Before buying a NYT subscription, here's what it'll take to cancel it

In my recent experience this has changed drastically. Amazon was on average the cheapest, fastest online marketplace I'd used, and any issues were resolved within an hour.

Now I'm still waiting for a product I ordered 3 months ago. The only option I have is contacting the seller - who doesn't respond. I wrote a review about the experience, which then got promptly removed.

More recently I've ordered a few things from multiple places, the one outstanding delivery is from Amazon, and now almost a week late. It'll probably be the last one; their obvious lack of interest regarding fake reviews, review resetting and obfuscation, misleading pricing, counterfeit products and the constantly shrinking number of quality products have taken a toll. More often than not products are shipped from China, making it a worse choice than many local competitors who may ask higher prices for delivery but at least ship in two days instead of two weeks, have a phone support hotline and a reason to care.

Very slowly but steadily the reasons I started using Amazon's platform eroded away until it became more or less a more approachable middleman for aliexpress dropshippers.

> is not how it is supposed to work

But THIS is how it works. This reality doesn't fit your paradigm. But the reality prevails.

In other words, when you stop paying them.. it stops. You can no longer consume the goods, past-present-future. You call it subscription. I call it a service. Because in my mind a subscription to a Newspaper is "News-as-a-Service. I stop paying Amazon, I lose the AWS. I stop paying the Economist, I lose access to all (present-past-future) issues.

Downvote all you want. Call it what you want. Still.. someone give me an example where the subscription ENDED, and they still have access to the Benefits. If not.. you're welcome. NaaS. Unless you get the paper-copy. Then you ACTUALLY bought the "News" and ONLY because YOU control the physical medium (the paper its printed on).

Just had to do this yesterday, its ridiculous they make it harder to discourage you, this only made me want to cancel it even more

Tried to expand on it but I missed the edit window. If you're a subscriber (even at a discount) you count in their circulation numbers. Those numbers affect their advertising costs, the value of the news outlet (not just the NYTimes), and probably the internal performance reviews of lots of people who really don't want to lose you.

Traditionally newspapers didn't make enough money from subscription revenue to cover their costs - advertising is where the money was, payment for subscriptions was nice but a big part of its importance was as an indicator "this person cares enough to pay for this news source" for selling advertising. That hasn't really changed that much.

Yes, I've read it.

Magazines publishing centre-right views are fine. But if what you are seeking is a news publication that doesn't push a particular agenda, then The Spectator is pretty much as far away from it as you can get outside of Pravda.

You're right, of course, that it publishes some mild centre-right commentators with uncontroversial conservative views. That doesn't really compensate, in my view, for the provision of space to writers like Liddle and Young. These particular people are reactionary trolls; their writing contains little other than disinformation deliberately intended to stoke culture-war nonsense, and they're too smart to believe what they write. This stuff does little more than make society worse for everyone.

But I'd say regardless of your views on individual commentators or the overall quality of the publication – if someone wants to avoid the NYT because it is campaigning too much, then directing them to The Spectator is laughable.