Aggressive subscription renewals are nothing new in the dying field of magazines. But reader Ben was a little surprised when the first thing he received as a new subscriber to Wired wasn’t a welcome letter or a magazine. It was a solicitation to re-up for another year.

I’m sure everyone has seen plenty of these solicitations in their mailbox. Sometimes they come a few issues into a subscription, later they get sent out several times a month nearing the end of the subscription, but this is a new one to me. I subscribed to Wired magazine a few months back and this is the first thing they have sent me. I’m getting a subscription renewal before I’ve received a single publication in the mail. On top of that, I only paid $3 on a deal-of-the-day website back when I ordered it, which is a whole lot better than the normal $10 “83% off” price.

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