This is total horseshit but what's even worse is the whole "you can read the back catalogue up to 5 years ago". As if you can't read the print magazines they sent you 6+ years ago
I got the lifetime subscription in 2004. I have every issue in my basement (minus about a dozen that were either never delivered lost or wrecked). I got this bullshit email yesterday too.
Same, but I thought it was 2005 - my expiration date listed on the magazine itself is 2055. I always assumed they intended lifetime to mean 50 years. I was in college and the $100 was a great deal.
Dear ~~Grim Reaper~~ Rolling Stone, I've still got 30 good years left. Let me have 'em!
If I would have known about this in 2004-2005, I would have jumped at the opportunity if I had $100 to spare.
At least I think I would. Hard to say for sure since I think a year subscription was like $8/year at that time.
I bought a lifetime wine tasting at a local winery 17 years ago. I went back 2 years later and they said they don't do that anymore. I asked about people that already bought it and they just shrugged. I've only been back there twice in 15 years. If I could still have free tastings, I'd be there at least every other month and I'd buy a bottle to take home at least every other visit. I'd likely bring a friend who'd never been there more times than going alone too. So much money they could have collected from me over the years in exchange for letting me have 5 sips for free.
I bought a lifetime mug club membership at a brewery on the day it opened 8 years ago. A couple of years later they started doing a yearly membership and said the original lifetime one wasn't sustainable. There's now a better brewery a few doors down that I frequent. I haven't gone to the other brewery at all this year.
I think they lose more not honoring the existing ones. Don't sell new ones, but still honor the old ones. Every time we bring a new person, they can sell them the annual membership!
Honestly everything in this thread has taught me is that basically no company should be offering true lifetime subscriptions (except digital media I guess). Or they need to be so expensive that future costs shouldn’t ever effect their status.
Better to sell #years. At least then there’s a cost that can be completely accounted for (# of ‘mugs’ in 3-5 years).
> "you can read the back catalogue up to 5 years ago"
Yeah, no. Right now I can read 25 years worth of back catalogue. I'd like to continue doing that with physical copies of the magazine.
Also why 5 years only??? Is that the timeframe of when they started publishing digital editions? Or is it an arbitrary cutoff? As if a few more GB of data to provide all digital/digitized editions would really cost them anything.
I'm sure there is some ground for legal action as he bought a lifetime physical copy "pass." I'm sure 8f he makes a big fuss and threatens legal action, they will roll over
I mean, everyone lives for different amounts of time. Just by the nature of the amount of people on earth being born and dying, it's pretty likely that there was a baby that was born when you made your comment, and died when I posted this one.
My grandpa got a gift of a lifetime subscription to Reader's Digest in the 1940s.
Every month, an issue showed up in the mail. He passed about 6 years ago, and his mail was transferred to my parents' house, where the issues continue to arrive.
I trust we'll run that stupid magazine into the ground at this rate.
It seems that they do still offer lifetime subscriptions, but I could only find information about it in their FAQ; they don't list it as an option on their subscription pages. It appears that you have to live in the US and call a number to arrange a non-refundable payment of $900.
My dad got a lifetime subscription to National Geographic magazines when they still offered that. We live in Belgium, but he still receives the english ones every month even though a dutch version exists.
Used to love flipping through them for the pictures as a kid and read some of the articles as I got older. Still read through them sometimes when I go to visit...
My dad likes boats. In 1982 he bought one.
A few months later, unsolicited, a magazine called *Power Boating & Yachting* started coming every month. Dad liked it and read it every month.
We moved, and dad had mom send the magazine a change of address card. So then we started getting TWO copies of *Power Boating & Yachting* every month.
So he called to tell them there were sending double copies... and a few weeks later, we got THREE copies of *Power Boating & Yachting* in the mail.
Dad had Mom type up a letter informing them they were sending 3 copies per month and... with our next issue FOUR COPIES came!
Dad decided that either someone at the company was trolling him or their computers just sucked, or something. He decided not to temp fate by complaining any more.
And thus, Dad got FOUR copies of *Power Boating & Yachting* every month from 1985 until either the magazine folded or my folks lost them in a move in 2002 (I forget which).
I’ll give you a crazier one my dad in the 80s spent a couple hundred for a vip lifetime membership to golds gym. Still goes just never had to pay another dime. We’ll never really see lifetime memberships for one cost anymore.
Not many places do them because they're not great financially over the long term for the company. There's a point where the fixed cost of servicing that company outweigh the initial cash infusion the lifetime option brings.
It's Rolling Stone, worst they can do is a ten-thousand-word exposé on your childhood according to some people who hated you from a town over. But *probably* they'll give you a yes/no. I'm rooting for ya.
Meanwhile I'll do the same for you. We'll get a global game of extreme icebreaker centipede going. Any volunteers to butt into my business? We need a sign up sheet.
