I enjoyed very few deliveries as an adolescent and young adult more than the initial Columbia House box. Digital has finally killed them. I guess the biggest surprise for me hearing that was that they were still actually around in 2015.
For our younger readers, a brief explanation. Columbia House was the larger of two music/movie clubs that would ship you a decent Christmas morning’s-worth of merchandise for a pittance, in exchange for your commitment to purchase some specified amount of additional selections (typically six or eight) at regular price during a set timeframe (typically two or three years).
Regular club prices were high. I remember an album on cassette being a total of $12.14, and it seems like a CD was $17.44.
The whole package was still quite a good deal—if you paid attention. You see, you had to opt out of a shipment every single month. If you didn’t, you received and were billed for the selection of the month.
Why this seems so widely remembered as a “ripoff,” I have no idea. The business model is pretty obvious, and as I said, if you kept up with it, no worries. When you fulfilled your obligation, they stopped the negative option shipping, because you were now a “preferred member.”
But you had to be a real sap to hang around and be a preferred member, because the thing to do was get out and get right back in again. They would let you do that as many times as you wanted. In the latter days, you could cancel and get right back in on the same phone call. I was in for cassettes and CDs probably a dozen times, and nearly that many for DVDs. It was a killer way to build a library, particularly after I was old enough that it wasn’t such a big deal for me to drop the cash for the commitment in one shot.
It was the HD revolution that killed my interest in Columbia House. For a long time Columbia House didn’t do anything at all with Blu-ray, and when they finally did it was really mediocre—nothing approaching the cost-per-unit benefit of the DVD or CD agreements.
So I quit dealing with them, I dunno, eight or nine years ago? I’m amazed they bumped along for this long. I’ll always remember them fondly.
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