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A shocking number of companies hate money. I know this sounds absurd on its face. But companies should make it as easy as possible for people to pay them. Yet a

A shocking number of companies hate money. I know this sounds absurd on its face. But companies should make it as easy as possible for people to pay them. Yet across industries many go out of their way to prevent it for various reasons: security, business models, ease of fiscal reporting, etc. A company's #1 job is, arguably, to stay in business. To that end, being able to accept payments is something each should always be making better, not preventing outright.

TomVDB 8y ago
My daughter wanted a subscription to the New Yorker for her birthday. There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker). After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months. How is that possible?
- bpicolo 8y ago
  I recently signed up for the New Yorker and issues started coming in the next week. Was this a long time ago?
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    This was last year in December. It was some kind of promotion though.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  Probably lead time on printing. 1) It's a physical product, not a service, 2) it has a short shelf life, after which it dramatically drops in value, so 3) and every overprinted copy becomes hamster cage liner. My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    I don’t think weekly magazines are printed months in advance.
    - sulam 8y ago
      I think you're onto something here.
    - rabidrat 8y ago
      They have to build a new mag fab to handle the increase in demand, and those take time to build.
      - tinus_hn 8y ago
        Why would the New Yorker print their own magazines? It is much easier to share a resource like that.
- megaman8 8y ago
  there's a reason print media is going out of business. to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    I've kept thinking that if I could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      They can already make plenty of money out of you from ads. Far more scalable and efficient, and 0 active work for you to do.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > they'd make a lot of money out of me No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
    - dman 8y ago
      But then they would have to write something good.
    - usr1106 8y ago
      > could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't. The Guardian has it. But they are an exception. On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1]. Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper. Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't open at the moment. [1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today. Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book publishers are rather poor.
guitarbill 8y ago
As a non-business but paying user, I had the opposite experience. They spammed me with over 10 emails "warning" me that my Dropbox subscription was about to expire, oh and also casually hinted the business plan was "better", even though I don't use anywhere close to the 1TB. Which of course made me cancel/not renew. As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  This is the same experience. They bombard you at renewal time, but ignore you and apparently don't even allow upgrades during the rest of the year.
- preinheimer 8y ago
  I made the mistake of sighing up for a trial of their business account, it wasn't a good fit. I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.
raverbashing 8y ago
This, this, this, this Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?" And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.
chadcmulligan 8y ago
Yah, just had this experience with amazon in Australia. They've decided that you can only buy things from Amazon oz, but they don't stock half the stuff. I bought an instant pot from amazon UK a year or so ago and wanted to get one for my daughter. Nope can't do that any more, sent Jeff an email, got some gobbledy gook about how the taxes have to be collected for Australia now so they can't do that overseas. Yet I used to buy from Amazon US and used an Alabama address, they seemed able to apply US state based taxes without any problem. Not only do they refuse to sell things to me but they it seems they lie about the reason. Bought it from somewhere else, Amazon is now my last choice if I can't get it anywhere else.
- JazzXP 8y ago
  They've actually turned this decision around. In a few months (not sure why it's going to take so long) us Aussies will be able to buy from Amazon US again.
  - chadcmulligan 8y ago
    not UK though
usrusr 8y ago
Some more detailed examples for that list of reasons: "you can't give us more money before a sales representative had a chance to upsell you even further, sorry they are all unavailable right now", and of course the personalized variant: "... before the sales representative who called dibs on your business had a chance to upsell you even further" (in that case you might even get deliberately stalled because the transaction volume might be more valuable in the next reporting interval, or the one after. All metrics will be gamed). A properly incentivized sales org would sooner run the company to the ground than allow themselves to get bypassed for even a single transaction.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > All metrics will be gamed That's about it as the modern replacement for 'gnothi seauton' on the Delphi temple ...
dullroar 8y ago
This. I have always said the #1 job of a for-profit company should be extracting money from the customers wallets, and it should be as frictionless as possible. But no - examples abound of companies that seem to hate money, as you say.
stevenhubertron 8y ago
I have been trying to pay Netlify for about a year now. Their TIN still doesn't match their invoices and we a have been unable to pay. It's totally crazy to me.
turc1656 8y ago
You're not kidding. I recently booked a Disney trip for the family and ran into issues at every single stage. First, there was a problem with the airfare not displaying the proper pricing. Then I was told that I had to remove the airfare and book that separately as that was the only way I could continue online booking. When I went to pay, there was a problem with their payment system that took 24 hours to resolve (it was on their side, to be clear, not a bank issue on my side). Then I had to get someone to fix the itinerary within my account because it was all messed up. After that, there was some issue with my account and I got mysteriously locked out for no apparent reason (no, I did not enter the wrong password). And then just today, at 7 AM I became eligible to register for FastPass events now that I was inside the 60 day window for the trip. Logged on right at 7 AM and sure enough, FastPass registrations were the only thing not working on the site. Spoke to chat support and they confirmed it was site-wide and the same thing happened the previous day. They fixed it within an hour and I was finally able to register for the events, but literally every step along the way there was an issue. I expect way more from a $170B company, especially one which families give thousands of dollars to at a time. The fact that I literally couldn't give them money for a full 24 hours and had to spend about 4 hours on the phone over two days to figure out and resolve with them is absolutely mind-blowing.
- markhopkins 8y ago
  But they got your money anyway. So why would they care?
  - turc1656 8y ago
    Very fair point, but only from one perspective. Yeah I gave them my money, but they did have to pay at least 4 hours or salary+benefits for at least one person just talking to me on the phone. That doesn't include anyone else behind the scenes who was used to help rectify the issue from the technical side. Nor does it include the cost of however many other people also encounter these issues and have to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone with their employees. That can easily add up.
    - 8y ago