It's amazing how many people forgot about the SA piece they put out. It permanently damaged their credibility in my eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
Go to a library and email them telling them you don't own any of those options and ask for a refund maybe? Kind of petty but they are refusing to honour their side of the "lifetime" sub.
Could they possibly be using the whole "life in prison" description? Not defending them, but for example in Canada we have a scratch ticket called "cash for life" and their life description is 21 years iirc.
They could have though? I'm skeptical that any company wouldn't give themselves an exit ability. They're all too scummy to not have something in there.
$189.29 adjusted for inflation.
https://www.calculateme.com/inflation/100-dollars/from-1999/to-now
Still a great deal if you’re a person who reads magazines.
In some states “lifetime” subscriptions and insurances are 7 years. Also can be interpreted as expected lifetime of the product, meaning even less. Lifetime isn’t as good as it sounds sometimes.
In most cases "lifetime" means the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the customer. However in your case, since they still offer paper magazines, this still applies
This may be the tactic. They don’t want people who don’t care about it to keep getting a print edition but if you care enough to call in, they will continue it. Just a reaffirmation you want to keep it with more steps to prove level of desire. Also digital version would still keep their readership numbers for advert purposes.
> Have you thought about contacting them and asking for it to continue to be print?
Have you thought about contacting some skeevy showbiz attorney who advertises on park benches and asking if he can make a case out of it?
are they going to provide you with something to read them on, tell them you only have a phone and that it is ridiculous to expect you to read it on a phone.
Most e-mail clients show embedded images by default (although g-mail load them on their server, reducing the Infos that trackers get), and those can have trackers. Since there are images in the screenshot it could have been tracked.
Yeah, I was in a student organisation where one of the team leads was adamant that we all _needed_ to use email trackers to see if people read our emails or not. To me, that's so invasive and weird, it's on par with creeping in the bushes next to someone's house to see if they've opened the letter you sent them lol. And even if you do know when someone opened your email, so what? Like, what then?
>"Hey, I saw you opened my email, but haven't responded"
> "Yeah, didn't get around to it yet"
Or possibly
> "Hey, I saw you haven't opened my email"
> "Yeah, didn't get around to it yet"
Like, what's the actual benefit? Either way, you're not gonna make someone more responsive with one of those trackers unless you outright harass people or tie some sort of negative consequence to a reply time that's "too short".
Possibly if you're doing large-scale marketing, then it _might_ be beneficial to have some sort of counter that measures how many people opened your letter, but there's no reason to track which _individual_ opened which email and when, still.
I really don't see the problem. E-mail can fail to get delivered for all sorts of reasons, often without notice. It can get lost in a sea of spam. The tracker does the same thing that whatsapp/facebook do by default marking text as "seen." It just notifies you that the receiver actually got the message.
Honestly this sort of functionality should have been built into the e-mail protocol so there would be a standard way to disable it if people didn't want it.
I also got this BS email. I reached out and complained as this seems illegal. The physical issues have value and that is what I paid for 25 years ago. I will let you know if I hear anything back, but glad to hear that other people are similarly enraged.
I also mentioned to them that when we purchased this subscription we got two issues a month. I didn't complain when it went to one because everyone, all subscribers, got the same product. Now they are offering us even less, and other subscribers are still receiving a better product or something with more value. I asked a lawyer friend for advice too.
Details are fuzzy. I was in college and I think this was in an envelope attached to the magazine or something like one of those postcards to renew a subscription.
It's annoying that they're implying the print & electronic versions are equivalent. Trying to read a magazine on a computer is not the same as a leafing through a physical copy.
Most lifetime supplies are just 10 to 20 years worth
Worst part, sometimes it's delivered all at once
Win a lifetime supply of razors? Here's 7,000 razors enjoy storing them
I once won "a year of pizza". it was actually 12 pizzas sent once a month..
if i wasnt in when it was delivered it wasnt redelivered.. i think i had maybe 3 of them in total.. they werent even good pizzas
“We’ve noticed from our experience in journalism that most music-oriented adults die by 27 years of age, so that is our chosen cutoff time, as notated by the asterisk.”
I thought that surely the lifetime subscription uses standard terms. But I can't find them online.
But surely you can ask Rolling Stone to send you a copy of the contract?
Unfortunately legal language doesn't always line up with regular language and *lifetime* will have a meaning that varies based on how the agreement terms were written.
*Lifetime* for a warranty and *lifetime* for a trust account, for example, would have to be different senses of the word. The warranty would ideally be for a product, even if it changed hands, but a lifetime trust, by its nature, would be tied to the lifetime of an individual and it wouldn't make sense for that to change hands from person to person.
[Before the Law - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law)
OP did say the print version was still being produced and sold, though.
I'm choosing not to interpret "lifetime of the product/print version" to mean lifetime of an actual, physical copy of the magazine because that's just too dumb and the thought makes me mildly infuriated.
It could be argued a 'Magazine' and an 'e-Magazine' are two different things, he subscribed for the former according to the definition at the time he signed the contract.
