“Auto-renew” is not a convenience. It is a license to steal, and makes keeping your checkbook balanced an impossible task…
I’ve been meaning to write this again for some time, and today’s utter paucity of news affords just such an opportunity. [icopyright one button toolbar]
The digital transition ripoff caused me to
cancel my decade-plus subscription … permanently.
Consumer advocate/radio money man Clark Howard states my thesis elegantly [emphasis added]:
RIP-OFF ALERT … I hate automatic renewals. I think they’re a gross, unethical, terrible way to do business… I know that it’s tough for people in corporate America to meet their profit goals. But there’s no reason for them to abuse customers with auto renewal clauses that bring nothing but harm. If you Google the Synapse phone number, wow, people are furious about getting ripped off on magazines!
I hate this crap, too. Which is WHY I’m not subscribing to The Nation, or most any other magazine, nowadaze. Too bad for them. Like Microsoft, American magazines have so come to see themselves as indispensable that they cannot conceive of why so much consumer rage is aimed at their exploitive, ripoff approach to consumers and why consumers don’t give a good goddam as to whether they die slowly and horribly or just die, rather than harass and harm said consumers.
What publishing USED to be
Let me give you some background (from last year’s “Media Mélange” 29 August 2013):
Speaking of education, I just tossed Vanity Fair into the ashcan of history, after more than fifteen years as a subscriber.
I transition to digital
The first thing I had noticed months ago is that I no longer open or read all the issues. Less and less, in fact.
But then came my Kindle Fire. “VF Subscribers click here!” said the button on my newstand button. And that’s where the trouble started. (I hope you’re listening Katrina vandenHeuvel).
Note Upper RH button “Current
Magazine subscribers tap here.”After a long, creepy and frustrating process, I managed to “confirm” my subscription and suddenly my issues showed up on the Kindle. Hooray! Uh, not so fast. Unbeknownst to me, Vanity Fair went into my bank account and grabbed $29.99 to renew for two years at the best price … for THEM!
Since I don’t recall EVER authorizing Vanity Fair access to my bank account, it took me awhile to cancel the transaction and figure out WHERE it came from.
Was I pissed? Was I lucky to catch it before it started wrecking my checking account? (I purposely keep my balance low for just such contingencies) Was I REALLY REALLY pissed? Yes.
(Actually, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. Snuck away in my authorization for my “free” digital component to my magazine was, undoubtedly, a sneaky paragraph authorizing ‘auto-renew’ and they took FULL advantage of it, re-upping me for two years at their best (e.g. my worst) price. I’ve only re-upped a subscription for two years twice in my life, when I was in my 20s — Rolling Stone and Playboy. The point is that they’re already out to SHEAR this SHEEP, who happens to be a loyal subscriber. What kind of moronic long-term business model is that? )
Killing all the cats in Europe wasn’t a
very bright long-term business model, either.Did calling customer service at my bank help? No. But they gave me the thieves’ … er, Condé Nast’s customer service phone number.
After the requisite half an hour on hold and no help from MY bank, etc. the transaction was cancelled. And the thing I was trying to buy online went away and the next day the money was returned to my bank account from Condé Nast.
Why don’t I authorize this crap? Because this is the crap that bounces utility checks, that starts ringing up bank charges like numbers on an old pinball machine. I NEVER authorize this crap, but I can tell you where it comes from:
PORN.
Let me amplify that: the “porn” auto-renew ripoff could ONLY function because early internet porn consumers were, almost invariably, too EMBARRASSED to complain, to make noise or to resist the blatant ripoff that the involuntary “auto-renew” signups represented.
The new American business model
It points to the fundamental evil of American business morality that the prigs at “Ancestry dot com” — as “moral” a bunch of Mormons as ever slaughtered a wagon-train — had zero problem early with importing the coercive porn model right into their fledgling business model, horrifically overpriced as it already was.
It’s OK. It’s a harmless pun. No salesman will call
That’s right: it comes from the early daze of the internets, when they were trying to put a coin slot on the web. And the “automatic renewal” scam was born. Since most of the men jerking off to the online porn weren’t about to raise a ruckus, this vile practice — without precedent in legitimate business and few ILLEGITIMATE business practice — became entrenched.
The next to embrace the notion (after the early flush of porn scammers on the web) were sites like “Ancestry dot com.”
But yeah, Ancestry dot com loves them some automatically renewing “subscriptions” and making it difficult to unsubscribe, just like the porn crooks. Only Ancestry generally wants a one year renewal at a minimum of $70 a pop. The more pricey scams can “auto-renew” at hundreds of dollars, as anyone who’s done business with them and then found their rent check bouncing can attest.
You get it?
“Auto-renew” is not a convenience. It is a license to steal, and makes keeping your checkbook balanced an impossible task.
