You sucked me right in, Ed.
Can I have a refund of half my subscription fee from January? I’ve been a member since '01 but couldn’t afford/had time to sign up until January, and had to pay the whole $14.99.
And now you’re discounting it even for new members? 
Bad form!
A little while back, I seemed to have the option to re-subscribe at $7.48. Now I have the option to re-subscribe at $9.95. When did this change?
Actually, no. The $7.48 resubscription rate is for Charter Members, those who signed up prior to April 28, 2004. For everyone who subscribed after that date (as in your case), it’s $9.95 to resubscribe.
your humble TubaDiva
I’m sorry that you didn’t choose to sign up as a Charter Member when that opportunity came up.
There were options available for people who didn’t have the scratch at that time; all you had to do was ask. Dopers did this for total strangers, even; there would have been no problem for a long-time member of the board who needed to be covered. The generosity of the community is beautiful to see in action and you could have been part of that process.
The subscription plan was not only mentioned on the board and discussed extensively, but an email was sent to all registered members. (Which caused us SUCH a headache, we won’t be doing that ever again.) You cannot say that you were not made aware of the situation; we did everything we could short of going to your house and pointing all of this out to you.
The original Charter Member offer was meant to be promotional in nature and available for a short time. The current promotional offer in place now is only available for a short time. This is the nature of promotions. Do you go to Macy’s and demand they give you a refund because you bought something at full price the day before or after a sale?
your humble TubaDiva
Actually, most retail outlets have a policy that if something goes on sale within a certain amount of time (usually 30 days) you can go back with your receipt and they WILL refund you the difference. And sometimes even if it’s over 30 days, they’ll do it anyway if it’s a big difference. Like, say, 50%. I think even Wal-Mart has a price guarantee.
So yeah. I would.
Does this look like Wal-Mart to you? Sheesh.
your humble TubaDiva
Apples and oranges? Apples and watermelons.
No, but most places that ask people to give them money in exchange for goods or services at least try to make sure the customer is happy, and will make reasonable accomidations to make sure they are. Especially someone who has been around a while or is a regular. I know that’s how I treat my customers.
You made a big deal about the discount being members only, sign up NOW only, or you can never ever get the discount again, etc etc… I didn’t have TIME to post back then, and I wasn’t going to ask someone to pay something I’m not going to be able to use anyway. I didn’t feel bad about paying the $15 in January to sign up when I had time to post again, and I didn’t even care I couldn’t get the cheap renewals, but I guess now y’all need cash bad enough to just discount it for everyone even though you gave the impression that was a one-time deal when the board first went pay. If you intended to discount it for new members, IMO you should’ve left the discount in place for returning older members. Or at least for longer than your “limited time only deal.”
But Hell, what do I know, I’ve only been in customer service type jobs for the last eight years or so. Carry on.
But you’re assuming that they planned, a year ago, to have a special now. I don’t know about you, but many many places that ask people to give them money in exchange for goods or services don’t plan their specials a year ahead of time. Or even 3 months ahead of time. For all we know, Ed only got the okay for the special the day he posted the announcement.
Do you give discounts to the customers who come in with 9-month-expired sales flyers and say “I’m a regular customer, and I want this sale price.” just on the possibility that the item in question may be on sale again 3 months from now? Or even on the certainty that the item goes on sale once a year?
has only been in customer service type jobs for the last 20 years, so could be wrong
This. Is. So. Cool.
I just re-upped and paid with my PayPal account that I use to hold payment from my sales on eBay, so I didn’t have to use the Visa and dip into the household account.
It all happened with a few button clicks and took all of about 35 seconds.
I love computer technology when it works!
Old Navy will actually do this, it’s printed right on the receipt. So it’s not unheard-of in the world of commerce.
Well, given that I’m pretty frugal the odds that I buy something not on sale is rare. I know when I buy something if I’m paying too much or not. If I had known in advance they were going to periodically offer discounts to people every few months, I would’ve waited until then to decide if I wanted to sign up or not.
They made it seem like the only way to get a discount at all was to sign up at the initial pay-to-post thing. Like that offer would never be available again. I had a million things going on then and no time to post, so it wasn’t worth the money to me at that time. I don’t honestly expect to get a refund, but I’m sure you can understand being a bit miffed that shortly after I signed up, suddenly they’re offering big discounts to everyone willy-nilly trying to drum up money. If they had any idea at all they were planning on offering another discount in the future, IMO it would’ve been much smarter in terms of making people happy and wanting to spend their money here, to keep a discount in place for existing members. You don’t make money by alienating the people who support you. And you don’t win over new customers by saying stuff like “We’re not Wal-Mart” when one of your customers asks you a question or has a complaint. Anyone who has been in business for any length of time at all will tell you it’s much cheaper in the long run to retain the customers you have, than to replace them.
