For something that’s a near necessity like a utility, I think a grace period is reasonable. For anything else, if I don’t have enough money in my account, don’t give me the service/product anymore. That includes cable and internet service.
I don’t think that’s an apropos comparison. Public utilities are often regulated and what they can and cannot do controlled due to the essential nature of their service. Newspaper delivery is not that. A better comparison would be to other items that auto rebill after a set subscription period. Maybe the NY Times online edition. Or porn. Of course those are electronically delivered content so suspending access is different. There are other regular delivery services, like Farm to You vegetable delivery. If your payment fails, I doubt they will continue service, though I haven’t tried it.
I think this scenario happens because the value of the item being delivered is so low that there is no great loss they deliver a few dozen days worth of newspapers erroneously. Then a phone call or letter to ask for payment is relatively cheap. If the value of the item being delivered were much higher, I doubt any business would engage in this practice.
I’d tell them to pound sand - unless you agreed to pay for delivery separately somehow. If not, it seems more like a racket than legit business practice. They are essentially littering and asking you to pay for it.
We’re not talking about having the money to pay for it. We’re talking about a credit card that expired. And while your preference is not unreasonable, the onus is on you to avoid signing up for recurring billing if you don’t want billing to, well, recur.
This is silly. It would only be a valid complaint if the OP had never requested the service in the first place - but he did. It might also be a valid complaint if they reupped him without his consent and without prior notice, but that didn’t happen either.
He specifically ordered a subscription for a fixed period, and the vendor fulfilled his order. It’s completely unfair to blame the vendor for abiding by the terms of their agreement.
ETA: the point of the public utility comparison was not that they cannot legally cut off service, but that continuing service as a courtesy to nonpaying customers is just that - a courtesy. You’re trying to turn it into a scam.
Around here, fuel oil is delivered in tanker loads that run $600 to $900 or so, each. It’s an “essential” service if you depend on it for heat and hot water, but there is no particular regulation of the competing private companies that deliver it.
Trash pickup is a similarly unregulated private service which is assumed to be ongoing until canceled.
I may be misinterpreting the fact pattern then. This is how I am understanding it:
[ul]
[li]Order delivery service from period 1 to period 12. Pay with credit card for periods 1 through 12.[/li][li]Sometime after initial payment of periods 1 through 12, and before period 13, credit card expires.[/li][li]Period 13 service is continued as a courtesy. When billing is attempted using card on file, payment is declined.[/li][li]Period 14 service is continued as a courtesy. Customer is contacted saying that they owe payment for period 13 and 14.[/li][/ul]
If this is correct, then the vendor fulfilled the order for period 1 through 12 and was paid. The vendor imposed an order in period 13 and 14 without consent. There would be no agreement for period 13 and 14 to abide by. This also assumes the auto renew wasn’t agreed to somehow, so that’s why I first suggested the OP ask the newspaper to produce the agreement that would show they wanted continued service.
Count me in with “pound sand”. Newspaper subscriptions are annoying. I also had them drop off a paper every week for a while. I called them up and bitched them out about it. They said it was complimentary. I said they were wasting paper, that I took it directly from the drive and put it in the trash. That if I wanted to read their paper, I would read it online. THEN THEY TRIED TO CHARGE ME FOR IT.
Anything extended “as a courtesy” I don’t owe for. Anything you dropped off at my door without my explicit permission I don’t owe for. This is just a way to milk more money out of you.
Interesting. I have one available option for power and gas. It is governed by the Public Utility Commission (PUC) - a state agency. I have one available option for trash pickup. I can decline, but i’d be obligated to take my trash to the dump - all other forms of disposal are illegal. (does not include compost).
You have it wrong, or at least I understand it differently. They called him and he renewed the subscription while the card was still valid. How long the new subscription had been going for when he re-upped I’m not sure, but presumably there were at least two months left on the renewal.
Nope. The OP reads as he expected the paper to cancel the subscription once the charge was rejected due to the CC expiring. They didn’t but he never actually explicitly canceled either. I say he owes them $30.
Ok - well I’m not clear on the fact pattern then. I don’t interpret what you quoted that way. If the OP would clarify that’d be lovely. What about the scenario I outlined? 
The only time the paper would have attempted to re-charge his credit card would have been when they were renewing his subscription. As I noted earlier, newspapers as a standard practice don’t operate on a delivery of the paper then bill or charge you for it. They bill you or charge you in advance of your subscription. Just subscribing does not obligate you to paying for the paper or any other periodical. Nor does that obligate the paper to deliver you a paper. Their standard procedure is to collect the subscription fee and then they deliver it. Try calling the Wall Street Journal and asking them to deliver you the paper and tell them that you will pay them at the end of the year. Won’t happen.
At the time of a renewal, many periodicals will continue to deliver you their product, thinking that you may be late in payment, etc. But as explained by the OP this is a courtesy.
The Chicago Tribune did this to me years ago. I simply ignored the renewal bill (I was paying via check) and assumed that was that. The papers kept showing up in my driveway, but I figured they’d stop eventually. To my surprise, a bill marked OVERDUE showed up in the mail, demanding payment for the papers I had received since my renewal date. The Tribune is owned by a huge, powerful media company and I was concerned about my credit score, so I paid the bill (about $30) and phoned them to cancel. I had long since forgotten what, if anything, I had agreed to when I started the subscription many years earlier; that’s a mistake I won’t make again.
