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| But your cat will like the box... Creative Commons image chromewaves on Flickr |
A travel magazine has added a whole new feature, launched with great excitement: a quarterly subscription box, that for a mere $89 a quarter - or choose the $39/month option - plus tax (of course), you get your magazine (separate subscription) in a box full of consumer goods meant to inspire you to travel. Free shipping! WTF?!?! Like this makes sense?
$350 a year can go a long way towards a vacation.
It's certainly not green: that box filled with fancy pasta made in Italy, along with gourmet olive oil, some one-of-a-kind wooden spatula (lovely, I'm sure), a little just-add-water herb garden and a boring (or exciting) scarf won't just sprout wings and fly.
Yes, I am a travel agent, and yes, I help people burn jet fuel to hop around the globe... the contradiction is not lost on me.
But here's what I'm thinking:
What a waste of money and resources.
Why not 'sell' contributions to micro-loans or give-a-family-a-goat or literacy abroad? Send me a story about who is being helped. Maybe fund an annual draw for a trip to a village helped? Or something both innovative and inspiring?
Just getting people to give their credit card (on a non-secure webpage no less), contributes nothing to the greater good.
It doesn't get the subscriber any closer to their travel dreams; rather it adds to consumer debt (for many).
It's madness.
PS. Looking for an image to put with this post, I tried 'carrier pigeon'.. and stumbled across a service that will actually carry a letter part way by bird - delivering it to the postal service to take it the rest of the way (along with a pigeon certification). It's called Pigeongram. More here.
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