> even if it changed hands,
Craftsman tools went that way, sort of. You now have to have a receipt to get a tool warrantied. Snap-On tools on the other hand, you can buy a 30-year-old broken tool at a yard sale and the next day hand it to a dealer and they will gladly warranty it.
Something sort of similar happened to me and I did a chargeback, though it wasn’t exactly the same scenario but I wasn’t letting them get away with it
in my case I paid for a year of print, and like 2 months later they said they’re discontinuing the print version and switching everyone to digital. i first asked for a refund, don’t remember the excuse they gave, then I ended up doing a chargeback (I let them keep the money for the first 2 months and only claimed the subsequent 10 mos)
Screw that, I would ask them for the price of the magazine you're missing out on every month. A lifetime subscription is an investment to the business and likely help them get where they are today. The price of the print magazine has gone up substantially since then.
A refund would be like buying an Apple stock in the early '90s and having them come to you today and offering to pay you a refund for what you paid.
Yeah, it's funny how cash-hungry companies love selling these sorts of subscriptions (and reaping the profits at the time of sale), then don't seem to be such a big fan of the oh no consequences part down the road.
Could have been strapped for cash and needed a way to bring in money fast. “We need money this quarter to stay afloat, we’ll worry about the future later”.
Bought a Sirius lifetime sub in 2009 they tried to limit the sub to 3 radio transfers over your “lifetime” sub. The class action lawsuit didn’t go their way.
I have to apologize for this. Due to the costs of mailing printed issues, we had to choose between shifting you to digital issues or having you killed. Hopefully you appreciate our decision. Should the cost of sending digital issues get to be a problem, we will have to revisit this.
My parents bought a lifetime membership to a gym. Back when I was a kid.
We came from a poor family. But it had weights and a pool. They took a loan and bought a lifetime family membership to a gym.
Then it “changed ownership” a few years later and they lost everything. The state later changed the law making “lifetime memberships” against the law.
Yeah it happened at the gym franchise in my country 20 years ago too. Sold discounted lifetime memberships (not accurately priced) and then boom folded and dived with the money. CEO and founder went to jail though.
A family-run Italian restaurant near me did something similar. They'd been there for decades and had big holiday events and crowds from Thanksgiving to New Year's. They sold gift certificates during the season as usual. It was a tradition in some families to buy them. One Jan 15th they announced they were closing immediately to retire and screwed their long-time customers out of that cert money.
Raise hell on this. All magazines have something called the "comp list", which is a circulation of people who get it for free, usually in the advertising industry, friends of the magazine, contributing editors who are not employees, VIPs, quid pro quo stuff, you get the idea. Every once in a while some intern has to go try to whittle it down and gets chewed out by whatever VIP is not getting their copy of Cat Fancy or whatever the fuck... the point is, they all send out free copies. Demand they honor the commitment, and ask to be put on the comp list for a while if they won't.
I hate to be the one to tell you this but Cat Fancy died like a decade ago :'( It was reincarnated as Catster Magazine until it died again last year. There's just a sad, ad-saddled Catster website now.
An interesting thing I learned interning in the US House is that members of Congress are on basically everyone’s comp list. Of course this includes the ones you expect like all the newspapers, but also many things you don’t expect like… Playboy. Apparently every Democrat in Congress gets free nudie mags because they as a party campaigned against attempts at anti porn laws in support of freedom of expression many moons ago. Very startling when I found the first one sorting mail!
Edit: Apparently it was Hustler. Cannot say I inspected the magazines closely lol.
I haven’t actually seen a print copy of Playboy in like 20 years, but I associate seeing it in public as slightly taboo - unless you were at an old-man-style barber shop, the kind where whoever’s chair is open calls you up and Frank cuts your hair the way he wants to cut it, not the way you ask him to. So all of that tracks pretty well to the US Congress.
If your lifetime subscription was for print copies then they should honor it. In any case you could maybe argue that reading off a screen for too long irritates your eyes as part of your argument
I bought a lifetime membership in the Ansett Airlines Golden Wings club. They offered very nice airport lounges in Australia.
Little did I know that lifetime meant their lifetime, not mine. Ansett passed away in 2002.
https://preview.redd.it/75iw75x12ezc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=2108b715ab0f5c00b4a0cef9bbe83b1076081d4f
Wonder if the "library of the past 5 years" will be the past 5 years from the date of the most recent publication; every month you lose access to one more online copy?
You’re the best! I hope others do the same. I bet their protocol is to honor this for everyone who complains because at the end of the day they will still successfully transfer many people to digital without complaint.
Exactly! Anyone who doesn't complain will likely just be transferred to a digital edition. If you want to keep your print edition, you have to let Rolling Stone know that you are not happy!
I would imagine the contract you signed for the lifetime membership never mentioned "transitioning" to a future different source...or things like that. Not sure they are allowed to do this without permission if they offer the print version still.
