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Best Buy Deception Less Than Entertaining

Months ago I was in Best Buy to pick up something or other - almost certainly a DVD - and the clerk asked me if I'd like to get 6 or 8 free issues of Entertainment Weekly magazine. I already subscribed to it (picked up a subscription via one of the magazine fund-raisers the kids bring home from school) and enjoy getting it each week. It's a wonderful, light source for current and upcoming pop culture, from music to movies to television and books. They've even taken to occasionally binding in a DVD of the premiere episode of a new or returning series (Nip/Tuck, House, and Huff come to mind) -- and all in all I have little but praise for the magazine itself. So, I don't have the problem with EW. The problem's with Best Buy.

See, I figured that one of two things would happen. I'd either find my subscription extended by 6 or 8 weeks or I'd end up with a free extra issue I could add to the general reading pile at work.

Long story shorter than it might be: Double issues started showing up each week... and so on, and so on. Then I see that they both have "Mar 05" as the end of subscription date, and I find a $29-something charge on my credit card. I check online to find that while I wasn't told about it (though I was supposed to have been), when I accepted the free issues it was like signing up for some club. I had to watch for when the free period was up and act to cancel it. Not having done so, they were "authorized" to charge me for a subscription. I'm told that if I dig up the receipt for whatever I bought back then I'll find the contract printed on the back. My, wasn't that handy?

To call this underhanded is to be too kind.

Well, at least now it's essentially fixed. I've killed the automatic renewal and they put the six month subscription (and, I should note in all fairness, based on what the operator told me about the new end of subscription date, they put a full six months on it rather than subtracting the extra issues from it) on the tail end of my existing one, so all is well once again.

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