Open Letter to The New Yorker

I greatly appreciated the opportunity to become acquainted with your publication via the incredibly inexpensive offer to try twelve weeks for six dollars. I find about half of the magazine germane to my life. In that I do not live in New York City, nor do I visit there often, the first half of the content detailing shows, restaurants, and other various entertainments isn't terribly useful to me. I do enjoy the longer form articles that really go in depth with a story, and naturally the cartoons, but not to the tune of over a hundred bucks for renewal. What made the decision for me to not renew my subscription was the flippant attitude of your telephone representative. You see, I was checking my credit card account online and discovered I had already been billed when your email from two months ago assured me that I would receive an email notice near the end of my current subscription so I would have the choice of opting in or out before I was billed. I received no such notice. So I called. Your customer service rep assured me that the charge would be refunded. When I mentioned that the magazine was awfully quick to charge me without the notice I was promised, he answered that things do get messed up at times. He sort of apologized but not really. It has been a week now and I still have not seen a refund posted to my credit card. May I suggest a bit of fine-tuning to the computer language that controls subscription notices and billing? Quite simply, the notice should be sent before the billing is activated. That is, after all, what you promise to the new subscriber. Computers are actually quite good at doing things in the order that they are programmed to do them. All I have to say is, if this is how you treat customers, no wonder print journalism is suffering from death throes. Finally, there aren't nearly as many cat cartoons as I had hoped there would be.