TomVDB 8y ago

My daughter wanted a subscription to the New Yorker for her birthday. There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker). After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months. How is that possible?

bpicolo 8y ago
I recently signed up for the New Yorker and issues started coming in the next week. Was this a long time ago?
- TomVDB 8y ago
  This was last year in December. It was some kind of promotion though.
pessimizer 8y ago
Probably lead time on printing. 1) It's a physical product, not a service, 2) it has a short shelf life, after which it dramatically drops in value, so 3) and every overprinted copy becomes hamster cage liner. My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  I don’t think weekly magazines are printed months in advance.
  - sulam 8y ago
    I think you're onto something here.
  - rabidrat 8y ago
    They have to build a new mag fab to handle the increase in demand, and those take time to build.
    - tinus_hn 8y ago
      Why would the New Yorker print their own magazines? It is much easier to share a resource like that.
megaman8 8y ago
there's a reason print media is going out of business. to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
  I've kept thinking that if I could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    They can already make plenty of money out of you from ads. Far more scalable and efficient, and 0 active work for you to do.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > they'd make a lot of money out of me No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
  - dman 8y ago
    But then they would have to write something good.
  - usr1106 8y ago
    > could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't. The Guardian has it. But they are an exception. On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1]. Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper. Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't open at the moment. [1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today. Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book publishers are rather poor.

guitarbill 8y ago

As a non-business but paying user, I had the opposite experience. They spammed me with over 10 emails "warning" me that my Dropbox subscription was about to expire, oh and also casually hinted the business plan was "better", even though I don't use anywhere close to the 1TB. Which of course made me cancel/not renew. As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)

daveFNbuck 8y ago
This is the same experience. They bombard you at renewal time, but ignore you and apparently don't even allow upgrades during the rest of the year.
preinheimer 8y ago
I made the mistake of sighing up for a trial of their business account, it wasn't a good fit. I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.

raverbashing 8y ago

This, this, this, this Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?" And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.

chadcmulligan 8y ago

Yah, just had this experience with amazon in Australia. They've decided that you can only buy things from Amazon oz, but they don't stock half the stuff. I bought an instant pot from amazon UK a year or so ago and wanted to get one for my daughter. Nope can't do that any more, sent Jeff an email, got some gobbledy gook about how the taxes have to be collected for Australia now so they can't do that overseas. Yet I used to buy from Amazon US and used an Alabama address, they seemed able to apply US state based taxes without any problem. Not only do they refuse to sell things to me but they it seems they lie about the reason. Bought it from somewhere else, Amazon is now my last choice if I can't get it anywhere else.

JazzXP 8y ago
They've actually turned this decision around. In a few months (not sure why it's going to take so long) us Aussies will be able to buy from Amazon US again.
- chadcmulligan 8y ago
  not UK though

usrusr 8y ago

Some more detailed examples for that list of reasons: "you can't give us more money before a sales representative had a chance to upsell you even further, sorry they are all unavailable right now", and of course the personalized variant: "... before the sales representative who called dibs on your business had a chance to upsell you even further" (in that case you might even get deliberately stalled because the transaction volume might be more valuable in the next reporting interval, or the one after. All metrics will be gamed). A properly incentivized sales org would sooner run the company to the ground than allow themselves to get bypassed for even a single transaction.

B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
> All metrics will be gamed That's about it as the modern replacement for 'gnothi seauton' on the Delphi temple ...

dullroar 8y ago

This. I have always said the #1 job of a for-profit company should be extracting money from the customers wallets, and it should be as frictionless as possible. But no - examples abound of companies that seem to hate money, as you say.

stevenhubertron 8y ago

I have been trying to pay Netlify for about a year now. Their TIN still doesn't match their invoices and we a have been unable to pay. It's totally crazy to me.

turc1656 8y ago

You're not kidding. I recently booked a Disney trip for the family and ran into issues at every single stage. First, there was a problem with the airfare not displaying the proper pricing. Then I was told that I had to remove the airfare and book that separately as that was the only way I could continue online booking. When I went to pay, there was a problem with their payment system that took 24 hours to resolve (it was on their side, to be clear, not a bank issue on my side). Then I had to get someone to fix the itinerary within my account because it was all messed up. After that, there was some issue with my account and I got mysteriously locked out for no apparent reason (no, I did not enter the wrong password). And then just today, at 7 AM I became eligible to register for FastPass events now that I was inside the 60 day window for the trip. Logged on right at 7 AM and sure enough, FastPass registrations were the only thing not working on the site. Spoke to chat support and they confirmed it was site-wide and the same thing happened the previous day. They fixed it within an hour and I was finally able to register for the events, but literally every step along the way there was an issue. I expect way more from a $170B company, especially one which families give thousands of dollars to at a time. The fact that I literally couldn't give them money for a full 24 hours and had to spend about 4 hours on the phone over two days to figure out and resolve with them is absolutely mind-blowing.

markhopkins 8y ago
But they got your money anyway. So why would they care?
- turc1656 8y ago
  Very fair point, but only from one perspective. Yeah I gave them my money, but they did have to pay at least 4 hours or salary+benefits for at least one person just talking to me on the phone. That doesn't include anyone else behind the scenes who was used to help rectify the issue from the technical side. Nor does it include the cost of however many other people also encounter these issues and have to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone with their employees. That can easily add up.
  - 8y ago