Sludge (Private Sector Sludge)

Private Sector Sludge: External Facing

Thaler is a self-declared expert in misbehaving. He even wrote a book with that title. When the book was published, he was excited to get an email from his editor sharing a link to the first review of the book, in a prestigious London newspaper, no less. When he excitedly clicked on the link he ran into a paywall. Aargh! But wait, the newspaper was offering a trial subscription for a month that cost only £1. What a deal! Of course, the fact that it did cost a pound meant that he would have to provide a credit card, and he knew that inevitably he would be automatically renewed at the end of the month, so he figured he’d better check the dreaded fine print.

As he suspected, once the trial period was over, his subscription would be automatically renewed. No surprise there. But the price was a bit stiff: £27 a month for an online subscription. Still, a pound was not a lot to read the first review of a book he had managed to write without Sunstein’s help. Ready to splurge on the trial deal, he checked into how to go about unsubscribing, which he planned to do as soon as he had finished reading the review, to avoid the risk of a lifetime subscription. Here he ran into a bit of a shock. It turns out that to unsubscribe he would have to give the newspaper fourteen days’ notice, meaning that notice for the “one-month” trial had to be given well before its end. The account does not specify whether cancellation also ended access immediately. Worse, it was not possible to cancel online. You had to call the London office, not on a toll-free line, during London business hours!

This is the experience that led to the Twitter term #sludge.