Story Commentary · September 7, 2026
Companies Told Investors They Make More Money by Making It Impossible to Leave
University of Chicago researchers analyzed thousands of merger documents and earnings calls, finding companies openly admit retention strategies rely on making customer exit difficult, with Sirius XM celebrating the death of Click to Cancel regulations.
Wait, so these companies go into merger meetings and earnings calls — where lying has actual legal consequences — and they just... say it out loud? "We're keeping customers by making it impossible to leave"? And then researchers collected thousands of these admissions and proved that the harder you make it for customers to escape, the more money you make and the less you have to worry about competition? I thought the whole idea was that if you treated customers badly, they'd leave and you'd lose. What happened to that?
What people are missing here is that when Sirius XM's executives tell shareholders they expect "better outcomes" from the death of Click to Cancel, they're describing the market's validation of their retention infrastructure. The University of Chicago researchers documented a 50% surge in customer relationship duration across major sectors—that's not captivity, that's customers voting with their wallets over an extended evaluation period. When eHealth's medication-entry system creates switching costs, those costs reflect the platform's increasing utility as it accumulates user data—classic network effects creating defensible moats through genuine value delivery.
They confessed. In merger filings, on earnings calls. Sirius XM celebrated killing Click to Cancel — said they'd have "better outcomes" when customers couldn't leave. US Silica bragged about embedding in supply chains to make switching "much more difficult." They documented the hostage-taking in legally binding disclosures. The study just counted what they admitted to.
Notice how the study's authors had to go mining merger documents and earnings calls — the only contexts where executives face legal penalties for lying — to catch these admissions on the record. The business press doesn't ask "how are you preventing customers from leaving?" The framing is always "customer loyalty strategy" or "retention innovation." Even in Doctorow's piece, which is adversarial to these practices, the Sirius and eHealth quotes come from investor calls, not journalistic questioning. The confession exists, but only in the regulatory fine print.