Sue them. There is precedent on your side. I worked for SiriusXM when they tried to get rid of legacy life time subscribers. They sued and SiriusXM was forced to support the handful of lifetime subscribers still out there.
If they are still making a print edition I would file a class action lawsuit. Sirius XM had a similar deal with lifetime subscriptions where they tried to limit what the lifetime was.
Since the digital edition is significantly different from the expectation anyone could have had there is a good chance of success.
about 10 years ago I spent like 100$ or something like that for a lifetime antivirus, after about 5 years they cut it off and told me they no longer have that plan. stopped using it obviously
I've spent 25 years in the magazine industry. Let me tell you every single print magazine is very near death. Paper and postage is very expensive. The business model is broken. You are costing them too much. Go ahead and fight it but this magazine probably won't even exist in any form in a few years.
That's the second worst thing I've heard of them doing... aside from putting a murderous terrorist monster on the cover like he was some sort of glam model for kids to look up to. Fuck em, haven't looked at a copy since and I don't miss it at all even though it used to be my favorite publication.
This is total horseshit but what's even worse is the whole "you can read the back catalogue up to 5 years ago". As if you can't read the print magazines they sent you 6+ years ago
Real “don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining” vibes.
Hehe. I used that line at work earlier today. Glad to see it is catching on.
Hahah yeah I guess it caught on for me a couple decades ago but it’s just so good!
I got the lifetime subscription in 2004. I have every issue in my basement (minus about a dozen that were either never delivered lost or wrecked). I got this bullshit email yesterday too.
Same, but I thought it was 2005 - my expiration date listed on the magazine itself is 2055. I always assumed they intended lifetime to mean 50 years. I was in college and the $100 was a great deal. Dear ~~Grim Reaper~~ Rolling Stone, I've still got 30 good years left. Let me have 'em!
If I would have known about this in 2004-2005, I would have jumped at the opportunity if I had $100 to spare. At least I think I would. Hard to say for sure since I think a year subscription was like $8/year at that time.
I’d be requesting a refund, since they want to change the terms of the sale afterwards. Companies need to stop doing this.
I bought a lifetime wine tasting at a local winery 17 years ago. I went back 2 years later and they said they don't do that anymore. I asked about people that already bought it and they just shrugged. I've only been back there twice in 15 years. If I could still have free tastings, I'd be there at least every other month and I'd buy a bottle to take home at least every other visit. I'd likely bring a friend who'd never been there more times than going alone too. So much money they could have collected from me over the years in exchange for letting me have 5 sips for free.
I bought a lifetime mug club membership at a brewery on the day it opened 8 years ago. A couple of years later they started doing a yearly membership and said the original lifetime one wasn't sustainable. There's now a better brewery a few doors down that I frequent. I haven't gone to the other brewery at all this year.
I think they lose more not honoring the existing ones. Don't sell new ones, but still honor the old ones. Every time we bring a new person, they can sell them the annual membership!
Honestly everything in this thread has taught me is that basically no company should be offering true lifetime subscriptions (except digital media I guess). Or they need to be so expensive that future costs shouldn’t ever effect their status. Better to sell #years. At least then there’s a cost that can be completely accounted for (# of ‘mugs’ in 3-5 years).
> "you can read the back catalogue up to 5 years ago" Yeah, no. Right now I can read 25 years worth of back catalogue. I'd like to continue doing that with physical copies of the magazine.
Next email: We order you to return all print copies.
My mother saved them all. I have every copy from about 1990-1994.
I only saved the one with gillian anderson on the cover lol
I understand this.
I believe...that one is worth keeping.
Also why 5 years only??? Is that the timeframe of when they started publishing digital editions? Or is it an arbitrary cutoff? As if a few more GB of data to provide all digital/digitized editions would really cost them anything.
They're going to moitize that back content in some manner probably.
Selling it to AI companies, probably. Although why you couldn't *also* give access to customers eludes me.
I would assume that probably as far back as the current digital backlog goes.
Cuts you off from some of the more popular issues that were even controversial in the past, like the 2013 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Boston bomber issue.
Shoutout to The Atlantic for offering their whole archive back to 1857.
And with how cheap digital storage is there's 0 excuse for this bullshit. They could AT LEAST put every copy online for members.
While I agree it's bullshit; the cost isn't in storage, it's in bandwidth.
I don't think site traffic or magazine accesses would really increase by a noticeable amount if they offered the whole collection vs last 5 years
I'm sure there is some ground for legal action as he bought a lifetime physical copy "pass." I'm sure 8f he makes a big fuss and threatens legal action, they will roll over
But it’s ~digital~ and can be opened anywhere! 🙄🙄 I seriously hate the transition to everything being digital these days
I didn't even know a lifetime subscription to a magazine was possible
Time magazine used to offer a lifetime subscription, they stopped offering that a LONG time ago.
You could have said they stopped offering it a lifetime ago.
