Interestingly, I don't think a court would look kindly on intentionally obfuscated or difficult cancellation procedures imposed on a contract unilaterally. And I don't think the cost/benefit ratio favors a firm taking someone to court on this. (Collections may be an option for them, and I'm not sure how you challenge the validity of a charge or who decides.)
They don't have to take you to court at all, they will just send your bills to collections and nuke your credit score.
Yes, but you can challenge the bill. Otherwise anyone could send anyone to collections for anything.
I feel like challenging the bill and fixing your credit score would be much harder than jitsu cancelling the thing in thy first place?
It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message.
how? do you have some paper trail of attempts to cancel?
I imagine that would do. I've never done it but I suspect there is a dispute process, even if it is corrupt (for example, administered by the collections agency).
Always wondered why there are no large scale protests against credit score. I wouldn't live in a country where corporations got such power. Not entirely sure why there is not more outrage about it; it doesn't benefit anyone but big corporations, so why does the average or even any citizen (rich people just probably pay their cable or gym even if they don't want to, but it's not benefitting them either?) just take it? It's a debilitating thing which china happily copied from you and 'improved' on.
A lot of things in USA benefit nobody but -big- corpos, it is kinda "by design".
In many countries, if one gym is annoying and doing weird things, you move to another one the next month. But when all the gyms are owned by the same company or two, they can go away with such behaviour.
We can see it in this article too.