To my dear former friends at The Week:

I am highly annoyed by The Week's handling of my subscription. I received your magazine just fine for several months at my new address. Suddenly I realized that I had not received an issue for a few weeks. I checked my subscription status at your web site only to find that "the post office has notified us that the address we have listed on your subscription is incorrect."

Well, that's ridiculous because mail—including, once upon a time, my subscription to The Week—gets to me at that address just fine.

Nonetheless, knowing that the post office is picky about things, I updated my address a couple of months ago, but I still have not received any further issues. I checked the site again today only to find that same ridiculous objection about the post office.

Back while I was still receiving The Week, I renewed my subscription for something like 5 years, paying around $250. That's how much I loved your magazine. In return, you suspended my subscription. That's apparently how much you value my subscription. Sadly, during this time period when you failed to deliver the subscription for which I paid you a lot of hard-earned money, I learned to live without your magazine.

Therefore, instead of reinstating my subscription, I'd like you to cancel it. Please refund the prorated balance remaining on my account. Why should I let you keep my money when you don't seem to want to send me your magazine?

Sincerely hurt,
William Shunn

Netflix is going to eliminate account profiles this September. If you don't know, that's the feature that allows you to maintain separate DVD queues under one account.

YMMV, but to me Netflix is taking a giant step backward with this move in terms of serving its customers. This feature was a godsend when they first implemented it. Until then, if I wanted to be sure I always had a Bill-movie on hand (as opposed to a Laura-movie or a Laura-and-Bill-movie), I had to work hard at managing my queue, moving a new Bill-movie to the top every time I sent a Bill-movie back. Profiles took all the effort out of that effort. I'm used to it now, and it pisses me off that they're taking it away and sending me back to the Stone Age.

Good customer service is about continually making things easier for the customer, not harder. It's about giving the customer good new stuff without taking good old stuff away. I hope Netflix has some killer features they're planning to roll out instead, because otherwise they've just made the first move that would make me reconsider how useful my subscription is to me. And they didn't even ask me first.