The Subscription Conundrum
A Pet Peeve and Godsend
Back in 2019, I tried to go “plastic free” in an effort to lower my environmental impact. Aside from the quixotic disappointment of that endeavor, I picked up a major subscription habit. There are a lot of things that you can get delivered to your door which are plastic-free and easier to get at home than the store. For example, we prefer our Who Gives a Crap bamboo toilet paper that comes wrapped in its own cute paper instead of plastic, and always seems to arrive just a little before we start running out of the last batch. I also like our Dropps laundry and dishwasher pods that come in neatly stackable cardboard and clean just as well as major brands. I mean, sure, they don’t taste as good, but . . .
Unfortunately, since the pandemic, subscription services have gotten out of hand. Literally everything comes with a subscription, including this newsletter. We get several papers (NYT, WSJ, Boston Globe, Washington Post, LA Times, East Bay Times, and Chronicle), cloud services (Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive), streaming services (Apple, Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, Audible, Peacock), food services (Safeway FreshPass, Amazon Prime, Farm Fresh), fitness (Runkeeper, Peloton, Club Pilates, gym membership), and household related (Orkin, Martha’s Bloom Box). That doesn’t even touch all the substack and podcast subscriptions that I dip in and out of. Our family Comptroller (Brook) reports that there are multiple small charges every day for subscriptions he cannot identify and declared that we need a Subscription Day to weed through them all and cancel what we don’t want. I’ve already cancelled our Farm Fresh box, my Prose haircare, and Dollar Shave Club.
Listing out all those subscriptions makes me a little lightheaded. I feel like I just confessed something shameful.
In many ways though, subscriptions make sense. It’s much easier to subscribe than the schedule, order, or buy the same thing repeatedly. The problem is, the fact that so much of this is digital obscures the volume of stuff we are buying. For example, I listed seven newspapers up there. We only get paper copies of two of them, and only on the weekends. That already feels like there’s too much paper sitting around. If I had to deal with seven dailies, I would be able to better calculate the cost (and pain in the ass) of those subscriptions. At the same time, sometimes I want to read something from each of those. And how can a Patriots fan possibly follow his team without a Globe subscription?!
There are few existing workable solutions to this problem. You can either subscribe and unsubscribe constantly or go without. One workable solution to the inundation of subscriptions would be micropayments. A micropayment is a transaction of a small dollar amount. In my ideal world, you could set up a banked amount, say $50, with each vendor, and when you want their product, you authorize a microtransaction. For example, let’s say I banked $50 with Substack. I could then pay 25 cents or one dollar for each individual article I read, or if a newsletter was running some kind of special for a whole month, I could authorize a one month subscription without it being renewed automatically or requiring other action on my part.
Micropayments are common in “fintech” (I assume that means financial technology) and in developing countries.
I understand why media platforms are reluctant to adopt this model. Presumably they fear a loss of income since their financial models are dependent on people being too lazy to cancel subscriptions. Believe it or not, I would probably buy more individual stuff than I subscribe to if I could make micropayments. For example, every time I hear the pitch from Crooked Media to subscribe their Friends of the Pod ($10 or $20 per month), I decline to do so because I already subscribe to too much stuff. I’m not even persuaded by the promise of “ad-free” since the streaming services have all jettisoned that promise. I would, however, pay $1.00 to listen to an episode of Pollercoaster or $3.00 to watch a comedy special on Netflix.
All this is to say, subscription services are TG2BT (too good to be true). I’m going to do some soul-searching to figure out what we can cancel. In the meantime, here’s an old column of other TG2BTs.
Andrea Dooley
Have a great day, and if you know someone else who might like this newsletter, please share it with them. For obvious reasons, I feel sheepish asking people to subscribe today, but also encourage you to do so if you agree with me that subscription services have gotten out of hand.
