Yesterday I was attacked by our vacuum cleaner. Joe was vacuuming the stairs and had the cleaner at the top of the stairs. It fell and hit him on the top of the head, so I started up the stairs to go hold it for him. At the time he was telling me he didn’t need my help, it fell again, this time striking me across the forehead and one side of my nose which really hurt. It still hurts today. I’m just waiting to see if a bruise forms so everyone can assume my husband beats me. ;)
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This morning I was looking over our Discover bill since we’ve started cutting back on our restaurant expenses in order to save more money, and I noticed a charge from our paper, the Chicago Tribune, in the amount of $58.50. I was immediately alarmed because we usually pay $19.50 per quarter, and back in November we had been charged $58.50 but determined it was for a longer period of time, so we didn’t dispute it (more on that in a bit).
Joe immediately called the Tribune to inquire about the charge and was told it is now $58.50 quarterly. Yikes! That’s three times what it used to cost, and the only reason we even subscribe is for the Sunday paper. If we purchased the paper individually it would cost us $10 per month ($2.50 weekly) which is why we were ok paying $19.50 every three months (which also includes Wednesday and Friday delivery which we don’t care about). Joe asked them to cancel our subscription and refund us the charge, which after some back and forth trying to keep us, they agreed to do.
After getting off the phone I remarked to Joe that it still didn’t make sense because I know when we were originally charged the $58.50 in November we wouldn’t have just assumed the charge was for a longer time period without something to give us that impression. Sure enough, I was correct. Evernote came to the rescue, and I found this screenshot I took in November when this first came up.
Click the screenshot below to make it bigger. Notice how there’s a column to the far right that says “Paid Thru” and it says August 10, 2012 in the field? That explains why we had assumed the charge was for nine months of service at once. Sure, we weren’t exactly happy that they changed their billing from quarterly to three quarters, but it was no big deal since we pay our credit card in full every month anyway.
After looking at that screenshot Joe called them back and insisted they refund us another $39 since the original charge was misleading and we would have cancelled then if we had known their rates had tripled. At first the guy was implying it was our fault for not logging back into the account and checking on it later since that paid through date was an error. How the heck would we know it was an error, and why would the burden be on us to check the account again when what it said originally made sense to us and indicated we wouldn’t be charged again until August? Joe explained this to the guy and eventually he relented and agreed to reimburse us $39 on top of reversing the most recent charge of $58.50.
Interesting enough, when Joe was finally able to reset his password and log into his Tribune account they no longer had the option to look at past transactions and what the through date would be. How convenient for them. I’m so glad I use Evernote to document this stuff.
These companies are unbelievable! I feel like they intentionally mislead customers in the hope they don’t notice or don’t want to be bothered to dispute the charges. Well they are messing with the wrong couple because we don’t bust our butts working for our paychecks only to waste our money.
Now we’ll have to buy the paper weekly, but in a way it will be more convenient than home delivery because we’ll be able to get it on Saturday and go through the coupons ahead of time. That’s all we get it for anyway.