I have always had a FIRM POLICY to either NEVER sign up for such scams, else place multiple reminders in Google Calendar so that I know to cancel days before the process can work itself out. Why? Because in the Information Age, information companies, like “vintage newspapers” or “ancestry records” or, now, “magazine subscriptions” operate on the desperate drug dealer model: not only are you a junkie, having given permission in the sign-up to engage in this egregious practice, but they consider that “good business” means that grabbing money from your bank account is GREAT for them!
A paper magazine
Screwing your customers is NOT, in the long run, good for business, unless you’re a sex worker.
I have written elsewhere about this insanity of the modern business model, wherein young MBAs-to-be read Musashi’s Go Rin No Sh0 (The Book of Five Rings) and Sun Tzu’s multi-millennial classic The Art of War to … do BUSINESS.
To do BUSINESS?
Yes. You see it in the moron at MicroSoft who years ago decided to save the wholesale .12 on a jewel box for a CD with a .03 envelope for a $900 program? (Never mind the idiotic lie we all accept, that $9.99 is NOT $10, or that gas it 109.9 instead of $1.10 and boy wasn’t THAT a long time ago?)
MSRP $1,199.00 when it came out!
HOW many programs would MicroSoft have to sell to make up for ONE customer being pissed off at the insult of paying $1,200 for a computer program that MicroSoft couldn’t be bothered to provide a decent storage box for?
THAT is called being pennywise and dollar (or pound) foolish. It is also called the basic notion of American business for a generation: customers to businesses are like humans to mosquitoes: something hot and tasty that their senses are drawn to, and from which they suck blood.
The modern practice of doing business
The notions of the ‘loyal customer’ and customer service are quaint relics of a more prosperous age.
We’re beyond all that now. We just look at them as adversaries, just like our competition. That’s what guarantees safety and quality of products.
OK: that last sentence was utter BS.
What, are we engaged in fair trade and barter (my services, my time, my ‘money’ for your services, your time, your product)? Or are they trying to kill their customers?*
(* Ask DOW, who inherited the Bhopal mess from Union Carbide, and for which a pittance was paid the Indian government, none of which ever got back to the 100,000 victims.)
Bhopal, India. A Union Carbide chemical plant accident
killed 50,000 immediately, and another 50K delayed.I think much of it is that they do not SEE their customers. They SEE marks. Targets. Rubes.
(Think how successful the gold scammers have been on Faux Nooz for years now, selling “gold” in such a way that customers paid two to three times the actual market price for bullion? Think it’s a coincidence?)
And they see their employees as WORSE.
Slavery is fine with them, as long as they don’t see it, or it’s conveniently outside of US territorial boundaries.
Simon Legree, motivational speaker
But they fail to understand that those “slaves” are the selfsame “consumers” that fuel a “consumer” economy.
I saw a shocking news item recently. It’s a little dated, but new figures are hither and thither. You’ll get the point:
From world0meters ‘cars’ counter. Click pic to enlarge.
One of those things that makes you go ‘huh’? along with the shocking Katrina-without-a-Katrina disaster of Detroit, Michigan.
Detroit in 2012. Click photo to enlarge.
How have we fallen so far? Perhaps it might have something to do with the fundamentally vampiric economic model so many industries now espouse: once you’ve signed up with us, pal, we gotcha, and can raid your bank account, change our services or generally do whatever we want for huge profits.
So, I considered subscribing to the New York Times digital.
And, like the bastards that all these paper pirates are, they pretend that no longer having to live and die at the cost of exorbitant paper prices gives them NO profit margin, and pretend that the pure “digital” subscription OUGHT to cost pretty near what the paper Times costs.
Sorry, Jack, but I don’t do business with pirates.
Do whatever we tells youse or we kills dis dog.
I remember all the months that Ralph Weinstock, my old boss at Knight Publishing, spent weeks every month scouring the continent for paper to print his magazines on.*
[* One particular issue was printed on porous but high-quality stock because that’s all Ralph could find. And, TODAY, unlike all the other magazines, it still looks like it was printed yesterday! But the porousness of the paper sucked up all black ink, making all the black backgrounds turn into weird evaporated salt pools of gray.]
Not that much different from Gutenberg
Every time they could screw the writers (like going from payment on acceptance to payment on publication) it was always the price of paper. I have listened to publishers whine about paper costs my entire professional life — which turns 37 years old this December — and, I will PROMISE you that with all that extra capital freed up in digital sales, NONE of it is going to the writers. No: the publishers want to suck up the entire paper cost savings as profit?
Go to hell. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, pal.
Or, in the case of magazines, I was about to subscribe to The Nation, except that, again, it would “auto-renew” until I cancelled.
It’s the old Book of the Month Club® scam: rely on human sloth to sell people stuff they never asked for and don’t want.
BUT WAIT! Call NOW and we’ll send you ANOTHER Iron Lung™ FREE (just pay separate crating, shipping and moving fees).
Seriously, who wants a SECOND piece of crap if the FIRST one turns out to be?
