Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you “bought” digitally.
Except when they aren’t. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.
Refunding the sale price is still theft.
What did you lose in this theft?
Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?
Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.
Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise “pay this price and own this movie” rather than “pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time”.
Better yet, demand loudly to get a refund. When they say there is nothing to refund, insist that you have an email confirming a booking.
“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” // Carl Sagan.
While a broad concept, in the context of your question, science is a metod to derive knowledge from observations.
Alternatives to the scientific method is to guess or to obtain knowledge from others. (Most other ways I can come up with, e.g. “religion” can still be sorted under these two.)
Obtaining knowledge from others is great, but may not always be available, and the quality of the knowledge derived this way depends on the reliability of the source.
For the other alternative, every sensible metric shows how science is a better method than guessing to derive knowledge.
As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).
Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter. There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/ReST -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.
The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.
Maybe widely name-calling this practice for what it is could help steer companies away from this disgusting pattern.
Should we start refering to pop-ups that give no option to say “no” as something like “rape-ups”?