It’s a new year. Time for some new habits. As Michelle Lloyd of United Art Space says, time to decide what to shelf and what to delve (deeper into).
So, one of the things I decided it’s time to shelf is some of my online subscriptions. Not so long ago, I was subscribed to four different streaming services – count ‘em, four! Three of them movies, one audiobooks. Britbox, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Audible.
Now, I don’t know about you, but most of those I subscribed to “just for a while,” in order to watch a particular series or get a set of particular books. And then, I was going to cancel as soon as I had watched/purchased/got that thing I came for.
Right. I watched the new “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans” on Britbox, the one with Will Coulter and Lucy Boynton. I highly recommend it, you really should… No, you shouldn’t. Because if you’re like me, you get a Britbox subscription in spring of 2022 when the series comes out, and in summer of 2023 you’re still paying for it, even though you hardly watch the channel.
And then there’s the Audible subscription. I signed up for long enough to get all six Austen novels as narrated by Juliet Stevenson, because they’re just So. Dang. Good. Now, I’ll grant you: you sign up, you pay your $15 a month ($16.74 with tax), and you get a free audiobook for that, which, if you buy it outright, would cost anywhere from $25 to $40. And you get to keep that book even after you cancel the subscription. So that’s a good deal. However. I signed up. I got my first few books. Then they offered me a deal on buying more credits, which brought each credit (i.e. each audiobook) down to about $13. Even better, right? So I got the rest of the Austens. And the whole Narnia collection (all of them for one credit!), and a few Heyers. I got what I came for! And then some! But did I pack up and leave?
Spoiler alert: No. At least not without some pretty serious struggles.
I decided to cancel my Britbox last summer. They popped up a message to the tune of “Are you really, absolutely, totally sure you want to leave? Why? WHY???” When I clicked the little button that said I was leaving because I was “trying to save money,” they offered me one month free. Heck, yeah, I’m not one to pass up a freebie! At the end of that month I went to cancel again. This time they offered me a couple of months at half price. I mean, sure, why not?
Stuck again.
I kept making myself calendar reminders, in plenty of time before the next billing due date: “Cancel Britbox.” “Cancel Audible.” “Cancel Prime.” Then the day would come around, the reminder pop up on my phone, and I’d go “Ummm, I’ll do it tomorrow…” Tomorrow came, and the reminder got postponed for another few days yet. Eventually, the billing period rolled around, and here I was, with another month of streaming services paid for that I hardly made use of.
But finally, I decided to bite the bullet and do that thing. Pull the plug, get out. But, but, but – all those benefits I’d be missing out on! I wouldn’t be able to watch Poirot whenever I felt like it, or one of the old BBC Shakespeares, like the Romeo and Juliet from 1978 that has a young Alan Rickman with floppy dark hair playing Tybalt…. Did I ever watch that Romeo and Juliet in the last two years? No. But I could have! And if I cancel, I definitely won’t be able to!
FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out, strikes full force. It’s astonishing how powerful that force is. And the streaming services, aka the people whose sole purpose for existence is to answer the question “How can I get your money into my pocket?”, play it up to the hilt. Quite literally. Trying to cancel Amazon Prime, you have to click through at least three windows that shout at you over and over “LOOK AT WHAT YOU’LL BE MISSING!” And even though most of what they’re telling me I’ll be missing is services I have no interest in (such as Amazon Music, or Amazon Photos), that phrase still has the power to make me pause, and cringe a little, and stop to consider – do I really want to cancel… really really…?
I found myself quite surprised at just how difficult it was to click those buttons to cancel. I mean, it’s not like I couldn’t sign up again anytime I want. If I get an irresistible craving some Saturday evening to watch David Suchet put “ze little grey cells” of Hercule Poirot to work, all it takes is a few more clicks of the mouse, and my Britbox subscription is reactivated. As for the Prime benefits beyond the streaming video, I can still order things from Amazon; it just takes a few days longer for the stuff to get here. If I’m really desperate for 2-day shipping on an order, I could – gasp! – pay for shipping, which would probably still cost less than $10/month…
Because that’s the thing: it’s not like they’re giving us all these wonderful services for FREE. Sure, once you’ve signed up, your forget the chunk of money that drops out of your credit card every month. The pain comes in when you first hit that button, when you perform the action of paying the money. But once the action is completed, you forget it. The pain comes in making a change. That’s what they’re relying on with their marketing strategies: once they’ve got you to take the action and make a change, i.e. subscribe to their service, it’s easier for you to not make another change, and you very quickly get to feeling that you actually deserve whatever they’re giving you, that you’re getting it without cost, “as a membership benefit.”
But there is a cost. A not insubstantial one, at that. I just (gulp!) pulled the plug on Prime and Audible. And when I did the math, I realized that with tax, that’s $27.93 that won’t be coming out of my credit card every month. I cancelled Britbox at the end of December; another $11.19 per month. That’s nearly $40 every month that I’m saving. Genuinely saving, not the fake “Save with our discounted products!” that marketing strategies like to sucker you in with.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that streaming services are bad, that you should cancel your streaming subscriptions, that cancelling is more righteous than keeping your services, that I’ll never sign up to another streaming service again, or any such nonsense.
My point is that I noticed just how difficult it is to make the choice to discontinue, even if I don’t really get my money’s worth out of it anymore. Even if I have plenty of alternatives: I have hundreds of DVDs on my shelf, and probably thousands I can get from my local library. Public service broadcasters – around here that’s Knowledge and CBC – have free movie streaming available. Librivox has thousands of public domain audiobooks, and the library has thousands more. I’m not exaggerating – thousands. And all of that genuinely, truly FREE.
Yet I found it hard to click that “cancel” button.
With all the shouting that the stream-for-money services are doing to trigger my FOMO, I’ve almost forgotten about all the resources I have available to me. I’ve let myself be sucked into the stream, into the idea that I need to keep those services because else I’ll… I’ll… I don’t know, I’ll be bored on a Saturday evening when I don’t have a movie to watch? I know. It’s ridiculous.
So I clicked the button, wincing just a little. And now I have a week to watch the last few Prime Video episodes I can’t do without (but kept putting off), and listen to the last few chapters of the free Audible book I’ve got on the go, and then I will try life without those services. But truth be told, it already feels good to know that there will be $28 less coming out of my account each month. Think of what I could do with that…
Life, the Universe, and Getting Out of the Stream. The Joy Of Missing Out.