Your Wallet Is Being Drained by Subscriptions. Wall Street Thanks You.

Try to count how many subscriptions you have. We’ll wait.

There is your Amazon Prime and your Spotify—those you are married to. What about the Apple TV+ subscription you have been meaning to cancel since you binge watched Ted Lasso…last summer? Scroll through your cellphone (itself another subscription) and you might find a Calm app your doctor recommended but you never actually used, or a dating app you did use and hated, but will probably use again. There is the Chewy subscription to feed your dog, the DoorDash subscription to feed yourself and the Peloton subscription to work off the food you just ate. And, of course, there is also The Wall Street Journal subscription necessary to read this article.

The strategy of locking people into small, recurring payments predates the internet and even credit cards, but it gained momentum during the pandemic. It doesn’t just add up to a lot of money for many household budgets—it has created hundreds of billions of dollars of value on Wall Street. Companies that get it right and keep you satisfied, or at least paying, have been rewarded richly for their predictability and rapid growth. Subscription businesses saw revenue grow by more than 300% between 2012 and 2018, five times faster than the overall pace of the companies in the S&P 500, according to management consulting firm McKinsey.

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It helps that people pay on autopilot. Surveys by consulting firm West Monroe show Americans have long underestimated their monthly subscription spending. As of 2021, 100% of respondents were unaware of what they actually spent on subscriptions, with consumers actually spending 3.4 times more than what they guessed. A surprising 13% of respondents were off by more than $400 a month.

Getting people to enter their payment details is more than half the battle. A 2016 survey by fintech startup Hiatus found more than 70% of consumers continued paying for unwanted subscriptions because they simply forget to cancel the service before it is renewed. About a fifth of respondents said they continued subscribing to things they didn’t even want because it took too much effort to cancel services. Others said they didn’t cancel because they thought they would eventually need the subscription again. Some companies, such as gym chain Planet Fitness, seem to make canceling your membership intentionally cumbersome, ironically banking on customers’ laziness.

More..

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spending-on-subscriptions-average-11670529385 (subscription, ha!)