Thanksgiving Sale Backlash

Someone suggested to me last week that we never hold another sale. I think they were joking, but I’m honestly a little tempted to take their advice.

As you (likely) know, we held a one-week sale in celebration of Thanksgiving. We had a rush of people happy to take advantage of the deal, whether their subscription was due soon, whether it wasn’t due until June, or whether they had never subscribed before. It was great. We loved the support and were happy ourselves to see people enjoying the deal. Everyone loves a deal, including myself. However, there was a small minority that made it really difficult to enjoy the sale on our end. About half a dozen people expressed that they were very upset with us for having this deal, because they had renewed recently and weren’t told about the deal ahead of time. What made this particularly difficult was that some of these people weren’t very polite in expressing their feelings. One jumped straight to saying they’d never renew again, with no further explanation of any wrongdoing on our part, and another berated one of our staff over the phone. All of this over 20 cents a newspaper. And if half a dozen came forward angry, I can only imagine there’s at least a few more people who were upset and just didn’t bother addressing it with us.