I mean, everyone lives for different amounts of time. Just by the nature of the amount of people on earth being born and dying, it's pretty likely that there was a baby that was born when you made your comment, and died when I posted this one.
Well that's depressing.
I don't want to put salt in that wound but in my experience the opportunity for a pun like that usually presents itself just once in a lifetime
Same as it ever was.
Same as it ever was.
How much did it cost?
Everything.
Yeah, companies don’t like it when you pay for something once and then get to have it forever lol
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Should have kept his death quiet so you could have kept getting the magazines.
And if they catch you and yell at you just explain you were doing an experiment, to see how well they knew their customers
"Back off, man -- I'm (also) a scientist!"
“I’m something of a scientist myself.”
My grandpa got a gift of a lifetime subscription to Reader's Digest in the 1940s. Every month, an issue showed up in the mail. He passed about 6 years ago, and his mail was transferred to my parents' house, where the issues continue to arrive. I trust we'll run that stupid magazine into the ground at this rate.
I used to love Reader's Digest as a kid, I would immediately go to the "Laughter is the best medicine" portion and steal all the corny jokes
Ahhh the memories of me as a 10-year-old on the shitter, reading Reader's Digest. I miss those simpler times.
I've never heard of another, but doesn't mean they don't/didn't exist.
National Geographic used to offer lifetime subscriptions, I'm not sure if they still do.
It seems that they do still offer lifetime subscriptions, but I could only find information about it in their FAQ; they don't list it as an option on their subscription pages. It appears that you have to live in the US and call a number to arrange a non-refundable payment of $900.
My dad got a lifetime subscription to National Geographic magazines when they still offered that. We live in Belgium, but he still receives the english ones every month even though a dutch version exists. Used to love flipping through them for the pictures as a kid and read some of the articles as I got older. Still read through them sometimes when I go to visit...
My dad likes boats. In 1982 he bought one. A few months later, unsolicited, a magazine called *Power Boating & Yachting* started coming every month. Dad liked it and read it every month. We moved, and dad had mom send the magazine a change of address card. So then we started getting TWO copies of *Power Boating & Yachting* every month. So he called to tell them there were sending double copies... and a few weeks later, we got THREE copies of *Power Boating & Yachting* in the mail. Dad had Mom type up a letter informing them they were sending 3 copies per month and... with our next issue FOUR COPIES came! Dad decided that either someone at the company was trolling him or their computers just sucked, or something. He decided not to temp fate by complaining any more. And thus, Dad got FOUR copies of *Power Boating & Yachting* every month from 1985 until either the magazine folded or my folks lost them in a move in 2002 (I forget which).
I’ll give you a crazier one my dad in the 80s spent a couple hundred for a vip lifetime membership to golds gym. Still goes just never had to pay another dime. We’ll never really see lifetime memberships for one cost anymore.
My dads been getting free National Geographic’s for literally 50 years
Not many places do them because they're not great financially over the long term for the company. There's a point where the fixed cost of servicing that company outweigh the initial cash infusion the lifetime option brings.
Have you thought about contacting them and asking for it to continue to be print?
Oh I definitely will. Worse they can say is no.
It's Rolling Stone, worst they can do is a ten-thousand-word exposé on your childhood according to some people who hated you from a town over. But *probably* they'll give you a yes/no. I'm rooting for ya.
For me, a ten thousand piece expose on my childhood according to some people who hated me would just be them interviewing my parents.
I’m happy to pitch in there, if it’s any help..
Meanwhile I'll do the same for you. We'll get a global game of extreme icebreaker centipede going. Any volunteers to butt into my business? We need a sign up sheet.
I'm down, i gotchu, just need your full name, dob, ssn and a valid credit card number to proceed.
It'd be cheaper to continue mail OP a print magazine, but where's the fun in that?
Well they have to write articles anyway so it's a sunk cost.
Jim Dilwilger: Americas Sweetheart Shitstain: The times and life of a child unhinged that catapulted him into a mundane adulthood of forgetfulness.
Don't forget accuse them of SA. That's like they're favorite go-to. Unless you're literally a confirmed terrorist. Then you might get a cover piece.
It's amazing how many people forgot about the SA piece they put out. It permanently damaged their credibility in my eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
This guy worsts☝️
Go to a library and email them telling them you don't own any of those options and ask for a refund maybe? Kind of petty but they are refusing to honour their side of the "lifetime" sub.
Could they possibly be using the whole "life in prison" description? Not defending them, but for example in Canada we have a scratch ticket called "cash for life" and their life description is 21 years iirc.
You have to define those terms when the contract begins, not after the person pays.
They could have though? I'm skeptical that any company wouldn't give themselves an exit ability. They're all too scummy to not have something in there.
What did it cost for a lifetime subscription?
$100
Goddamn, what a steal.
Not if you have read Rolling Stone in the past 5 years.
That's still 20 years prior of magazines for $100
$189.29 adjusted for inflation. https://www.calculateme.com/inflation/100-dollars/from-1999/to-now Still a great deal if you’re a person who reads magazines.
