Thanks for the kind offer, but I prefer to renew my subscription at my own damned pleasure, thank you

by Ken

Did you ever have one of those days where you finished a blogpost that only took you three or four hours to write and you figured, hot diggity, you could still maybe get a few hours' sleep before you had to stagger not more than a couple of hours after the crack of dawn to catch a train -- no, actually, the first of two trains, because of weekend planned subway service changes -- to get to South Ferry to meet your group to catch the Staten Island Ferry for your walking tour of Great Kills, where you've never been as far as you can remember, and you're all set to schedule the post, finito, when you notice that Howie has already written the same post? So then, you know how it feels.

Don't you just hate when that happens?

And the next four or five post ideas you have aren't ready to be written. Which isn't to say they'll ever be, just that they for sure aren't now. But suddenly it occurs to you that there is one urgent matter you've been meaning to write about.

Okay, possibly it's more urgent to some people than to you. Namely the people who printed "URGENT" on the envelope. The envelope that you never bothered to open because you knew what was in it, seeing as how it came tucked in the plastic pouch that contained your latest subscription copy of Food Network Magazine. So the urgent matter pretty surely has to do with your imminently expiring subscription. Which is tricky, because --

(1) You're still kind of doubtful whether you want to renew, because over the last year, maybe more, you've noticed it takes you less and less time to do a quick once-through of each new issue, and each time there seems to be less and less you want to go back to and look at again. You think back when you actually looked forward to getting a new issue, and how much there seemed to be to read in it, including stuff you had to go back to more than once and stuff you came this close to actually wanting to thinking about cooking. And actually you don't specifically remember doing that last renewal, but they kept sending you the magazine so you know you must have.

(2) You did actually look at an earlier renewal notice, and when you read the fine print you discovered that along with this great rate they were offering you for your renewal (which as far as you can tell is the exactly same rate paid by everyone who renews or even just subscribes, you're being given the thrill-packed privilege of never having to go to all the time and trouble to renew ever again, they'll take care of it for you -- presumably until your credit card expires, and then they'll come back to you for a new form of payment for the money you owe them.

This didn't actually surprise you as much as it should have, because you'd found pretty much the same generous offer to save you the time and trouble of renewing the last time your New Yorker subscription had to be renewed, and even though it was The New Yorker, you still weren't thrilled about the idea of them making your purchasing decision for you and helping themselves to a chunk o' your hard-earned cash. Which was a lot tougher a call because after all it was The New Yorker, so you couldn't pretend to the nonchalance you're feeling now about Food Network Magazine. In the end you got around the dilemma somehow. The details are murky, but didn't you do it by mailing a check for just the term of renewal you were prepared to commit to? (It's probably not a payback that for months now they've been sending you carefully labeled "EXPIRATION NOTICE"s, even though you double-checked your subscription label and confirmed that no, you don't expire until 2016.)

Of course this idea of automatic subscription renewals isn't brand-new. Your public TV and radio stations have been trying to get you to do it for years now, but at least they were always up front about it, offering the "sustaining" membership as an option, and pointing out that it would save them time and money, and they're nonprofits, after all, and any money they can save on hounding members to renew can probably be put to better use.

You also discovered, to your surprise, that contributions to deserving entities made via Paypal may also be subject to automatic renewal. The surprise came, actually, the first time you got automatically renewed, previously unaware that yes indeed, you had signed up for that when you made the original contribution. Who knew? Now you try to read the fine print a little more carefully, in case you might be obligating yourself to clean their pool or pick up their laundry.

Then there are the health-issue "white papers" and suchlike reports put out in the name of one of the country's distinguished medical centers are also offered more or less openly on an "opt-out" basis for future editions of the same white paper or suchlike report. You've ordered a few of them, and a couple were genuinely useful. When you got a second edition of the one that wasn't, you were peeved enough to track down online the place where you could shut at least that one off in perpetuity. Still, you never know when this may be the year that there's a breakthrough of some sort in connection with the subject of your publication. Oh, they promise to let you know in plenty of time when the brand-new-for-the-new-year edition is about read to be mailed out, in time for you to opt out if you wish. But they know what we all know: that requiring customers to opt out results in a significantly higher "re-order" rate than requiring them to opt in.

(Which reminds you that you just got the notice for the 2015 edition of the report on the health issue that happens just now to be uppermost in your mind. How do you know that the 2015 edition won't contain just the very facts you need to know, which weren't available for inclusion in the sadly out-of-date 2014 edition? What if your doctor doesn't get the 2015 edition? Can you afford to take the chance?)

Maybe this isn't the most urgent issue facing mankind in the year to come -- except, of course, to the folks at Food Network Magazine. And I'm a bit uneasy about bringing it up, being a pretty committed print person, with a strong personal stake in the survival of printed issues of periodicals. It's true that I don't subscribe to as many magazines as I once did, and I do feel a twinge of guilt every time I get yet another of those "We want you back" mailings from one of the publications I did finally cut loose, for reasons totally unrelated to infinite-renewal requests/demands.

It's just that I don't like it, is all. Especially when it's sneaked into the fine print, and passed off as a special consideration for my benefit.

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