Services Archives - Page 6 of 13

Automatic Renewal

California regulates subscriptions that renew automatically under a law first enacted in 2010. An amendment that took effect on July 1, 2025, adds annual reminders for some subscriptions. It also allows the business, when a customer cancels, to present a “discounted offer, retention benefit, or information regarding the effects of cancellation,” as long as a clear way to cancel is shown.

A federal rule went further. In October 2024 the Federal Trade Commission adopted a “click-to-cancel” rule. Its chair, Lina Khan, said: “Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription.” On July 8, 2025, a federal appeals court struck the rule down on procedural grounds, days before most of it was due to take effect.

Eight Rhymed with Great

Wells Fargo built its strategy on selling more products to its existing customers. Its chief executive, John Stumpf, wrote in a 2010 letter to shareholders that the goal was eight products per customer, because “eight ‘rhymed with great.'”

At a Senate hearing on September 20, 2016, Senator Richard Shelby read the line back to him. Employees had opened about 1.5 million deposit accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts that customers may not have authorized. The bank paid $185 million in fines, and about 5,300 employees were fired.

Land and Expand

American software companies describe a sales strategy called land and expand. The vendor first secures a small presence in a client’s organization. Then it grows the account.

The result is reported to investors as net revenue retention. A rate above 100 percent means that revenue from existing customers grew by more than the company lost from customers who left or cut back. Snowflake reported a net revenue retention rate of 131 percent as of January 31, 2024.

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Amazon product pages show what other customers bought with the item. In January 2003, three Amazon engineers, Greg Linden, Brent Smith and Jeremy York, described the method in IEEE Internet Computing: “finding items that customers tend to purchase together.”

They were open about the purpose: “Recommendation algorithms provide an effective form of targeted marketing.” Their click-through and conversion rates “vastly exceed those of untargeted content such as banner advertisements.”

Super Size It

In the summer of 1987, McDonald’s introduced Super Size in the United States. At the counter, the customer could be asked: “Do you want to super size that?”

In March 2004, six weeks after the documentary Super Size Me opened, McDonald’s announced that it would phase out the Super Size option. The company gave menu simplification and healthier choices as its reasons.

Just to Confirm

Just to confirm what we discussed… — The first line of an email sent after a call.

To recap our call… — A summary follows, so that both sides have the same record.

Can you put that in writing? — A spoken promise is not yet enough.

Boilerplate. — The standard clauses of a contract. The word first meant the iron plates of a boiler. Later it meant ready-made text that newspapers received on metal plates. Ed McBain used it for legal text in 1965: “The rest of the will was boilerplate.”

No Brown M&M’s

The concert rider of the rock band Van Halen for its 1982 world tour included the line: “M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” In his 1997 memoir, the singer David Lee Roth recalled the clause as: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

Roth explained the reason. The rider contained detailed technical and safety requirements, and the candy clause showed whether the venue had read them. If he found brown M&M’s, he wrote, “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract.”