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Time really flies when you're the subscription department of a big newspaper chain
By adamg on Thu, 08/29/2019 - 11:11am
Bob Sprague of Arlington reports GateHouse has found a new way to make money: Have people sign up for 52-weeks subscriptions to its newspapers, then tell them, oopsies, we're ending your subscriptions several months early, so send us more money.
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Comments
This is the sort of deceptive
This is the sort of deceptive practices thing the Attorney General's consumer protection powers should be policing.
Instead some winery will probably get fined for selling below wholesale cost.
=(
GateHouse papers are increasingly worthless & irrelevant
When they've pretty much given up on reporting local news and are now relying on what appears to be a credit card and subscription scam to stay afloat, it's time to pull the plug. Local news reporting is needed and there's a vacuum in the suburbs. If only there were more independent weeklies like the well written and reported ones in Boston's neighborhoods to fill the void. It might be a good time for some of them to swoop in and set up shop in some of the suburbs.
When I was young, I delivered the Parkway Transcript
Nowadays I know that the Bulletin has the better coverage. Sometimes I see a Transcript in passing and bemoan it's decline as a local news source.
Maybe they could save some
Maybe they could save some cash by moving their subscription department overseas. I hear Manila has good facilities.
> Manila has good facilities
...and great envelopes.
I found this to be very
I found this to be very common with subscriptions. Most people do your keep records and i do and when you call they are not polite.
I stopped
subscribing to magazines because of this. I'd start getting fake collections emails a few months before my subscription expired: "To keep your account in good standing, and to avoid damage to your credit, please pay [full price] by [date well before the subscription expires.]
Then they moved to requiring a credit card to be on file so they can charge you an "auto renew" several months in advance, and opting out of auto-renew is almost impossible to find on their website.
This is altogether too much work for the content of most magazines, which are 90% ads anyway.
Reading this article
Makes me think it’s time for me to support good journalism with a subscription to UHub.