Say you’re a satellite radio company with a loyal, even evangelical customer—someone who listens daily, who keeps buying your products for the people around him, and who steadily expands his own collection of your hardware and subscriptions. Wouldn’t that be a great guy to screw over? Sirius seems to think so.
subscriptions
Blockbuster Store Requires New Members to Sign Up For Online Service?
By 2.20.07
The guy at the counter told me that I had to show a driver’s license and major credit card (perfectly reasonable), pay a $10 dollar fee (a bit much, but acceptable) and sign up for their Netflix ripoff, Blockbuster Online. Wait, what? I told him that I didn’t want to sign up for Blockbuster Online, and he refused to let me start a membership without signing up. And of course I couldn’t rent movies without a membership, so I was forced to leave without my movies.
Third-Party Text Packages Cost Subscriber $7,000 In One Month
By 2.11.07
TampaForums member Treysdad received a $7,243.29 bill after subscribing to numerous third-party text packages. By purchasing an unlimited text message plan from Nextel, Treysdad thought he could receive any texts for free.
Car And Driver Is A Bitch
By 11.7.06
Car and Driver magazine sent Jim a real jerkoff collections notice, made all the more worse because his payment wasn’t even yet past due.
Match.com Joins The 19th Century
By 9.28.06
Match.com has sagely decided to stop requiring you to send a telegram to cancel your subscription.
Happy Sunshine Fun-Time Magazine Customer Service Happiness
By 9.26.06
Maybe it’s because of the nice sunny weather we’re having after days and days of dreary, grey weather, but we’re in a good mood today. And our good mood means we’re less inclined to take the all-companies-suck-all-the-time perspective that some readers seem to think we need to be employing. Sometimes, believe it or not, companies screw up and then actually fix the problem.
Adweek Bilks Blogger
By 9.15.06
PR blog maven B.L. Ochman says Adweek screwed her over by charging her $19.95 a month for a magazine subscription she didn’t order.
Reader Gets Scammed For $1000’s in Bogus Magazine Subscriptions
By 8.9.06
Anya responded to a telemarketer’s call 2 years ago and bought some magazine subscriptions. She thought she was going to pay “somewhere between 14 and 44 dollars a month,” and paid with her debit card.
Even Brits Can’t Cancel Their Subscriptions
By 6.16.06
…and, of course, it’s not just AOL who instructs their customer service reps to exhort, pressure, extol even bully canceling customers into staying with the service. The entire industry of cancellation call centers seems to work upon customer retention quotas. And it’s not just in the U.S.
Best Buy Dupes Customers into Worst Mag Subscriptions
By 2.16.06
In a classic bait-and-switch, customers allege that Best Buy tells people they get a free magazine subscription and then charges them for it.