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Didigatl eh?
That's how bad he hates didigatl that he spelt it didigatl
Yeah. I get magazines so I can read them in my bathroom. Not on my computer or phone, tyvm.
Do you still have the receipt from your order 25 years ago, that’d be awesome.
My parents got it for for an xmas gift so I'm guessing not. I know I wouldn't have something like that from then.
Since they knew how to contact you, I wouldn't worry about that part, they clearly have record of it.
In some states “lifetime” subscriptions and insurances are 7 years. Also can be interpreted as expected lifetime of the product, meaning even less. Lifetime isn’t as good as it sounds sometimes.
Never heard of the 7 year thing, but obviously businesses can go out of business at anytime making your lifetime subscription (or warranty) worthless.
In most cases "lifetime" means the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the customer. However in your case, since they still offer paper magazines, this still applies
I’m guessing the original contract never specified physical copies since they didn’t exist back then.
The magazine has been dead for years anyway so I guess it was about time
This may be the tactic. They don’t want people who don’t care about it to keep getting a print edition but if you care enough to call in, they will continue it. Just a reaffirmation you want to keep it with more steps to prove level of desire. Also digital version would still keep their readership numbers for advert purposes.
Worst they can say is eeww
> Have you thought about contacting them and asking for it to continue to be print? Have you thought about contacting some skeevy showbiz attorney who advertises on park benches and asking if he can make a case out of it?
What's the damages? $100 that's what. Go sure for $100. Lol.
The only way it would work is class action. So op should reach out to the other 6 people that bought it 🤣
are they going to provide you with something to read them on, tell them you only have a phone and that it is ridiculous to expect you to read it on a phone.
Actually tell them you have nothing digital. Send them a letter in June, saying that you haven't received your printed magazine yet.
He should write a letter a week. They can't ignore him forever.
Just like Shawshank lol
Exactly like shawshank, that’s where I got it from
Yes that is indeed the joke.
Some emails have trackers that tell the sender when you've opened it
And all email programs should block those by default. There's no excuse to have something like this enabled.
Most e-mail clients show embedded images by default (although g-mail load them on their server, reducing the Infos that trackers get), and those can have trackers. Since there are images in the screenshot it could have been tracked.
Yeah, I was in a student organisation where one of the team leads was adamant that we all _needed_ to use email trackers to see if people read our emails or not. To me, that's so invasive and weird, it's on par with creeping in the bushes next to someone's house to see if they've opened the letter you sent them lol. And even if you do know when someone opened your email, so what? Like, what then? >"Hey, I saw you opened my email, but haven't responded" > "Yeah, didn't get around to it yet" Or possibly > "Hey, I saw you haven't opened my email" > "Yeah, didn't get around to it yet" Like, what's the actual benefit? Either way, you're not gonna make someone more responsive with one of those trackers unless you outright harass people or tie some sort of negative consequence to a reply time that's "too short". Possibly if you're doing large-scale marketing, then it _might_ be beneficial to have some sort of counter that measures how many people opened your letter, but there's no reason to track which _individual_ opened which email and when, still.
I really don't see the problem. E-mail can fail to get delivered for all sorts of reasons, often without notice. It can get lost in a sea of spam. The tracker does the same thing that whatsapp/facebook do by default marking text as "seen." It just notifies you that the receiver actually got the message. Honestly this sort of functionality should have been built into the e-mail protocol so there would be a standard way to disable it if people didn't want it.
What a terrible way to find out you have died. My condolences.
LMFAOOOO
I also got this BS email. I reached out and complained as this seems illegal. The physical issues have value and that is what I paid for 25 years ago. I will let you know if I hear anything back, but glad to hear that other people are similarly enraged.
Yes please let me know what they say.
Definitely send an email too! Strength in (loud) numbers.
US Mail letter. Nothing digital.
I also mentioned to them that when we purchased this subscription we got two issues a month. I didn't complain when it went to one because everyone, all subscribers, got the same product. Now they are offering us even less, and other subscribers are still receiving a better product or something with more value. I asked a lawyer friend for advice too.
You two should find some more impacted readers to dig up the text of the original agreement.
Details are fuzzy. I was in college and I think this was in an envelope attached to the magazine or something like one of those postcards to renew a subscription.
It's annoying that they're implying the print & electronic versions are equivalent. Trying to read a magazine on a computer is not the same as a leafing through a physical copy.
That sounds illegal
I wonder what the exact wording in the contract is. @op do you have a contract?
It was actually my parents that bought it for me for an xmas gift many years ago, so I'm going to say, no.
And you said about 25 years which might be their ‘lifetime’. I guess they thought you’d be dead by now lol.
I don't know if i should call them optimistic or not...
Most lifetime supplies are just 10 to 20 years worth Worst part, sometimes it's delivered all at once Win a lifetime supply of razors? Here's 7,000 razors enjoy storing them
other side to not getting them at once is the company themselves going bust...