There are really two kinds of subscriptions. With one kind (which seems to be disappearing), you must take some action to renew it or it stops. With the other kind, you must explicitly cancel it or they’ll go on charging you until the end of time. That latter arrangement has become the norm. These days I would never assume that a subscription would be cancelled simply because I had stopped paying for it.
The scenario that the OP describes strikes me as roughly equivalent to mailing a bad check to the newspaper to cover the renewal, and assuming that the subscription would be cancelled once the check bounced.
As others have noted, I think the comparison of newspaper delivery to a public utility is bogus. That’s not why I’m responding, though.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, though I don’t think I am. My impression was that OP had subscribed to the paper for a specific period of time, say one year, for the sake of argument. Because the year was at its end, the paper was trying to auto-renew the subscription for another year through a credit card on file. Fair enough, if those are the terms that OP agreed to. Note this, though: the reason the newspaper was trying to run a new charge had to have been because the term of the subscription had lapsed. Otherwise, why would they be charging OP’s CC in the middle of a subscription term?
However, the CC didn’t go through. Rather than try to contact OP regarding the method of payment, the newspaper simply kept delivering for a few months after the term of the subscription had expired, of their own volition, “as a courtesy.” Two months later, OP figures out what is going on and calls the newspaper to cancel, at which point they demand payment for the two months of paper that OP never requested and that they sent of their own accord. My opinion is that OP owes nothing, as the term of subscription that he ordered had ended, and OP had never requested the extra papers that were sent. If a subscription is for a fixed term, then when it’s over, it’s over. OP shouldn’t have to explicitly cancel to have the deliveries stop at the end of the agreed term.
And that’s partly why I think the utility comparison is bogus. We don’t order electric service for our house a year at a time. We put the service in place, and expect it to remain in place until cancelled. Subscriptions to publications are not generally like that; I subscribe to magazines occasionally, and when the term of the subscription is up, the magazines stop coming, unless I explicitly renew my subscription for another term. Now, interestingly, it often happens when I decide to let a subscription drop, they continue to send another issue or two as a “courtesy.” But I’ve never had a magazine send me a bill for the extra issues. It was their decision to send them, not mine; I had already decided to discontinue the sub, and the term for which I had agreed to pay for their magazines was over. Therefore, I regard the extra magazines as I would regard any other unsolicited merchandise that I received in the mail - as a gift, as the law provides in my state. Under no circumstances would I honor an invoice for the extra magazines.
You’ve never had a daily newspaper delivery, I take it.
I have, and you still have to pay for it in advance for a set period of time. You don’t pay for your power in advance.
Yes, home delivery of daily newspapers works differently than mail delivery of magazines or newspapers. Home delivery doesn’t have a set subscription length - it ends when you cancel delivery and you can generally suspend your subscription for vacation which you can’t do with mail subscriptions ( Yes, you can have the post office hold your mail, but even if they hold your mail for the entire month, you will still get that month’s issue of any magazines you subscribe to and the subscription will not be extended.)Payment has now changed to a month or more at a time, in advance, mailed to the billing office but I remember when the delivery folks left an envelope each week for payments and even before that, when the paperboy collected each week in person and I think certain practices (such as no set subscription length) date back to that time.
They generally bill far enough in advance now that they could simply cancel the subscription when the bill isn't paid- for example, the NYT bills me 3 months at a time, so the bill I received on 12/6 covered delivery up until 3/4 - but I suspect the complaints when delivery is stopped outnumber the complaints of people who assumed it would stop when the bill wasn't paid ( due to expiration of a card or other reasons) and then get billed. Whether they can actually do anything is another story especially since they described the continued delivery as a courtesy.
Just because I was curious, I looked up the terms and conditions of a local paper. Here is what I found:
I omitted the name of the paper, and bolded a relevant section. This newspaper group has multiple local papers and these terms apply to all of their different offerings. And since I feel like I was on a roll, I also took a look at the WSJ terms:
If there were similar terms in place for the OP, then I would say he is on the hook for the money** and I was wrong.** 
That’s what I get for weighing in before reading common terms for a service I’ve never subscribed to. It still may be worth while to request they waive the fees, but if the agreements were similar there is no fallback if the paper chooses not to.
Pretty much this. If you want a subscription canceled then you need to go through the process agreed to in the terms and conditions of the subscription agreement. Sometimes this is more difficult than it should be, but that’s neither here nor there.
An open-ended subscription, as it seems this one was with an automatic re-bill, is something one needs to cancel actively instead of passively. Passive cancellations are for things that require explicit re-ups like the Consumer Reports or virus scanning software products.
Enjoy,
Steven
The paper is here
I had a digital only subscription. In poking around my now lapsed account there’s lots of messages for me to renew my lapsed subscription, but I can’t find word one about the specific terms and conditions of the subscription. I even went back to the email indicating my subscription had started in 2014 and there is nothing. Maybe there was some kind of notice when I actually enrolled but it did not stick around on the site. They only give an old fashioned telephone number for customer service quesions. How odd.