after those 2 years.
Automatic renewal is fine if it’s not automatically renewed for a whole year or more imho as it’s usually just convenient
We have this in the Netherlands for almost all subscription products, except it is a initial contract period, (max 2 years )and then it becomes 30 day… not even month to month.
Exceptions are specific to insurance products and some other things but even most of these orgs now just go with 30 days after the initial contract.
And contracts must be able to be cancelled the same way it was started.
I found out the hard way that Hulu ends your subscription immediately.
Edit: I was remembering a free trial, not paid subscription.
Is that even legal in the States? Or do you at least get a partial refund for the remainder of the month?
That’s not even true, it shows clearly on their website that is not the case
https://help.hulu.com/article/hulu-cancel-hulu-subscription
