I don’t know, kids today, they’re just growing up so fast. Despite being only 12, my daughter decided that she wanted – no, needed – a subscription to Seventeen magazine. When I was 12 I think I was subscribing to 2000 AD and worrying about whether my Curly Wurly would melt in my satchel, not subscribing to magazines five years ahead of me and worrying that my satchel made may ass look big… Still, Seventeen seems innocuous enough (at least when compared to Cosmo or Marie Claire), and is only $10 a year (which is about what I spend on CDs a week), so to save myself daily requests for the next five years, I assented. It turns out that her asking me was more of an FYI, as she’d already filled in some online form somewhere, and her first edition was already winging its way to us as we spoke. However, because she is only 12 she doesn’t have a credit card or any other way to pay for it. Which is where I came in, I guess. So when she got a confirmation email asking for payment, she naturally forwarded it to me, along with her most urgent exhortation (like, “Now, Dad. You need to pay this now. NOW!!”). So I did my dutiful father thing, and clicked one of the five (5) links in the email, so that I could pay online and get it over and done with.
However, when I went to fill in the form, I found that I couldn’t actually pay. The form wanted me to enter the ‘valid til’ date for my credit card, but it was impossible to select or enter the year for this, and the form kept on rejecting my input because I hadn’t specified this. In what seemed like a pretty simple coding mistake, the Year field just hasn’t been configured:
I was tempted to just tell my daughter “Well,I tried…”, but I knew I’d never hear the end of it, so I sent am email to the Customer Service department:
From: Me
To: Hearst MMPTrying to pay this but your website is broken. The Year field for the credit card expiry date just says “There is no Expire Year List Assigned To This Page”. Fix that and I might be able to pay. Thanks.
They didn’t seem too worried about their website being broken, but still wanted my money, so instead advised me to pay via one of the other available options:
From: Hearst MMP
To: MeDear Valued Customer,
Thank you for contacting Hearst Multi-Market Promotions.
You can pay by contacting our Customer Service Center at 1-800-223-3081 or you can mail the payment to us at:
Hearst Multi-Market Promotions
PO Box 6000
Harlan, IA 51593-1500
1-800-223-3081Thank You,
Hearst Multi-Market Promotions
I don’t like the ‘phone as I don’t really like talking to people if I can possibly help it, and I don’t want to send a check (cheque) as that just seems so archaic, so I tried again:
From: Me
To: Hearst MMPI’d rather pay online. When will your website be fixed?
This time they took a different (and entirely unexpected) tack:
From: Hearst MMP
To: MeDear Valued Customer,
Thank you for contacting Hearst Multi-Market Promotions.
We regret to inform you but at this time online payments are not offered.
Thank You,
Hearst Multi-Market Promotions
What? What?? Rather than actually bother to fix their website, they’d rather just stop taking online payments altogether? Wow. These days, many companies are living and dying based on their online presence, but Hearst Publishing’s business model is apparently “Oh, this is all too difficult, so let’s just not bother. We tried, but clearly this Interweb thingumajig really isn’t for us.”
Actually, they haven’t really stopped offering the option to pay online, as their online payment page is still there. What they’ve really done is stopped caring that they do not actually have the ability to accept online payments. Yes, this is for a physical product, but still… I can’t be the only person in the world that wants to subscribe/pay online, so presumably they’re happy to just give up on chasing this money. Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s just that no-one else has ever wanted to pay online – because their target demographic is apparently 12 year old girls, who don’t have a means to pay online anyway. But even then, i can’t be the only schmuck of a father who wants to appease their daughter’s constant demands in the fastest way possible.
But it’s not even as though this is really that difficult a problem to fix. Looking at the code behind the page, the problem is pretty easy to identify. At lines 521-524 we have:
It would take about seventeen seconds to fix this, but apparently the intern who built their website has moved on and no-one else at Hearst (a pretty significant – albeit ‘old-school’ – media company) have no idea how ‘modern technology’ works. So to to save them having to figure it out themselves, here’s my quick-and-dirty fix for them. Just change the above code to:
That will keep them going for another 10 years or so. But given that they seem entirely incapable of maintaining any kind of a workable Web presence, I’d be surprised if they are still around in another 10 years. By then my daughter will be 22, and given the speed at which she insists on maturing (like Benjamin Button in reverse), she’ll be looking to subscribe to Mid-Life Magazine…
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