What cost Glamour? What cost Allure? $15 a year. Each.

[persimmonfrost]

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Seriously, why do people have to go through things like this? Over a YEAR ago I was in Ulta and when I checked out they said “Would you like a couple of sample issues of magazines?” Didn’t tell me what magazines or anything. I think I mumbled something about “I don’t know, maybe.” and apparently that was enough. I started getting Glamour and Allure in the mail. Yeah me getting Glamour and Allure. Stop laughing.

Anyway they showed up at various intervals and after looking at the first ones I started tossing them out, figuring they’d stop when the trial was over. But they kept on coming on and off all through 2011. I started giving the copies to my mail carrier when I thought about it. Then in December I noticed I’d been charged for subscriptions. $15 for each magazine. I called AmEx right away and disputed the charge. That was the last I heard.

Until today when I opened my mailbox and there was Glamour staring at me. So I phoned the customer service number and was told that when I mumbled “maybe” at Ulta I had authorized a free subscription (Never told that.) which would automatically renew on the credit card I’d used (Never told that.) after the free period. I got the magazines stopped and told the CS rep not to worry about the refund because I thought American Express would take care of it. However I went to the AmEx site, discovered that the dispute was marked “closed” and that the entire amount had been refunded to my account.

 

So now I’m really pissed off with Conde-Nast because that kind of marketing just sucks. I’m pissed off with Ulta for not making sure that I knew it was a subscription and not just samples (The reason I remember all this is that I thought she’d put the magazines in my bag and when I got home and they weren’t in there I thought she’d forgotten.) and I’m wondering if AmEx is eating the cost of the subscription. I’m not worried about them, I know they have more money than God, but it chaps my hide that they might just settle it like that rather than making C-N own up to practices which I think border on deceptive.

Auto-renew should be an opt-in thing, not something you need to opt-out of.  The burden should be on us to say “Yes, keep this coming” instead of “Hey, I don’t even LOOK at your damn magazine; stop sending it to me!”  I just wasted half an hour making phone calls, checking websites and being really, really irritated.

This is ridiculous.

 

 

 

Mirrored from Persimmon Frost.

Comments

[stranger]

The exasperation here reminds me of similar problems: There are a million things that should be opt-in, not opt-out, most especially magazine subscriptions and I don't know what else.

It's possible here that AmEx is eating the cost, but if this happens much and they're up for the $30 (or whatever) on a regular basis, they have a good reason to push Conde-Nast to change that marketing policy. This may be slower, but I suspect the AmEx mill will grind smaller than an outraged consumer, or even a lot of outraged consumers. We may, at least, hope.

[persimmonfrost]

I hope you're right about that. I know they're not in business to lose money, so I'm hoping that their rep as heavy hitters will get them further with C-N than I could ever get.

I've been an AmEx customer for...nearly 30 years now, and they've always gone to bat for me, but oddly they screwed up massively with The Housemate. She hates them.