In 2017, on the day after Inauguration Day, I signed up for a $100/year online subscription to The Washington Post. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” yes, give me that, give me allllll of that. My intention was to support Journalism; I picked the particular paper in large part because of the columns of Alexandra Petri (her most recent column: “To Clarify, I Meant Ban Abortion Except for Republican Politicians: Myself Is the Last Person Who Should Be Bothered by My Values”).
I would be interested to see a little graph of my satisfaction levels each year when the subscription auto-renewed. For the first few years, satisfaction levels were high: DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS!! SUPPORT JOURNALISTS!!! SHINE A LIGHT!!! ETC.!!!
At some unknown point, I became aware that Jeff Bezos, multi-billionaire owner of Amazon, was also the multi-billionaire owner of The Washington Post. Satisfaction levels dropped somewhat—but, you know, Very Rich People have often funded such things, AS WELL THEY SHOULD. Carnegie. Rockefeller. Something about the railroads? I don’t really know anything except that rich people funded things and named them after themselves. Maybe that sort of thing was okay. Maybe that’s one of the GOOD ways rich people can spend their money! Journalism! Museums! Concert halls! Etc.! SOMEONE needs to fund those things! Maybe the opinion pieces on topics such as “Capitalism Is Great, Actually,” and “It Would Hurt Us All To Raise Taxes on Billionaires” were fine, just, you know, balanced discourse. I’m not really reading any of the articles I have access to, but we should still Support Journalism in These Dark Times.
In the last couple of years, I started wondering if another organization could make better use of my hundred dollars a year—especially when I saw subscription offers now going for $30. But I was reluctant to actually unsubscribe. It felt like Defunding/Devaluing Journalism.
Then, this week, The Washington Post sent an email, very similar to the emails I keep getting each year as my Amazon Prime membership increases, telling me that my subscription would be increasing to $120/year. I’d found my Line: $100 for a purely digital subscription I wasn’t actually using was Okay, but $120 for a purely digital subscription I was not actually using was Not Okay. I DO want to support journalism, I DO!! But I feel like maybe Jeff Bezos can easily afford to support it without my specific help? And also: I find NPR much more useful, news-wise, so perhaps I will just TRANSFER my support to THEM. Win-win! Funding journalism that NEEDS funding! Plus, NPR sometimes gives me a cute bird mug/tote!
As I tried to cancel my subscription, I encountered hurdles. First there was the screen that I might have carelessly thought meant I had successfully completed my cancellation—but no, I had to scroll past some paragraphs about the cancellation to find another button to click to ACTUALLY cancel.
Then, after I clicked that button, an offer: Would I like to keep my subscription, for $60/year?? Oh!!! Okay!!! I was already going to willingly pay $100/year! Then you raised it to $120/year, which is why I cancelled! And now it’s $60/year???? All along you could have been happy with HALF what you were going to charge me???? You didn’t NEED to raise the price after all, you were just TRYING IT?????? to SEE IF I’D PAY IT?????
Infuriating. And absolutely confirmed that I was making the right decision. I clicked YES UNSUBSCRIBE.
The next day, a new offer: Would I like to have the subscription for $40/year???
This post has two purposes: first, to tell you about how glad I am that I stopped my subscription to The Washington Post; second, to let you know that if you would like to continue your subscription, you can apparently get a better rate by trying to cancel. (Has anyone gotten similar results while canceling Amazon Prime?)
Yeah, the NYTimes is the same way. I have a $4/per month subscription and every year when the “promotion” ends I have to play the same game. This year they even threw in a games subscription.
Happened to be talking about this w/a friend, turns out she is paying over 3x the amount for the same subscription.
I love the NYT cooking app. Well worth the subscription
This. I have this. The one completely annoying thing that might make me cancel is I get NYT cooking emails, which I can click through because I have the subscription but sometimes I also get NYT emails that involve cooking and those do the whole “just sign in or subscribe to read” “you’ve read your monthly allotment of free articles” (PS: I’m nearly sure I HAVE NOT reached my free article allotment unless that number is zero, because I always get that notice and never read ANYTHING). I HAVE A FLIPPING COOKING SUBSCRIPTION. LET ME SEE THE COOKING. /rant.
Also, should you get it: we like ermine icing (though recently saw an icing vs frosting debate and according to THAT this is frosting), we went through all the variations on “pasta with a creme fraiche/marscapone/heavy cream/ricotta plus lemon and pasta water and maybe an herb” which was fun and the chive one is our favorite, and double chocolate chip cookies. I just looked through my saved recipes and realized there are some good ideas in here. I need to remember that when I have zero dinner ideas instead of staring at the walls for inspiration.
and, I did the whole cancel WAPO thing but was happy at $40 so that’s where we are right now. But I hate, abhor, really despise the Bezos factor.
Yes, I stayed on with the Washington Post because they offered me something like $10 for a full year or something absolutely comical like that when I tried to cancel, but I too am tired of their nonsense and will probably offer my news money to independent journalists directly after this.
