The default was the toggle “on” state with the toggle turning green when enabled. You think that turning “on” an “opt out” toggle would indeed… opt you out. So they had to have the text “slide left” to tell you to turn off the toggle?
Is it just me, or does anyone else find this confusing and suspicious? I clicked the “Learn more at” link, and while it does mostly explain this new “Home Region” setting, it doesn’t say why it’s been implemented. My intuition is signaling there’s something nefarious going on behind the scenes.
Pulled the actual health club billing data behind gym contracts after wondering why I always end up picking the same "unlimited monthly" plan, and the layering of independently documented mechanisms turned out to be more extensive than I expected.
Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier tracked 7,752 members across three U.S. health clubs over three years (American Economic Review, 2006). Members who chose a flat monthly contract over $70 attended an average of 4.3 times a month, paying more than $17 per visit, even though a 10-visit pass was sitting right there at $10 a visit. On average they forwent about $600 in savings over the life of the membership. The stranger detail: monthly members were 17 percent more likely to stay enrolled past a year than annual members, despite paying more precisely for the option to cancel anytime. They paid extra for flexibility they consistently declined to use.
John Gourville and Dilip Soman studied a health club that billed twice a year instead of monthly (Journal of Consumer Research, 1998). Attendance spiked hard right after each bill, then decayed steadily until the next one. They called it payment depreciation, the psychological sting of a purchase fades the further you get from paying it, and once the sting is gone, so is the motivation to use what you paid for. Most gyms bill monthly or weekly now, which keeps that sting too small and too frequent to ever spike attendance the way a biannual bill does.
Richard Samuelson and William Zeckhauser's work on status quo bias (Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1988) explains what happens next. People default to whatever requires no action, even when a better option sits right next to it and the status quo is actively costing them money. Some cancellation processes lean into this hard, phone-only or mail-only cancellation, narrow in-person windows, while sign-up takes under a minute online.
Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer's classic sunk cost experiments (1985) cover the part where people don't cancel even after they've mentally clocked the waste. Money already spent is gone regardless of what happens next, but it doesn't feel that way, continuing to pay gets framed as "not wasting" the earlier spend instead of a second, separate loss.
And Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's anchoring research (1974) shows up in the pricing tiers themselves, three-tier menus where the priciest option sits just slightly above the middle one, making the expensive plan look like the generous choice regardless of whether you'll use the extras.
Planet Fitness is a useful real-world stress test of all of this at once. As of their most recent earnings the company has more than 20 million members on roughly $10–15/month plans, a price that only works if most members don't show up often. It's not a flaw in their model, it's reportedly the model.
The pattern got documented enough that the FTC finalized a "click-to-cancel" rule in 2024 requiring cancellation to be as easy as sign-up. A federal court vacated it on procedural grounds in 2025, and the FTC has since opened a new rulemaking process. States didn't wait either, California has had its own automatic renewal law on the books for years covering exactly this kind of contract.
Made a full breakdown of all five mechanisms here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOskQyuqi70
Curious whether anyone here has seen research treating the sunk cost effect and status quo bias as interacting rather than independent, my instinct is the sunk cost framing is doing a lot of the work in making the status quo feel actively justified rather than just default, but I haven't found a study that isolates that specifically.
Have anyone observed this dark pattern of online shopping or quick commerce apps in iphone?
No app provides you to turn off or opt out the promotional or offer notifications which overwhelms in your phone daily. Even iOS does not have an independent option to turn off promotional notifications.
Except Flipkart & Zomato, I haven’t found any app providing option to turn off in app settings.
However, Apple have been clear with the clause 4.5.4 in developer - app review guidelines that any application where users have opted in for the push notifications of promotional content there should be an option to opt out as well.
Spent the week digging into the psychology of the F&I office, the back room at car dealerships where financing and add-on products get sold, and the mechanisms stack up more than I expected.
The four-square worksheet is the entry point, a single sheet split into trade-in value, purchase price, down payment, and monthly payment. A former dealership salesman interviewed by Consumer Reports described how salespeople shift numbers between the boxes while buyers fixate on the smallest one, the monthly payment, since it feels most connected to their actual budget. Total price moves quietly while attention stays locked on one number.
Many versions of the worksheet also include a line near the top asking buyers to initial that they'll purchase the car today if the offer is acceptable, before any real numbers are even discussed. Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser's 1966 foot-in-the-door study found that securing a small early commitment measurably increases the odds someone agrees to a much larger one shortly after. The initials aren't binding, but they function as an early psychological commitment.
The financial stakes are bigger than most buyers realize. Industry data from the Haig Report put average finance and insurance profit at $2,534 per vehicle in Q3 2025, while separate benchmarking data showed front-end vehicle profit had shrunk to around $400 by year end, meaning close to nine of every ten profit dollars on a typical deal now come from the finance office, not the car.
The regulatory story is what got me though. The FTC finalized the CARS Rule in December 2023 specifically to address these tactics, projected to save consumers $3.4 billion annually. Dealer trade groups sued, and the Fifth Circuit struck the entire rule down in January 2025 on procedural grounds before it meaningfully took effect. Separately, the newer hotel/ticketing Junk Fees Rule explicitly excludes car dealerships, since they were supposed to be covered by CARS instead. As of now there's no dedicated federal rule governing this at all.
Made a full breakdown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRT4wMLrzPw
Anyone know of other cases where a federal consumer protection rule was fully created, then struck down before implementation rather than just delayed or watered down? Seems like a different pattern than the usual regulatory story.
I was looking for the 'Don't show this like fucking ever' button but ay, the QR code is more important.
While I was checking out for a product, the pop-up to join Prime showed up. I tapped on "no thanks", but it did nothing. I tried clicking multiple times, but it just grayed out. I tried refreshing and going back and forth, but nothing worked. However, when I tried clicking "Join", it worked in just milliseconds.