I admit it’s been a while since I had a subscription for a physical paper, but I know there are all kinds of games companies play when it comes time to renew subscriptions, and most are not favorable to the consumer.

In today’s story, one wily man is not about to let a company stiff him for newspapers he never got delivered, and in the end, he gets the best of them.

Check it out.

Where’s my credit?

When a newspaper subscription service falls down on the job, you should not have to pay.

Not my story but my dad’s from years ago: My dad use to get the newspaper delivered every day. This was paid once a year for 365 days of service.

Some days it wasn’t delivered and he’d call customer service.

If they had someone around they’d deliver the paper later in the day.

If they didn’t want to they would credit his account for one day of no paper.

This man was always on top of whether or not he was getting the service he paid for.

After a year he gets the bill for the following year and the date the subscription started was the same date as the prior year which would mean they didn’t give him any credit for the days they didn’t deliver the paper.

He figured he should not have to pay for newspapers that were never delivered.

He calls customer service to ask about this and they have no information on that so he grabs his calendar and starts giving each date, the name of the person he spoke with and what was said.

They try to give him a song and dance to get off the phone but he’s retired and has all the time in the world.

This is why it’s important to keep records.

At some point they transferred him to a supervisor who acknowledged that there were 2 weeks of missing newspapers but claimed he had gotten credit for them.

Was the credit an extra day of delivery or a return on his bill?

‘If I got credit then the effective date of the new subscription would be 2 weeks from the start date listed or the you would be asking for payment for 50 weeks of paper delivery instead of 52.’

The sup asked ‘How do you figure that’s right?’ ‘I passed math in the first grade.’

They wouldn’t do anything so he decided to let the subscription go and didn’t pay the bill.

It’s a matter of simple math.

The newspaper kept delivering the paper every morning although they hadn’t received payment.

Two months of free newspapers.

When they stopped he called newspaper to set up a new subscription.

There seems to be a lot of disorganization in the delivery process.

In the comments, people share their own story of newspaper subscriptions gone awry.

This widow had plenty on her plate without worrying about how difficult it was to cancel a subscription.

And this person got a runaround when they tried to call and cancel.

You can even sometimes scam some free papers if the only subscription you have is digital.

And here, an ex-magazine employee explains that subscriptions are hard to cancel because the publishers need those numbers to sell ads.

And after all, the math behind the subscriptions is not too hard for the customer to do.

He certainly schooled them.

Hilarious.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.