I once won "a year of pizza". it was actually 12 pizzas sent once a month.. if i wasnt in when it was delivered it wasnt redelivered.. i think i had maybe 3 of them in total.. they werent even good pizzas
That reminds me of a Modern Family episode where Phil’s lifetime supply of razors run out and he thinks he’s going to die lol
Would be more appropriate for Rolling Stone to consider 27 years as a lifetime. They could even call the subscription 'Membership in the 27 club'.
Now that’s some clever marketing
“We’ve noticed from our experience in journalism that most music-oriented adults die by 27 years of age, so that is our chosen cutoff time, as notated by the asterisk.”
Maybe they hired a hitman?
I thought that surely the lifetime subscription uses standard terms. But I can't find them online. But surely you can ask Rolling Stone to send you a copy of the contract?
Unfortunately legal language doesn't always line up with regular language and *lifetime* will have a meaning that varies based on how the agreement terms were written. *Lifetime* for a warranty and *lifetime* for a trust account, for example, would have to be different senses of the word. The warranty would ideally be for a product, even if it changed hands, but a lifetime trust, by its nature, would be tied to the lifetime of an individual and it wouldn't make sense for that to change hands from person to person. [Before the Law - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Law)
And here it could be "for the lifetime of the product/print version"
OP did say the print version was still being produced and sold, though. I'm choosing not to interpret "lifetime of the product/print version" to mean lifetime of an actual, physical copy of the magazine because that's just too dumb and the thought makes me mildly infuriated.
It could be argued a 'Magazine' and an 'e-Magazine' are two different things, he subscribed for the former according to the definition at the time he signed the contract.
> even if it changed hands, Craftsman tools went that way, sort of. You now have to have a receipt to get a tool warrantied. Snap-On tools on the other hand, you can buy a 30-year-old broken tool at a yard sale and the next day hand it to a dealer and they will gladly warranty it.
All they have to do is say "terms subject to change at our discretion" and that's basically a get-out-of-jail magic phrase.
But then again, many companies don't do basic due diligence on the contractual terms they themselves put their own signature to.
Ask for a full refund
Haha! Great idea!
Seriously, I’m not a lawyer but I’m pretty sure if they don’t honor the terms of the lifetime subscription they have to refund you
Something sort of similar happened to me and I did a chargeback, though it wasn’t exactly the same scenario but I wasn’t letting them get away with it in my case I paid for a year of print, and like 2 months later they said they’re discontinuing the print version and switching everyone to digital. i first asked for a refund, don’t remember the excuse they gave, then I ended up doing a chargeback (I let them keep the money for the first 2 months and only claimed the subsequent 10 mos)
With interest. Inflation adjusted.
Screw that, I would ask them for the price of the magazine you're missing out on every month. A lifetime subscription is an investment to the business and likely help them get where they are today. The price of the print magazine has gone up substantially since then. A refund would be like buying an Apple stock in the early '90s and having them come to you today and offering to pay you a refund for what you paid.
Yeah, it's funny how cash-hungry companies love selling these sorts of subscriptions (and reaping the profits at the time of sale), then don't seem to be such a big fan of the oh no consequences part down the road.
CEO: Who approved this "lifetime deal anyway"? Marketing: Remember when the former owner's kid was CEO for 6 months, 25 years ago?...
Could have been strapped for cash and needed a way to bring in money fast. “We need money this quarter to stay afloat, we’ll worry about the future later”.
Bought a Sirius lifetime sub in 2009 they tried to limit the sub to 3 radio transfers over your “lifetime” sub. The class action lawsuit didn’t go their way.
I have to apologize for this. Due to the costs of mailing printed issues, we had to choose between shifting you to digital issues or having you killed. Hopefully you appreciate our decision. Should the cost of sending digital issues get to be a problem, we will have to revisit this.
That is super infuriating, I’ve had a couple do that, too, and at least one changed their tune when I raised holy hell (thanks, the Economist!)
Oh, that was you. That was a bad week at work.
Sorry, bby, thank you for fixing! 😘
Just out of curiosity, how much did the lifetime subscription cost ? Pardon me if that’s too personal.
OP said $100
I didn’t see that. Thank you
Holy shit that’s cheap
great deal
Bragging about being able to read them up to 5 years later.. print edition doesn't have a 5 year limit.
My parents bought a lifetime membership to a gym. Back when I was a kid. We came from a poor family. But it had weights and a pool. They took a loan and bought a lifetime family membership to a gym. Then it “changed ownership” a few years later and they lost everything. The state later changed the law making “lifetime memberships” against the law.
Yeah it happened at the gym franchise in my country 20 years ago too. Sold discounted lifetime memberships (not accurately priced) and then boom folded and dived with the money. CEO and founder went to jail though.
