Heading in the Right Direction. 02/27/26

Just what you’ve all been waiting for! Advice from the New 60. It’s about subscriptions. Not the kind we forgot about and are still paying in perpetuity. More on those later. No, I’m talking about the ones you have but don’t really use and you are thinking about doing the unthinkable—unsubscribing. John had such an experience with a small-town local paper. He reads the national papers, but did he really need the local one? Upon calling the representative and explaining his reason for wanting to stop, the guy kept continually lowering the price. This is the advice part. Call up your subscriptions, or at least the ones you are not sure about keeping and tell them you want to discontinue their service. Listen to them squirm. My wife and I had two separate music accounts, Spotify and something called Deezer. The Spotify family plan was cheaper than the two separate services individually. I emailed Deezer to unsubscribe and they sent subsequent versions of, “Are you sure?, we’re willing to throw in 3 months for free, we’ll upgrade you to our premium service at no extra charge for the first year!!!”

It reminds us of an old joke. A guy walks into his boss’s office and says, “I want a raise to $200,000 and I won’t take a penny less!” The boss stares silently and doesn’t say a word. The guy then says, “Okay, $175,000 but that is the absolute bottom.”

The boss stares. You get the idea, the boss never says a word and the worker keeps lowering his price. The kicker is the guy offers to work for free, the boss remains silent and the guy finally says, “I’ll pay you.” And the boss sticks out his hand and says, “Deal.” It’s a good trick, and I’d use it if it were possible for me to remain silent. Which is not remotely possible. I still get magazines I never read and subscribe to streaming platforms I bought for one particular series and then never watched again. We bought an Amazon Kindle and took the option to read any book any time for the low, low price of only $10.00 per month. Terrific. Until we realized 8 years later that we had never used the service and finally had the wherewithal to cancel that feature. All that time I was downloading books on my iPad. Take that Amazon!

That’s all for this week. And thank you all for subscribing to The New 60 Comic. Unfortunately (since it’s currently FREE) we cannot lower the price…

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John