I gave money to the Mississippi Free Press, if you’re looking for a worthy organization. They broke the “white dudes in MIssissippi are welfare cheats but that’s ok, they’re white” story. Ahem. Farve.
If you have a favorite op/ed writer or journalist, you might check Substack to see if they do a subscription newsletter. Usually they offer tiered subscription offers. I like supporting individuals this way. It’s also easy to subscribe on the platform, just click off. There are writers from all over the political spectrum there.
*easy to cancel
I strongly recommend cancelling all subscriptions from time to time. If you don’t get an immediate offer for discounts like you experienced, you’ll almost certainly get an email saying “Come back for only $X a month!”. This is especially true for meal subscription kits (Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, etc) if you use those.
That reminds me of when we try to cancel things like cable. Suddenly we get cable for almost free! Like, we’ve been customers for 23 years and now we get these deals because we want to cancel?
This. I know people who regularly threaten to cancel Internet and get to more or less keep their promotional prices indefinitely, but I have never had the guts for fear they would call my bluff. “Oh, you don’t need Internet any longer? No problem, enjoy trying to get AT&T to come out and set up that last mile for you!” The closest I came was giving up the package we were grandfathered into for a different package with (allegedly) higher speeds and a new modem that saved us … 5 bucks a month. Sigh. There should really, really be more rewards for loyalty.
If I could just as easily cancel/threaten to cancel our Internet over the computer and immediately get offered a better deal as with newspaper and magazine subscriptions, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don’t mind playing the game as long as it’s easy to play and requires no interaction with an actual human.
The whole “price increase that they try to see if you’ll pay it” makes me crazy! Thank you for this info; I actually do use my digital WaPo subscription somewhat, but I wasn’t too happy about the price going up (20%!), so when it’s time for mine to renew, I will definitely cancel and see how low they’ll go to renew me. It’s maddening.
Same with Sirius radio. $21/month on renewal, but you can get it for under $6 if you try to cancel
I used to pay for the New York Times for all the same reasons you mentioned. But it just became another thing I had to justify with my ever dwindling budget of money and time. I had one baby and then a second and I felt guilty for never reading the news. In this time I moved and when I set up my new library cards for my new city, I discovered that my local library has free access to the New York Times. So I bookmarked the login page for that and now when I want to read something it’s super easy. It doesn’t work for the Cooking or Wire Cutter sections and I do miss that. I never got offered super low subscription rates, but now I’m tempted. I support one independent journalist via substack, but I could easily go broke supporting all the content creators I love on their various platforms.
Thank you for saving me a not insignificant amount of money.
Thanks for this. I generally know I’m supposed to try this sort of thing but don’t because it isn’t top of mind. I have a digital subscription to the Washington Post, and do read it…but feel like the price jump is a bit much this time around.
I used to subscribe to Readers Digest magazine when I was in middle school and it was the same thing – there was a “new subscribers” deal, and there was the higher regular price, but if you called and threatened to cancel they would drop it to the cheaper “new subscriber” price.
NPR is the best (full disclosure: I used to work for an NPR affliate). Being a sustaining member of your local station really makes a difference to them financially.
We get the Sunday New York Times delivered (give me allll the puzzles) but I need to get my husband to yell at them again. They gave us a discount (ie removed our price increase) previously because our delivery kept getting skipped, and it’s happening agian. The skipping is due, I’m sure, to the number of fucks the underpaid delivery contractor has to give. I do really like getting the actual PAPER paper, so I don’t want to stop, but neither do I want to pay for a service that’s not reliable. Pro tip- the NYT will give you a credit if your paper is not delivered. Just go into your online account and report it.
We recently swapped our internet and our primary cell phone, and yes, we had called to see if we could get it cheaper, and they said no, so we got different services (because, no, we do not want to be without internet or cell service for a week), and then called to cancel and *poof* all these offers appeared.
It was kind of satisfying, actually, to say “no, I don’t care how low you’ll go *now* because we are already subscribed to a different service” but that is partly because they had both been jerks about stuff; if they’d been reliable, accurate, and possessed of good customer service, it would have been different. (and if we had not repeatedly called with “look, you’re giving new subscribers a faster internet service at 1/3 of the price; I know because I keep *getting your marketing emails* can you please reduce the cost of ours?” queries and gotten “oh, no, that’s impossible for us to do” responses. Obviously: not actually impossible for them to do.)
We do keep paying full price for our local-local newspaper, though. Partly we do just want to siphon money into them, even though they often run articles in favor of things we are not in favor of. And *also* even when there are pro-bad-things articles, there are juuuust enough facts in the articles along with the quotes that maybe perhaps some people in that bubble will be able to realize the disconnect between the talking points and reality. Maybe.
I canceled Amazon Prime last year. They haven’t offered discounted Prime memberships but they do keep offering me a month free trial. I signed up for the free trial in August and cancelled it right before the month was up. Then I noticed last week, that they’re offering me another free trial. So, they seem to be generous with the free trials.
