We subscribe to Sports Illustrated, Cooking Light, Weight Watchers, and Kiplinger’s magazines. Used to get Consumer Reports but that one has expired.
The last WW magazine I got was the Nov/Dec issue, and I had decided not to renew it. A couple of weeks ago in the mail, I got an invoice saying “Thanks for your renewal; attached is your bill.” I emailed WW customer service and said I didn’t renew and I don’t want to renew, so I’m not going to pay this bill and please note that I don’t want the magazine any more. I got an email back the next day or so, saying thank you and we’ll mark the subscription cancelled.
My Cooking Light subscription expired with the Jan/Feb issue (which I have already received) and I was given a gift renewal for Christmas by a family member. In the mail yesterday, I got an invoice from Cooking Light, thanking me for my renewal and enclosing the bill. Again … I did not renew this subscription; it was a gift renewal which was already paid for in mid-December . . . so why am I getting a bill???
The alarming thing that was also in this envelope – and which may explain the WW magazine “renewal” that I didn’t want – was a little white piece of paper (the kind that you usually toss out with the envelope while only reading the letter or bill that was in the envelope) that said, in effect, “We are now automatically renewing all subscriptions unless you call us and tell us not to.”
Well, that made me flipping mad! It appears that these magazine publishers are trying to trick subscribers into paying for another year by sending a bill when they never asked you in the first place whether you want to re-subscribe. This is just dirty pool, in my book.
I also just renewed the Sports Illustrated subscription, but it did not have one of these “automatic renewal” things, probably because it is a weekly magazine and is pretty expensive as far as magazine subscriptions go.
So, if you subscribe to any magazines, please watch your mail or email for “invoices” for renewals that you may not want.
I get plenty of these from third-party subscription services. They can look convincing, but the ones I receive are never from the magazine itself. Magazines sell their subscriber lists. That’s why a lot of junk mail seems “tailored” to people’s interests. Once they agree to sell to anybody, they have to sell to everybody, even the unscrupulous. Caveat emptor.
I spoke to one of the magazines when I received unsolicited magazines and was told that a distributor/marketing agent will send out copies and then bill to drum up business. They gave me the distributor’s name and number.
I tried to renew a magazine online with a credit card payment and the only way they would do that is if I agreed to them automatically charging the card for renewal every year. No thanks! I renewed by mail with a check.
Several years ago, I susbscribed to the South Beach Diet web site. It was a pay service, $65 per year. I guess I put it on my Amex. Recently my Amex security was compromised and they sent me a new card. South Beach tried to bill it and was declined, so they emailed me that they needed a new cc #. I had not realized they were billing me every year without so much as an email! My bad, I know. The thing is, I hadn’t visited that web site for at least 5 years, so that’s a lot of dough I had been throwing out the window.
Additionally, with this email came an announcement that South Beach Diet was increasing their online services fee to $49 PER MONTH!!!
OMG, I was incredulous. I called them up, of course was put on hold forever, and when I finally got ahold of a real person, I told her to cancel my subscription and btw, had they gone mad with this new price? She told me that in order to keep me as a client, they would be willing to keep me on at the $65 per year price. Of course I declined.
I got a flat box in the mail last year around Christmas time. I opened it to discover a unrequested cookbook with a note stating I was to return it to them “unopened” if I didn’t want the book and wished to be credited. Seriously…unopened…
I got something like and we forwarded it to the Sec of State Fraud Unit (or something like that). Sec of State acted and a few weeks later the crooks sent us a letter stating that their “claim” was being dropped.
I used to return stuff (magazines / book club stuff etc) I didn’t want to the mail man by marking on it with a sharpie: " Unsolicited Mail. Return to Sender."
Yes, we do NOT allow any “autorenew” for ANYTHING. It has worked well for us. When we get “bills” and “invoices” from any publisher, we ask if anyone in the household wants it and wants to pay for it & then we just toss it. I suspect they catch a lot of SRs and people who don’t pay attention with this scheme. I don’t have the energy or interest to track all of them down and complain (plus I don’t want to give them one more way of contacting me–phone or other). Even checks can be tracked to your checking account number, so be sure you double-check your statement so you aren’t being charged for services you don’t want.
I’m with MommaJ. I would just chuck the bill and any subsequent notices and not waste my time trying to call or e-mail. If they charge your credit card, just dispute it.
I paid for a couple of years for security programs for computers I didn’t even own any longer. Same idea… They just bill your credit card and send you an email once a year. I finally noticed the emails this year and called to cancel. One company made it very easy, but the other did not.
I noticed long ago that magazines start begging for renewals about 5 months into a year’s subscription. So I started keeping track. Whenever I pay for a subscription, I write it on the inside of my bill-paying folder, the number of months. Only when I’m 2 months away from the end will I renew.
My elderly parents got a notice from USNWR several years back that the print magazine was being discontinued, and Dad’s subscription was being converted to GQ (lol). I called the customer service number and was told that he was paid eight years ahead. I asked them to cancel the GQ subscription and send him a refund. But it wasn’t quite that simple. Apparently most magazine renewals aren’t sold by the publisher, but by third party distributors. So what would happen is Dad would get a phone call from one of these companies telling him that he needed to renew, and (being unable to say no to salespeople), he’d renew. Over time, it piled up to being paid eight years in advance.
Problem was, USNWR had no idea who had sold him those bits and pieces which made up the eight years. They did send a small refund for their piece of it, and gave me a couple of leads which led to a couple of other small refunds. But most of it was a loss. Good job taking advantage of a polite and confused old man, magazine distributors.
Yes, I know my folks are polite to all the people who call thei phone. I beg mom to just NOT ANSWER if it isn’t one of us or someone whose name she recognizes from caller ID, but I know she still does answer. I hear her politely talking with folks who want her to contribute to this and that. I hope she isn’t doing so, but hope my folks change their phone number when they move so that the solicitors no longer have their phone.
If you put them on the Do Not Call registry, those calls should stop (unfortunately, it doesn’t stop the charity calls; they’re exempt – grrrrr). You can do it online, without their knowing.
Magazines have been doing that sort of thing for years. We would get renewal notices/bills long before subscriptions were due to expire (i think we had some where we had purchased 2-3 year subscriptions because it was cheaper and they would send out renewal notices/bills even though there was a year or more to go). My husband would just pay them until I noticed we had some that now had years till the subscription would expire - we had a magazine we got for the kids for quite a while after they lost interest in it because of this. Now he checks the little sticker on the magazine to see if it is actually close to being due before he pays.
I just manage my magazine subscriptions online. I can see from the label on the magazine when the subscription is up – I just go in toward the end to pay again. I only subscribe to 2 magazines, but neither is storing my credit card online or asking me to set up auto-renew. I just ignore any paper notices I get – toss them right out, along with all of the mail from charities & nonprofits seeking donations. (I pay those online too – but now I’ve wised up and when I donate to a charity online I enter “no paper mail” instead of my street in the address line – but of course I do have to give the magazines my physical mailing address.)
Just because you receive a “bill” in the mail doesn’t mean you have to pay it. The magazines will send you 2nd and 3rd notices and dire notices that your subscription is about to end – but they don’t try to do collections or report to credit agencies. (They really can’t, since magazine subscriptions are paid in advance: if you haven’t paid, then they should just stop sending the magazine.)
