Internet retailers like Adore Me, JustFab, and Birchbox are placing customers into unwanted, hard-to-cancel subscriptions, leading to complaints and lawsuits
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2016 Bloomberg investigation is the early case file for what became a decade-long regulatory arc: Adore Me, JustFab, and Birchbox built their growth on subscription boxes whose sign-up flows enrolled customers into recurring charges that were deliberately hard to escape, drawing complaints and lawsuits. The FTC's later "click to cancel" rule proposal — requiring cancellation to be as easy as subscribing — is the direct institutional response to exactly this enrollment-and-retention playbook.
The pattern didn't stay confined to these three retailers: the FTC's Prime lawsuit later alleged that named Amazon executives personally drove unwitting enrollment and cancellation friction, showing the practice had scaled from startup growth hacks to the largest platforms.
First-order effects
- Adore Me, JustFab, and Birchbox face consumer complaints and active lawsuits over unwanted enrollments, putting legal exposure and refund liabilities directly on their books.
- Customers who discover the charges bear immediate financial harm and cancellation friction, which converts first-time buyers into detractors rather than repeat subscribers.
Second-order effects
- Birchbox's subsequent inability to raise funds or find a buyer — it suspended store-expansion plans within weeks of this reporting — suggests subscription-trap reputational damage compounds with investor scrutiny of retention-driven business models.
- Regulators moved from case-by-case lawsuits to structural fixes: the FTC's proposed ban on difficult-to-cancel subscriptions forces every subscription retailer to rebuild checkout and cancellation flows, not just settle individual claims.
Third-order effects
- If the click-to-cancel framework holds, subscription economics shift from maximizing involuntary renewals to competing on voluntary retention, penalizing the dark-pattern growth tactics this story documents.
- Enforcement targeting executives personally, as in the Amazon Prime case, raises the stakes from corporate fines to individual accountability across the subscription economy.
The trend: Subscription commerce is moving from growth-at-all-costs enrollment tactics toward enforced cancellation symmetry, with the FTC converting 2016-era complaints into binding rules.