So is it really that difficult to get a paper delivered once every week in the year 2008? Nothing seems to surprise me anymore in this day and age, but what I just recently went through with starting a new subscription with Barron’s seemed to be one for the memories.

As you may recall, I encourage individuals to try and redeem their frequent flyer points on items ranging from free flights to magazine subscriptions. With just a few flyer points sitting in my Continental OnePass account, not nearly enough for a free flight, I decided to subscribe to 3 magazines that I normally read saving me the $’s outlay.

Barrons - 26 issues with a newstand price of $104 and online price at $99 for 1,700 miles

Conde Nast Portfolio - 24 issues with a newstand price of $119.76 and online price at $12 for 1,000 miles

Fast Company - 10 issues with a newstand price of $882.00 and online price at $12 for 500 miles

This was great, right…..? I was able to use 3,200 miles to capture savings of $123.00, assuming online prices, for the 3 magazines that I normally read. So waiting the few weeks for my subscriptions to become enabled, I successfully received my first copies of Fast Company and Conde Nast Portfolio 4 weeks after sign up. So waiting a few more weeks and waking up every Saturday morning looking for the Barron’s subscription, I was disappointed multiple times without a paper.

After a 3-4 weeks of waiting, I finally called Barron’s customer service to understand if there were any issues with my account. I quickly learned that my account was activated for 5 weeks and that I was ~20% through my subscription term. Highlighting that I haven’t had my paper delivered once, the customer service rep reimbursed my account for the missed weeks.

After that slight mishap, I was in the clear….Like a kid waking up on Christmas morning, I was anticipating my paper on Saturday morning. So the time finally came and my hopes were crushed to see no paper on my stoop by the promised delivery time of 8am. Calling the customer service line again, they promised to have it re-delivered by 10am that day….Waiting anxiously for 4 hours until 2pm, no paper. So I had enough, I called Barron’s very disappointed and not truly understanding of how difficult it is to delivery a paper to an address in a major metropolitan area, I canceled my subscription.

Talk about pouring salt in my wounds, the kicker of this story is that for the next two weeks I received a copy of Barron’s on my doorstep. Unreal…

Having that experience over and behind me, I am very content with including the $24 savings for the other two magazines in my blog account.

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