No: just shove product down our throats like a prison rapist.
NO: I am not giving you vultures access to my bank account. (One of the reasons I keep my balance low. Guess I just lost interest — but not much to begin with.)
I love the idea of subscriptions by my ebook account.
And I had a problem with the digital Vanity Fair ANYway: They did a wonderful job of scanning in the WHOLE magazine, and the WONDERFUL innovation of having stories scroll down complete, so you don’t have to cross-reference your reading like a sea-captain with his charts: (go to page 234).
And when you get there, yeah, SOMEWHERE on the page is the rest of your story, cached among the cheaper black and white ads. This is particularly obnoxious when the story breaks in the middle of a thought, a paragraph, a sentence.
But there is no way to enlarge the pictures. They remain stubbornly locked. And, frankly, even could one enlarge, they’re still stuck in the world of print on paper. Like those old National Geographics that they scanned, page by page, that you could buy decades of in the CD cutout bins years ago.
We are so wedded to the medium of print that we forget what it’s FOR: to communicate by written langage thoughts and information. The switch from paper to pixel is a minor alteration of the flow from the writer’s pen to the reader’s eye. But stuck in print, Vanity Fair digitizes from a printer’s point of view, which is akin to opening your blacksmith’s shop outside that new plant Henry Ford is building.
Why, the workers can leave their horses to be shod in the morning, and pick them up on their way out of the factory that night! A GOLD mine!
The magazine and newspaper industry is floundering, given. But they need to think of the end consumer, and CATER to them, dammit. We are not your warri0rs on killing ground, nor are we to be struck with a “sticky” sword. We are customers, and we ought to be free to patronize your business as long as it’s not crap. That’s the deal.
My patronage is earned, never compelled.
Which brings us back to Clark Howard, who notes:
Here’s my solution: If you are into magazines, Amazon.com offers fantastic deals at amazing prices. Just know that when a magazine comes up for renewal, you won’t be offered the phenomenal deal you got upfront. So I suggest you take the longest term available if you really like the magazine.
One other thing about the Amazon deal: Once you subscribe to a magazine, Amazon will send you offers for private sale deals on other titles. Some of these other offers are extraordinary. Magazines that might be $30 or $40 annually can be offered for $5 a year!
Only one weird thing: On the page for subscribing to The Nation, it says to expect my first weekly issue in 6-10 weeks.
18th century speed on 21st century subscriptions?
Seriously? You can go into my bank account, and add to the $30 billion in overdraft fees that banks stole from middle-class and poor Americans trying to scrape by in a recession that drags on — much due to a recalcitrant GOP, who seem intent on punishing us for rejecting their wars of choice, their torture, their defense of the indefensible and their fundamental cruelty and ignorance — but you can’t GET ME MY MAGAZINE in less than a month and a half to two months?
Strange goddam technology you got there, ripoff artists.
I am not singling out The Nation. All the Condé Nast(y) group that includes Vanity Fair allows ONLY the “auto-renew” function, as does the digital New York Times, the digital Washington Post and OH, so many others.
From another subscription site:
About The Nation
Issues Per Year: 47Estimated Delivery: 4-6 weeksPublishing Frequency: WeeklyPublisher Name: The Nation
Automatic Renewal Service: For your convenience, this publication is part of the Automatic Renewal Service. You will receive all the benefits of our automatic renewal program. 100% Satisfaction Guarantee – cancel at any time!
Calling a ripoff a “convenience” is so par for the course from a corrupt and worm-ravaged business morality. Crime ultimately DOES NOT PAY, no matter what the weasels of the Harvard MBA program might have told you.
How did American business get the idea that in a business PREDICATED on customer loyalty, you RIP OFF those very customers?
Who would’ve ever guessed that Burke and Hare would become
the model of American business practices in the XXIth Century?
Let me tell you, ONE overdraft from a THEFT from my bank account ended my business relationship with Condé Nast’s magazines FOREVER. Do you MBA morons REALLY think that I’m the only one?
It’s the mindless greed of the MBA, the utter inability of the greedhead to see the forest for the trees and the implicit notion that business is a Medicine Show, wherein once you sell your snake oil, you will never see your rube victims again — in MAGAZINE subscriptions?
Greed is mindless, sure, but even greedy morons with MBAs and not the sense that the good lord gave a slug ought to understand how STUPID this auto-renewal ripoff is to their business in the long run. Offer it as an option, sure. But as a mandatory fine print ripoff?
See you in the funny papers.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation
No: as soon as you offer me a square deal, Katrina, I’ll subscribe to The Nation, happily.
But not before.
So stop spamming me.
Courage.
NOTE: If your political inclinations run the other way, substitute “The Wall Street Journal” or “Weekly Standard” for “The Nation” and “Vanity Fair.” OK? Great. This has nothing to do with politics. It is about ripoffs commerce.
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Mr. Williams has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.