Subscription Hostages

Raise your hand if this sounds familiar: You sign up for a service or a product online. When you go to cancel, you discover the only way to stop the subscription is to write an email or—even worse, make an actual phone call. In this episode, we try to get to the bottom of why this consumer trap persists, especially in the newspaper industry, and what it says about a company's confidence (or lack thereof) in what it's selling.