Edmonton Journal tempts fate

OK, Edmonton Journal. Last straw. After the paper was AGAIN thrown on the steps today, this is the last warning: next time it happens, we're cancelling the paper. You're about to lose a customer, folks.

Comments

Unknown said…
Seems to me this is unwinnable from your side. The incremental revenue of one subscriber (probably near enough zero - or less) can't possibly be worth the extra time you're requesting be expended delivering it to you. It would appear that the correct business response would be to listen politely to your complaint(s) and then ignore you. It usually makes sense to simply fire a customer that's more trouble/expense than they are worth. Just a thought.
May 29, 2010 at 6:52 PM
Unknown said…
I would like to think that the $300 a year I'm paying for home delivery is worth the extra 1.5 seconds it takes to put the paper in my mailbox, which has been nailed next to the door since the day we bought the house and has been the great receiver of newspapers ever since then ... until about a few months ago when our current carrier decided that putting it in the mailbox was too much trouble.

Also, I'd agree with you had the situation been 10 years ago and the newspaper business was rolling in customers. Now, they're not. Heck, as far as I know, I could be the last actual paid Journal subscriber in the city. Given the sad state of the newspaper business, they need me far more than I need them.
May 29, 2010 at 7:00 PM
Unknown said…
Well, I'm guessing that they probably don't need you. You obviously would know the business better than me, but it seems doubtful they make any money off subscriptions. I think it's the case that their whole business model is broken and thus there is no longer any incentive to keep subscriber customers happy.

From the carrier's perspective, it's probably more like 15 or 20 seconds since one can throw the paper to the step from say 5 or 10 meters away, eliminating twice that distance walking plus time to place the paper in the box. Using 15 sec per day and 360 delivery days, that's 1.5 hrs of extra time spent every year for a marginal amount of extra compensation. Do carriers still get paid piecemeal? If not, and they are paid flat rate to cover a route, you're sunk...

Have you tried bribery?
May 31, 2010 at 9:37 AM
Unknown said…
The funny thing is, in this case, I know the carrier isn't saving himself much time because he actually walks up my steps to the door to drop the paper at his feet. I know this because 90% of the time, I'm already up and hear his footprints on our wooden stairs. Never been able to make it to the door in time to chew him out, however.
May 31, 2010 at 9:40 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Car camping in our Toyota Rav4

Image
My wife and I booked a tenting trip to Yellowstone National Park last summer. We had never been there before and were really excited to go, but weren't thrilled that we were sleeping in a tent in bear country. We are fundamentally too cheap to buy a camper trailer, and our Toyota Rav4 doesn't have a big enough engine to pull anything larger than a ladybug anyway, so our options were pretty limited. During a discussion of those limited options just weeks ahead of the Yellowstone trip, I Google'd "car camping Rav4" and discovered there's a whole sub-culture out there of people who have retrofitted their Rav4 vehicles to sleep in the back. We started devouring other people's blog posts and videos on the subject and quickly set about to lifehacking our car and our trip to suit our needs. So we did a live beta test in Yellowstone and slept in our vehicle. We loved it. Sleeping in our Rav4 was quiet and dry. We didn't have to worry about wildlife, and ...
Keep reading

Saturday in Hilo: Farmers market, BJ Penn, waterfalls!

Image
Saturday was our last full day in Hilo. Our top priority here was to see the Volcano Park, which we accomplished in spades. But it's funny: while this was supposed to be a prelude to our "real" vacation on Maui, Hilo was a gigantic pleasant surprise and I'd come back here in a heartbeat. It's beautiful here, uncrowded and not overtly touristy. It's funny, too, because a lot of people tried to warn us off coming to Hilo, saying that we should stay on the Kona side of the island because Hilo is too rainy and ... well, too rainy. But in four days here we never got rained on once. Admittedly, August is the second driest month of the year, but the weather was quite good - sometimes overcast and a little windy once in a while but no complaints. And no downpours. At least on us. Saturday is Farmers Market day in Hilo so we headed off there first thing. It was a lot smaller than I was expecting. However we picked up some delicious orange-pineapple jam and Nicole boug...
Keep reading

WWE: What is so hard about 16x9 DVDs?

I don't understand this. The WWE has been broadcasting their events in high definition for nearly a year now. But their DVDs are still formatted in the standard 4x3 aspect ratio. I bought the No Mercy DVD this month, and was quite disappointed to learn that it was not presented in 16x9 widescreen. And this isn't like the weird Wrestlemania DVD issue, either, with the DVD deciding (depending on your TV) whether to show the event in widescreen or not. (See this post and comments.) As far as I can determine, No Mercy has no widescreen option. It's formatted in 4x3. But it's framed in 16x9. Which makes for some very poor viewing of some of the action when both wrestlers disappear off the screen because they're in the portion of the 16x9 framing that gets chopped to make it 4x3. This is ridiculous. Every Hollywood movie I own on DVD is in widescreen. Even UFC has put out regular DVDs formatted in widescreen. So, WWE, what's your excuse? EDIT 11:27 a.m.: O...
Keep reading