An update: I decided to take Amazon up on the offer for another free trial. And it wasn’t free. I chatted with a customer service rep who said the offer was mistake and they shouldn’t have offered me another free trial. He said they’d cancel my not-free membership trail and refund me.
Another Heidi here coming to say, I also canceled my Prime membership recently and they did not offer any discounts but they do want me to have a free trial.
I laughed at the last bit. And am so in the same “try to be as good as possible about the things and then find out I fell short anyway! AAAAHHHHHHHH.”
I haven’t noticed my non-Amazon sourced items coming from them….yet. Sigh. I did notice during the Amazon weaning process that often, they weren’t the cheapest anyway. And my Prime stuff had started coming with weird “it will take longer than the allotted two days but here are three excuses why we’re still counting it as two days” caveats. Which made it all the easier. I’m not above making a list of things I must source from them and then ordering all of it in a free trial OR getting one for Maisel. We just dumped Netflix too because no one is watching it.
I have kind of the opposite situation. We live in the DC metro area and have both digital and paper subscriptions to the Post, worth it because I read it every day.
But at the beginning of the Trump administration, I decided to start giving to NPR, which I’d been listening to for free for decades, for similar reasons to yours. And then the news got so depressing I pretty much stopped listening to NPR (the paper was all I could handle) and I switched to my town’s community radio station, which is all music. So now after years of listening for free, now I’m paying and not listening. Every now and then I think about cancelling it but then I think, well, I have a lot of years to make up for, and I do listen to a lot NPR-sponsored podcasts.
In addition to Alyson’s and Jessamy’s suggestions, you can also donate to Pro Publica or the Committee to Protect Journalists.
I subscribe to the Post, which is my local paper and which does at least point out the Bezos link every time, unlike the Times, which does not say “We’re no angels; our journalists come from privileged backgrounds and report accordingly, and we union-bust the Wirecutter writers. Don’t mention Alison Roman, OK?” I have a Sunday subscription to the Times.
Honestly, buying anything as a conscious consumer is, at least for me, an exercise in trying for ethics until I can try no more, then giving up and just getting something and hoping. I don’t shop on Amazon, but sometimes I can’t get what I need at a brick and mortar store, so I order online and it turns out the thing I got what shipped by Amazon fulfillment. Also I operated for years not realizing which online used bookstore was owned by the Kingdom of Darkness.
I am married to someone who is unwilling to bargain for ANYTHING. Continuing to pay full price for his satellite radio subscription is one of the things that has me reminding myself that this unnecessary expense is still cheaper than divorce.
My comment above was supposed to go here!!!! This is the last bit I’m laughing at.
Same as Lisa above. We have the $4 NYTimes subscription (comes out on Black Friday every year). We’ve had it for 3 or 4 years now because we try to cancel at the end of every year and they offer to extend the promo.
We never “threaten to cancel” as we figure they have set scripts/flow charts of what they’re allowed to offer. We call and are very pleasant and use the phrase “What are you willing to do to retain me as a customer?” If it isn’t enough we just say, ok that won’t work for us, please proceed with cancelling our subscription.
Comcast/Xfinity has given us good rates this way.
Cell phones I just read the deals on the website and switch to a better one any time it pops up.
Amazon Prime I’ve never seen a discount but lots of “one mont free” as others have said. I’ve never been motivated to buy a subscription as we’ve never gotten the promised 2 day shipping in any of our free months. And often get it within 2 days with the “free economy shipping” during regular times ??
Apple Music also offers one to four months free at any given time.
Oh! And I forgot! Our home insurance! We got it cut *in half* (it had been creeping up for a few years) with better coverage. And I’m like “I would probably pay more, if I could get home insurance from a company that DIDN’T DO THIS NONSENSE” but I know of no insurance companies that definitely don’t do this nonsense, so we have not swapped yet. But seriously folks: *half the price* for *better coverage* and I am very unhappy with apparently needing to haggle about everything (phone! internet! insurance! subscriptions! and who even knows what I’m paying and not questioning!) every year or be one of the “sucker” customers who collectively significantly improve the corporate profits by paying significantly more than is necessary every. single. year.
I just had a similar experience with the New York Times. It was surprisingly difficult to cancel, and I ended up having to chat with a customer service rep. That chat included multiple rounds of price lowering. I was so disappointed at the end of the exchange.
I signed up through Amazon for a Washington Post subscription after the Trump election. I think it was $3.99/month and then increased at some point in the future to $4.99/month. I kept it for years but then realized I wasn’t reading it as much and the content was pretty slanted towards capitalism is great.
Even though I pay more now, I support two local papers with a sustaining membership of $10/month each. The Minnesota Reformer is focused on politics and operates as a nonprofit through States Newsroom, a national organization. I also support Sahan Journal which reports for and with Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color.
I GASPED in indignation even though I am fully cognizant that these sleazy tactics are the norm. We are about to cancel our last remaining newspaper subscription because it’s not getting enough use and we have two kids in university and are trying to shave expenses. I will try to support a couple of newsletters I subscribe too, though, because I agree, supporting journalism is important – I just don’t know the most effective way to do it anymore.