smosa/adam
/scratchpad
/nytimes-paper
/


Dec 30: Bought a subscription to the NY Times, as in the Sunday physical paper, delivered to my home. Jan 2 (Sunday): Today's the day. Hmm, I thought they delivered these things early. Checked at 7:45, 8:00, 8:15… By 9:30, I decided to report the newspaper missing in their delivery issues page.

The page returned back with an apology and announcing a credit of $5 would be posted to my account. They will also attempt to redeliver the paper.

Jan 2 @ noonish: No paper still. I decided to call customer service. Apparently, the issue was not marked "in the system" as needing redelivery. According to the agent, it's either the credit or the redelivery. not both.

I'd rather have the paper, but the redelivery window ended at 10:30AM, so it's not an option.

Asked the agent how much it would be to just buy it somewhere. She said she didn't know but it was more than my $5 credit. I looked it up and confirmed. The credit doesn't even cover the cost for me to run out and get it.

She listed several places near me (not really that near) which carried the paper. I visited about 14 locations. None had it.

The agent didn't have a lot of answers or abilities to accomodate me because "the system" wouldn't let her. It's still unknown why the paper couldn't be delivered or why the form I filled out said there would be a redelivery. I'm not sure how next Sunday will be any different from this one in that case.

Jan 9: Sunday morning, 7:30AM delivery was a no-show. I requested a redelivery at 7:45AM via the delivery issue portal. Per the agent from last week's advice, I also called right away to ensure a redelivery.

The agent was pretty short with me and seemed irritated by a previous call, sometimes just responding with "yup." I asked how much I would be credited should the redelivery fail too and he could not tell me. I asked how much the NYTimes cost in a store and he also didn't know. One of his "yup"s was referring to my case as a "nonstarter". "Yup, we call this a nonstarter". "What does that mean?" "It means we're going to look into having it fixed." He couldn't elaborate beyond that.

According to my email following the redelivery request, the redelivery window would happen before 5PM EST. At 4:48PM EST there was still no paper. I called the number again and was told the call center was closed.