There is a scene in the popular 2000s TV show, friends, where Chandler is a member of the gym even though he doesn't ever work out there. Although he wants to stop paying the monthly premium, he can't get himself to quit because a dreamy spandex girl always changes his mind. Ross goes to the gym with Chandler to give him the courage to quit. But when the girl appears, Ross ends up getting a membership for himself, knowing very well he is unlikely to use it. Ross and Chandler eventually have a great idea to solve their problem: they decide to close their accounts at the bank so the gym can't charge them. Yet they end up unable to do so when the bank officer brings out a beautiful employee, and as a result not only do they not close their accounts but end up opening a new joint account instead. Turns out, in many ways we’re Chandlers in our own lives - and it's not entirely our fault.
I signed up recently for a makeup subscription service called Allure Beauty Box. The company sends you six handpicked cosmetics a month for $19. But what the service provides me feels deeper.
For that fee, I get the joy of walking to the mailroom to pick up a new package more frequently than I otherwise could, and try out makeup I wouldn’t normally have the time to shop for otherwise. And honestly, I’ve felt more confident lately.
Our subscriptions can have a powerful hold on us, according to a study published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research. We chose brands, in part, as a way to “affirm, construct, and communicate,” our identities, the authors write.
“You see yourself as someone who would drive a Lexus or wear a Gucci bag,” said Jennifer Savary, one of the authors of the study and an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Arizona. “Sometimes that’s aspirational, but a lot of brands are really effective at creating meaningful associations that aren’t just about money.”
Yet this form of self-expression can cost you, nonetheless.
The subscription market has grown by more than 100% each year over the last five years, and rakes in $2.6 billion annually, according to research by McKinsey & Company. The average American shells out nearly $240 a month for their subscriptions. And a mountain of research shows some people continue to pay for services and products they don’t want or use.
Subscriptions become popular for one main reason: convenience. Whether they’re associated with a streaming service, SaaS product, or DTC retail brand, subscriptions allow companies to realize recurring revenue, while also providing customers with regular and predictable deliveries of content or products.
In fact, it seems so easy and ridiculously tempting to sign up for. But you may have noticed they're not always so easy to cancel.
Over years of research, including six studies and hundreds of participants, Savary sought to understand why people are so reluctant to unsubscribe. She and her co-researchers homed in on people with low “self-certainty.”
“Some people are very sure of who they are,” Savary said. “And there are others who are more unclear.
“They ask: ‘Am I doing the right things with my life?’”
Those people (which sounds like all of us on at least some days) can find it harder to ditch subscriptions if they believe those services or products help solidify their identity. And companies prey on our shaky senses of self. They know most of us want to signal things about ourselves: Status, power, glamour, practicality. “The list goes on and on,” Savary said.
So this is what you are going to do today.
Go back to your budgeting plan. For more on that, read this article, and reevaluate your subscriptions to see what fits best with the rest of your budget. Take a look at every service you subscribe to and see if there are any you could eliminate, Pruemm suggests. “It happens all the time – you sign up for a free 30-day trial and forget to cancel when the trial ends. You tell yourself you’ll cancel the subscription before the next automatic deduction and life happens and you forget yet again.”
These days, it isn't only entertainment streaming subscriptions to keep track of, but others from cosmetics to meal plans. It used to be that coffeehouses were a hotbed of money mismanagement, according to personal finance experts, but in recent years it's subscriptions.
So do your own little audit to see what you're paying for, that you might not need anymore. I've done it myself and found three or four things that I was like, 'Oh yeah, I have this thing I've never used that in years - like my Amazon prime student account which was free the first 6 months but then began to charge me monthly. Similarly, do you need Hulu and Netflix when you know you barely get the chance to watch a show anyways? Now is the time for some hard decisions to be made, but hey the bright side? You feel so much closer to the accounts you choose to keep open!
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