In July, I bought an issue of Vanity Fair that I was really impressed with (I read Vanity Fair from time to time and like the fact that it covers the media the way it does; I've even subscribed to it in the past and let my subscription lapse when I decided I wasn't reading it enough to justify the cost). I decided to subscribe again. I went to the web site and ordered a subscription. It turned out that Wired is also published by the same company (Conde Nast), so on a whim I also subscribed to that magazine. (The whim was related to the fact that the last issue I bought, the July 2005 issue, had a very smart retrospective on the birth of the commercial internet).
Yesterday, I just returned from a week overseas and today, I got my first mail delivery. Guess what: two issues of Wired showed up on the same day, the July and August issues that I had already bought on the newsstand. Do you know what that is? A rip-off. One that's totally inconsistent with Wired's editorial approach and position. Since I spent 15+ years in the magazine business, I know exactly why it's a rip-off.
Let's see if I can explain: When I ordered a subscription, Wired sent me issues it had already published and then counted them as part of the subscription I had ordered for future issues. I subscribed in July 2005, after reading the July issue (which is actually published in June to allow time for printing the copies and distributing them through the postal system). When Wired received my subscription request from their Web site, they transmitted an order for the already-printed July and August issues to be sent to me. They recorded my subscription as renewing in July 2006, just 10 months later. But Wired sold me a 12-issue subscription. So they played a game with my subscription that meant they only had to service me with 10 new issues and 2 old ones. This is the most venal customer service you can imagine -- taking advantage of customers who aren't paying attention (or don't actually know how the magazine business works) in order to maximize profitability.
Next time I get a subscription renewal from Wired, I'm going to think a lot harder about whether the editorial content justifies such despicable business policies. And I hope that I don't get the July and August issues of Vanity Fair (which I have also already bought on the newsstand) in my mail tomorrow.
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