Dear Toronto Star subscription department –
A couple of years ago, I got suckered into your weekend delivery option. I didn’t actually want the paper delivered every Saturday and Sunday. You see, the walk to the end of the driveway is about the same as the walk to the corner gas station. Furthermore, I am rarely home on weekends, thus the paper gets read by my landlord if at all (and even when I am home, half the time one of the horse ladies has already picked it up and hand-delivered it to my landlord’s door, and I don’t have the heart to complain about this since he already complains about the Star littering the end of the driveway when I am not here).
But, two years ago, you had such an eager young man working the grocery store, and the same thing happened to me as the thing that makes housewives buy $1500 vacuums: if you’re working the grocery store selling newspaper subscriptions, you *might* be putting yourself through school. Not only that, but my carefully planned and executed excuse (“oh, I’m outside your delivery area”) didn’t work. And I probably should have read the fine print, the part about how it would automatically renew itself after 15 weeks and unless I did something as annoying as actually calling you folks, it would simply keep showing up at the end of the driveway. But I didn’t.
So imagine my delight when, a year ago, one of your fine people called me and asked me how he could help me manage my subscription better. He wanted to offer me a few weeks of free Monday to Friday delivery. I wanted him to help me cancel the subscription. He explained that he was not authorized to do it, just to add more delivery days to it. I thanked him, and asked him to please never send me another paper except the minimum that I had unwittingly signed up for. We went our separate ways.
A few weeks ago, of course, the blue bags started showing up at the end of the lane every day again. Now I have incurred the wrath of the landlord by filling the blue box far too quickly. And I read precisely as many papers as I did before this: usually, none. And tonight, Betty from a call centre in Atlantic Canada called me to chat with me about my subscription. I chirpily told her that yes, indeed, there was something she could do for me. She brightly told me that she wanted to offer me *free* Monday to Friday delivery of the paper. I equally brightly told her that I’d rather the recycling was taken away, not delivered, and I wanted no papers at all, please cancel. She testily told me that she was not the subscription department, she just wanted to sign me up for weekday delivery. I equally testily wanted to know why she could modify my subscription to add papers, but not reduce it. How about Saturday only deliver, could she do that? I might even have thrown something in about since we were currently having dinner together, or rather, I was eating, and she had timed her call well.
Betty wasn’t impressed with me. She rather angrily told me that she was calling *on behalf of* the Toronto Star, she did not *represent* the Toronto Star, and she could give me a number to call about my subscription. Since I had already wasted some of my valuable time chatting with Betty in Atlantic Canada, I didn’t feel the need to turn around and dial some more. I did *69 Betty, though, and discovered that her call centre was the source of about 30 hang-ups on my answering machine recently. I’m so happy I have an unlisted number.
So, I’ve been busy lately, and I’d been thinking I’d give the weekend subscription a break, and maybe sometimes I’d pick up the paper at the store. Except, if I were honest, I’d have to admit that sometimes I do go to the store for the paper, even on weekends, and then I buy the Globe and Mail. And they’ve never even offered me free Monday to Friday delivery. Or sent shiny young men to my grocery store.
Perhaps next you can send schoolchildren through the subdivision across the road, selling subscriptions as a fundraiser for school. But when I fell for that, at least the magazine stopped coming after my initial contract expired.
Sincerely,
The cranky barn troll
Posted by Johanna at April 10, 2006 08:37 PM