Complaint: My Subscription To The Economist

The last of my complaints from last year that I’ve been meaning to put up for, oooh, weeks.  I was not amused by the price increase of my quarterly subscription and wrote to complain.

I have recently actually cancelled my subscription, due to unemployment, then two days later I was offered a job.  So I have signed up again on their 12 issues for £12 deal.  I wonder if I can do that every 12 weeks?  Hmmm.  That would be economical.

I digress, complaint incoming.

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Good morning

I note with disappointment the quite significant rise in the subscription price.

I am sure that most subscribers to The Economist wouldn’t have a clue how much they are paying for it, however there are a small fraction of us that are on low wages and every pricing increase is an economic decision that has to be made.

Given that I am from Hull, I appreciate that I probably am not expected to be reading anything more intellectual than the Daily Star (which is not even a good source of boobs nowadays), however something bizarre happened and I ended up semi-intelligent.

My teachers once even thought that I could be the first person from Hull to go to Oxford or Cambridge University since 1756.

I tried my hardest to be as dumb as possible – drinking every weekend by 14, in trouble with the police by the age of 13, a love of fires, vandalism and fighting lit up my teenage years (though I tended to end up on the losing side of fights).  Not to mention smoking copious amounts of weed at university and dropping out – of course, I didn’t even get into Oxford Brookes, let alone proper Oxford.

Now I find myself in Bracknell, befriended by fools who actually want to leave the European Union to “get their sovrenty bakk innit”.  I have the most brain-numbing repetitive office job which a robot could and probably will soon do – I have taken to writing letters of complaint on my lunchtime to test that I still have a grasp of English and can establish paragraphs without using copy and paste.

The Economist has become almost my only solace from a world of Kasdashians and ketamine.

It is very likely that I will shortly be unemployed for a spell, so I may have to heart-wrenchingly interrupt my roughly 10-year subscription to this wonderful newspaper and be left with conspiracy theory nutcases on Facebook for my only source of news.

I appreciate that you are not going to reverse your decision on the price of a subscription after reading a little self-defecating prose from a common grunt from Hull, but I do ask that you bear in mind that not everyone that subscribes to The Economist can afford a new Louis Vuitton handbag every day.

Kind regards
James Winfield

ps If you know anyone looking for a junior front-end web developer, please let me know.

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Dear Mr Winfield,

Customer Reference Number:-

Thank you for contacting The Economist.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused in this matter.

We would like to inform that your subscription price is increased from £38.00 to £44.00 with your next payment due on 14th June 2016.

The price quoted is correct. The discounted rates previously available to your subscription no longer apply and currently we do not have any offer.

We would like to inform that the increase in subscription prices is not related to our new ownership structure. Our commitment to delivering high quality journalism demands a continual and significant investment.  We don’t want to compromise on our high standards so this requires us to review our pricing every two to three years, 2013 was the last time we reviewed our pricing and for customers paying the full subscription price we’ve kept the cost of their Economist subscription un-changed.

Should you require any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind regards

The Economist subscription centre