Posts: 33,877
Threads: 126
Joined: Jan 2006
Brian was on vacation and just got back to us on this problem - hope 'dlos' is still around!!
"What may be somewhat difficult to understand is that while subscribers (long term customers) purchase a large number of our books, the vast majority of our books are sold on the newsstand. Either to new customers or customers who have seen our content before, but never subscribed.
Oftentimes, recipes will be created for an issue of a magazine, but will then be repurposed in a book. For instance, if we are creating a book about “Soups”, we may take some of our more popular soup recipes from older issues and repurpose them in our books. For 99% of our customers, this will never be an issue. A very small percentage of our subscribers actually buy books…so it works out for us pretty well. That said, I TOTALLY understand how someone who buys a lot of CAH content could be upset by the duplications. It’s something we’ve discussed, and we certainly don’t want to upset our best customers…so we do our best to try and mix in new content as well. Recipe creation is difficult (as you know)…it’s tough to constantly come up with new ideas or new takes on existing recipes. If a recipe is successful, we want to reuse that from a business perspective, but also so that more of our customers can experience it. Obviously that can upset some customers at times.
All that said, we have one of the most liberal customer service policies that I’ve ever seen. At any point, if a customer is not happy with a purchase, they should call customer service at 1-800-311-3995 and talk with our great representatives. They will do all they can to make our customers happy…especially our most loyal, long-term customers. We don’t want anyone to feel cheated and will make it right.
Hope that helps!
Brian"
Retired and having fun writing cookbooks, tasting wine and sharing recipes with all my friends.
www.achefsjourney.com