I subscribe to The Atlantic. Like all magazines, it’s got those little card inserts trying to get you to extend/renew/gift your subscription. They suck, but that’s not the point of this post. The picture above shows four different subscription offers I’ve received from the magazine. Let’s go through them.
Starting with the second (the red one), the text is: “Smarter Save 59%: Get 2 years of The Atlantic for only $2.47 per copy”. This offer is 20 issues (2 years) for $49.50. Eh.
Let’s move to the third (the green one). The text here is “One free year! 3 years - $49.50”. Now we’re talking. The price has gone down from the cover price of God alone knows how much, to $2.47, to $1.64 per copy. Strictly better than the previous offer.
But wait! Take a look at the fourth (blue). The offer here is 2 years (20 issues) for only $49.50 - definitely not as good as the last one, but I also get a $5 Starbucks gift card! Again, strictly better than the red offer.
And finally, let’s move back to the first. This one came in its own envelope, part of the “Customer Retention Program”. Here I’m given a choice between one year for $14.95 ($1.50 per issue) or two years for $26.95 ($1.35 per issue).
The kicker, though, is that the three in-magazine subscription cards were all from the same issue.
I’m not totally sure why the magazine does this, or how it’s supposed to work (are they just hoping to trick some number of people?), but here’s my theory. I read the offers in the order presented in the photo, and after each successive offer I decided that I’d be a fool to pay for them, since I could pay as little as $1.35 per issue. And by the end, I had convinced myself that it must be a pretty good deal. Is that the end goal? Just to make the best offer look better? And if suckers sign up for the less-than-optimum offers, well, more money for the publishers.