I already said I probably won’t renew, and I paid in January anyway so I have almost a year to change my mind depending on how things go here until then, but that kind of attitude doesn’t exactly make me want to pull my wallet back out, you know?
I can see where you’re coming from, jinwicked, especially as you left it so late to sign up, just three months from what is effectively another subscription drive (who knows when these things will happen, but businesses do this all the time). But, if I was in that position, I’d take the discount offer now as a chance to save half the sub you did pay for a further year’s membership. In the long run, there’s a saving.
Not a lot of help if you have to be careful even over the spending of the $5 difference, but hey – it’s something.
Well, I have a lot of sympathy for jinwicked. One of the things that pisses me off the most is buying something only to see that it’s on sale the next week. Or the next day.
But I still never go back in, ever, and demand the new lower price. I also never use the “buyer’s protection” thing on my credit cards either to get the lower price. Why? Because I made an informed, intelligent decision at the time I made the purchase that I wanted to spend money for the goods and/or services received. So long as the provider upheld their end of the contract, I can’t complain.
As a case in point - I paid for my SDMB Membership and didn’t even need to, not out of generosity, but because I hadn’t been told that SDSAB Members would get their membership comped. But I never once bitched about that, or demanded my money back. Because I made an informed, intelligent decision at the time I bought it, and that’s that.
Feeling gyped when you buy something and it goes on sale is not only understandable, however, it’s pretty normal. Once again, I sympathise with your feelings. But what can the SDMB, or any business like it, do? At some point they have to be free to look at market conditions, judge future business, and make decisions based on what they think the fair price should be. If they have to hold off on doing any market correction based on the possibility that 2000 people will now get refunds, then they are now set up for failure. You get into a chicken and egg syndrome where people leave, revenues drop, and they can’t lower the barrier to try to bring people back because then they owe a refund to all those thousands of people who are presumed to have made mature, informed, intelligent decisions under no duress.
Some businesses can offer refunds after a sale, but there are completely different market factors at work here. First, I would hazard that most businesses in a money-losing situation do not offer refunds on “suprise sale” items, period. Second, a business relies on the fact that like mail-in-rebates, very few people will take advantage of the offer and get a refund - whereas in this sort of framework, it is expected that nearly everyone impacted would try to take advantage of a refund. Third, certain products can be refunded at times because they are not the only product the store sells, and they can sometimes be a loss-leader, to get the person into the store to buy other items. Here, the Dope is the only item for sale, period, end of story (ignoring the Cecil books, which are a side issue).
So my response to you, unofficially, would be “Yes, I understand that it’s an unfortunate situation. However, we can’t really open that door to offer refunds back for people who paid the full price because if we do that, the economics are such that we can’t really offer the reduced price anyhow, and that might also negatively impact future membership under the current forecasts. We can assure you that we didn’t know in advance about this special deal, certainly not back at the time you signed up and paid, and we absolutely never intended to make any of the Members feel like they got the short end of the stick. We do really appreciate the people like yourself who felt like the SDMB was worth that much to them and who committed money they could have used elsewhere to this place. We can tell you that we will actively see - no promises mind you - if there are ways we can avoid or minimize tricky situations like this in the future.”
“Shortly”? Even if it was the end of January, it’s still been two months. Even the places that offer after-the-fact refunds for sale prices usually limit it to 30 days (some even less).
(1) You’re still assuming that they were planning on offering a discount.
(2) I have never ever worked at a company who had a policy of automatically looking for possible upcoming sales for customers. If the customer asks about it, they might do so, but not automatically–and even then they don’t look 2 months ahead.
(3) How are they to tell a new member from a previously-existing member when someone is signing up for a first-time subscription?
I signed up before April 28, 2004, but I did not subscribe until January 2005. I used to be a Charter Member (it said so under my name!), but I’m not anymore 
The original Charter Member offer was only open to people who SUBSCRIBED by April 28, 2004. I’m sorry if you did not understand the difference between registration and subscription.
Until a few days ago, it said “Charter Member” under everyone’s name who subscribed over a certain long-standing period, regardless of the date. This was a glitch that the tech department had to sort out before the subscription drive: this sorting has only happened in the past couple of days. The “Charter Member/Member” designation is publicly displayed right now so that the individual member can see at a glance what category they fall into for subscription.
Since the user TITLE function is completely independent of the subscription category, it’s entirely possible that when the current subscription drive ends, all visible user titles for our subscribing members will be “Member” . . . until we start offering our vanity user titles, which we hope to do in the near future.
your humble TubaDiva
In a frenzy of billpaying, (actually, it was during an attempt to give somebody else a membership as a gift) I renewed my membership this January (Jan 17, to be exact) Will I need to pay again to keep being a Charter Member?
I do not see where you renewed your subscription; are you sure it went through?
Please contact me off the board and let’s take a look at this situation. TubaDiva@aol.com.
your humble TubaDiva
D’oh! :smack:
So much for ever being remembered as an original 