My New Yorker subscription runs out in July. In February I got a letter from the magazine that said “We Need Your Instructions At Once”. Renewal price: $49.99 (1 year) or $79.99 (2 years). In May I got a similar letter that said “Renewal Confirmation”. Renewal price: $29.99 (1 year) or $49.99 (2 years).
30 bucks? Worth it for the cartoons alone, I’d have thought. That’s assuming it lasts a year.
My dad got a price that was about double for a wall street journal subscription than the asking price I received. Have no idea why, but of course he used my mailing to renew his subscription. Thought maybe at first mine was for just half a year, but it was for just as long. He gets the paper and I use the online edition from the same subscription. Not much difference in cost to add the internet version.
I’ve heard about websites tweaking prices in an effort to get the most revenue.
Standard practice in the magazine business for decades.
If you want the cheapest price, let your subscription lapse, then resubscribe with one of the “blow-in” cards from a newsstand copy.
Make sure you keep a xerox of the offer; when the bill arrives it will invariably be for far more than the contracted price, (just as with any long distance phone plan you ever signed up for.)
Yes, systematic fraud on a grand scale. Never prosecuted, AFAIK.
What do you think happens to psychology students who don’t become professors? They become marketers and invent tests to subject their professors to. Just another rat in a maze.
In general, in marketing, you offer your best prices to your worst customers.
Regarding an older post/link – Amish farm kids have fewer allergies than Swiss farm kids. You suggested that something else besides growing up on a farm could be responsible for reducing allergies: drinking microbe-rich raw milk. I don’t know if you already thought of it, but how about the lack of electric light and a better sleep/12hour fasting?
«”People who work at night have a 150 percent higher rate of metabolic disease,” and “If you overlay the CDC diabetes map with the NASA nighttime satellite map, there’s an almost perfect match,” says Satchin Panda, regulatory biology specialist at the Salk Institute. The more light in a region at night, the higher the incidence of diabetes. According to Panda, this is because your liver needs sleep. Actually, it’s not the sleep per se that your liver needs, but a defined period of fasting each day, which throughout humanity’s evolutionary history was the hours of darkness when you couldn’t really do much but snooze»
https://www.bakadesuyo.com/should-we-blame-the-diabetes-epidemic-on-ligh
Hi,
Can you publish the promo code for the renewal rate or site that was in your letter? The people of the CS won’t let me renew my sub for that price if i don’t have a promo code…
Thanks!
Seth: Sorry, I don’t have it any more.