Monday, February 2, 2009

Time Magazine's Terrible Treason: The Story of How One of the World's Biggest Magazine's Abandoned its Subscribers

I'd always been intrigued by Time's insightful articles and I'll give them credit. Their writers are great and always will be great. And that's why I decided it'd be cool to subscribe to the publication and so spent $30 (Canadian dollars) on a year's subscription.
So quickly, they sent me the first issue, which happened to be the Barack Obama Time Person of the Year Issue. I was very satisfied by the content and the service; it was in perfect condition and everything was great ... at the time that is.
After this, I thought I knew my next issue would come on January 19th but that day passed without any sign of a Time Magazine coming any time soon. But I decided that I was so satisfied with the first issue that I didn't care; I'd just wait another week to see if I'd get anything (despite the fact that it's a news magazine and many of the stories' validity and interest quickly expire). However, I waited another week, and nothing came, and another. In fact, I've been waiting until now, more than 4 weeks, and still nothing has come. And you bet that's frustrating because in these tough economical times, you want everything for your dollar and I wasn't getting anything for my hard 30.
Thus, I did the only sensible thing I could and decided I would investigate. So I went to the site (which by the way they had no Canadian version of) and tried to enter my account number, which I had to use to contact them. But somehow, it seemed that all of my account information had been erased from the Time database because, even after continuously trying to get into my account, they refused to grant me entry. And so I called them. But it turned out that the provided phone number could not be called from Canada.
After looking around for awhile though, I came across a little text (maybe font size 6, and grey to boot): It said that there was a specific place to enter account info for Canadians. I clicked and here's where it took me. In case you didn't click, here's the message I was shown:

TIME will no longer be publishing a Canadian advertiser edition. The final issue of TIME Canada is the December 29, 2008 issue.
An official notification will be sent in the next 2-3 weeks. If you have any questions, please call customer service at 1-800 843-8463.

You might spot the phone number at the end, which is what I called to inquire about this. And what I got was a long waiting process followed by a totally unhelpful answerer who just assertively backed this message. So I basically won't get 6 or 7 Time Magazine issues. There cheating me out of 5 bucks. It sounds petty but that's not the point; you wouldn't be happy either if you were denied of your only source of informational entertainment for 2 months.

So thanks Time, for spitting on all of the loyal Canadian subscribers out there.