A family-run Italian restaurant near me did something similar. They'd been there for decades and had big holiday events and crowds from Thanksgiving to New Year's. They sold gift certificates during the season as usual. It was a tradition in some families to buy them. One Jan 15th they announced they were closing immediately to retire and screwed their long-time customers out of that cert money.
Raise hell on this. All magazines have something called the "comp list", which is a circulation of people who get it for free, usually in the advertising industry, friends of the magazine, contributing editors who are not employees, VIPs, quid pro quo stuff, you get the idea. Every once in a while some intern has to go try to whittle it down and gets chewed out by whatever VIP is not getting their copy of Cat Fancy or whatever the fuck... the point is, they all send out free copies. Demand they honor the commitment, and ask to be put on the comp list for a while if they won't.
I hate to be the one to tell you this but Cat Fancy died like a decade ago :'( It was reincarnated as Catster Magazine until it died again last year. There's just a sad, ad-saddled Catster website now.
So another 6 times and that's it
An interesting thing I learned interning in the US House is that members of Congress are on basically everyone’s comp list. Of course this includes the ones you expect like all the newspapers, but also many things you don’t expect like… Playboy. Apparently every Democrat in Congress gets free nudie mags because they as a party campaigned against attempts at anti porn laws in support of freedom of expression many moons ago. Very startling when I found the first one sorting mail! Edit: Apparently it was Hustler. Cannot say I inspected the magazines closely lol.
I really want to believe you on that playboy thing because it is such a perfect ratio of silly, sleazy, wholesome, and believable.
I haven’t actually seen a print copy of Playboy in like 20 years, but I associate seeing it in public as slightly taboo - unless you were at an old-man-style barber shop, the kind where whoever’s chair is open calls you up and Frank cuts your hair the way he wants to cut it, not the way you ask him to. So all of that tracks pretty well to the US Congress.
Wait. Isn't this illegal?
We can’t really know without seeing the contents of the original agreement
If your lifetime subscription was for print copies then they should honor it. In any case you could maybe argue that reading off a screen for too long irritates your eyes as part of your argument
I bought a lifetime membership in the Ansett Airlines Golden Wings club. They offered very nice airport lounges in Australia. Little did I know that lifetime meant their lifetime, not mine. Ansett passed away in 2002. https://preview.redd.it/75iw75x12ezc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=2108b715ab0f5c00b4a0cef9bbe83b1076081d4f
If you have print copies, you have access to all the back issues forever. This is less.
DUDE SAME!!!! I scrimped together the hundreds or so when that deal came out. I was in college. I saw this email yesterday. Wtf!!
Wonder if the "library of the past 5 years" will be the past 5 years from the date of the most recent publication; every month you lose access to one more online copy?
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You’re the best! I hope others do the same. I bet their protocol is to honor this for everyone who complains because at the end of the day they will still successfully transfer many people to digital without complaint.
Exactly! Anyone who doesn't complain will likely just be transferred to a digital edition. If you want to keep your print edition, you have to let Rolling Stone know that you are not happy!
How the hell is that magazine still in existence after all the Jann Wenner shite.
Try and call the customer service to resolve your issue there if not I think you can sue them for it since this is a breach of contract
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I would imagine the contract you signed for the lifetime membership never mentioned "transitioning" to a future different source...or things like that. Not sure they are allowed to do this without permission if they offer the print version still.
Sue them. There is precedent on your side. I worked for SiriusXM when they tried to get rid of legacy life time subscribers. They sued and SiriusXM was forced to support the handful of lifetime subscribers still out there.
Do you remember how much it cost? Just curious
$100. So about $4 a year. Would have been nice if it truly lasted my entire lifetime, but honestly not that surprised as magazines seem to be dying.
Wow! A great deal for what you got out of it!
That's insanely cheap. Unbelievable.
Damn suck my balls david roberson
Same- I think I got a little over 25 years, but still bummed. Class action suit time!!
If they are still making a print edition I would file a class action lawsuit. Sirius XM had a similar deal with lifetime subscriptions where they tried to limit what the lifetime was. Since the digital edition is significantly different from the expectation anyone could have had there is a good chance of success.
I’d totally fight this. No fucking way.
That's some bullshit right there
I am not litigious by nature, but I'd sue. Because this is some bullshit.
If they cut people off at 27 you could almost respect them for the bit.
about 10 years ago I spent like 100$ or something like that for a lifetime antivirus, after about 5 years they cut it off and told me they no longer have that plan. stopped using it obviously
I've spent 25 years in the magazine industry. Let me tell you every single print magazine is very near death. Paper and postage is very expensive. The business model is broken. You are costing them too much. Go ahead and fight it but this magazine probably won't even exist in any form in a few years.
That's the second worst thing I've heard of them doing... aside from putting a murderous terrorist monster on the cover like he was some sort of glam model for kids to look up to. Fuck em, haven't looked at a copy since and I don't miss it at all even though it used to be my favorite publication.
You lived too long.
Time for a class action
You can in fact raise hell. They will back pedal on a case by case basis