Blethen's crappy operation
Just a quick followup on my last post, having nothing to do with the continuing saga of Frank Blethen’s obsessive crusade to keep future asset transfers from being taxed.
As you recall, a week ago I called the Seattle Times circulation department (206-464-2121) to switch my newspaper subscription over to the Post-Intelligencer. I didn’t expect the change to happen overnight, so it was no surprise to see the Times on my doorstep on Tuesday. Wednesday might also be a bit quick to expect the information to trickle down from the office to the distributor to the route deliveryperson, so I didn’t really mind that that morning’s paper was still Frank’s rag. As Seattlites know all too well, under a long-running Joint Operating Agreement, Blethen owns and runs the printing presses, circulation department, and delivery network for both of the city’s dailies.
So… Thursday, Friday, and Saturday arrived, and so too did the Times. On Sunday, as is the case in many of the few two-newspaper towns, there is only one paper (alas, the Times) to be had, though there are a few scraps of the P-I‘s editorial/op-ed pages and comics slipped in among the usual Bletheniana. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I semi-convinced myself that perhaps they defined subscriptions by the week, and that I’d had to fulfill last week’s Times run before I’d be moved over to the P-I.
Hoping to find this surmise confirmed, this morning I bopped downstairs to the door, and found ... the same goddamn Seattle Times, a full week after I’d tried to kill the subscription.
So I called their circulation desk again to lodge my complaint. The very helpful customer service rep took my information, checked their subscription database, and informed me that there was NO RECORD that I’d ever asked to cancel the Times, nor that I’d demanded to start receiving the P-I, nor even that I’d complained bitterly about Blethen and his obsessions. She asked whether I recalled who I’d spoken with—yeah, like I’d written down the clerk’s name—and promised that this time the change is in their system. It may not happen tomorrow, but I’ll definitely receive the Post-Intelligencer on Wednesday morning.
Y’know, it’s not the most difficult database operation in the world to enter, record, and create the sort of transaction I requested last week. Every customer-service database has that sort of operation built into it. Every clerk is trained to do it, and is led through the procedure by pre-written macros. It’s so far from rocket-science or brain-surgery that it would be silly to even mention those metaphors. Yet this, one of the simplest of customer service procedures, wasn’t done by that Blethen-hired clerk a week ago.
Will the Post-Intelligencer be waiting on my doorstep come Wednesday? I’m not a betting man, but I suspect I could get some pretty long odds if I went for the “yes” side.
Comments
Well since Times was resting easily in their little township of Denial over the candidates, perhaps that management style has trickled down the ranks to circulation now. Beware, you’ll probably start to get subscription solicitations over the phone any day now-course you could take the opportunity to talk to the solicitor to be sure they were going to vote Dem...always a bright side.
Frank Blethen has always been a nut (Remember his shooting a neighbor’s dog back in tghe mid-1990s) and will, like most spoiled, trust-fund babies, do anything to get his way. I remember he had some elaborate conspiracy theory about how the Hearst Corp. was going to do economic ju-jitsu and drive the Times into bankruptcy to buy it cheap and merge it with the P.I.
As I recall, he claimed that this would all happen about three years ago.
I think Blethen is incompetent enough to bankrupt his own paper.
WOW! I just stumbled across your Blethen/Times rant (was doing research for tomorrow’s election) and my jaw dropped to the floor over the similarities to your saga and mine. I bailed on the Times over the summer due to the almost daily Blethen blathering in their pages whining about the estate tax. I got sick of the Blethen using the Times for his personal soap box. When I moved I tried to start up with the PI and it took me WEEKS and FIVE half hour long phone calls to get them to finally consistently deliver the PI. There was lots of excuse making about the delivery person having both papers on hand and getting confused and such, but when I pointed out that not once in the five years I subscribed to the Times did I ever accidently get the PI, they finally have been consistently delivering the PI and only the PI. Wish I had switched years ago, if only to support the underdog and vote my wallet in support of a two paper town. The PI is a better paper anyway, news-wise, but sadly the Times has the monoply on the good comics. Anyway, I wonder if there’s some forum for tracking people’s PI vs the Times stories?
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