Consumers Find It Hard To Leave Columbia House

Billing Problems, Bogus Subscriptions Top the Complaint List

By Mark Huffman
ConsumerAffairs.com

June 6, 2007

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Columbia House is one of the oldest “record of the month” clubs in the U.S., offering its members inexpensive CDs or DVDs in exchange for an ongoing commitment to keep buying its products.

Book and record clubs like Columbia House pioneered “negative option” marketing, where a lack of response from a consumer is taken as “implied consent.” But while some negative option plans are well-run, many others are questionable.

Consumers have been complaining about Columbia House for years, with nearly 800 complaints in the ConsumerAffairs.com database (read selected complaints) but the cries of outrage have escalated in the last few weeks, with numerous consumers across the country claiming they were signed up for “membership” without their knowledge and against their will.

“I received a package from Columbia House DVD Club with a $5.35 invoice dated April 20, 2007,” said Laurie Keefe, of Asbury, New Jersey. “I did not order this nor did I ever go on their website. I tried contacting them numerous times at the published customer service number for a few days and was put into a circle of voice options.”

Keefe knows something about the voice mail run-around, she says, because she happens to be a customer service rep herself. But she says even as a pro, she couldn’t find her way through the maze.

“I tried a number of ways to bypass the system to get to speak to a live person. There was no person to get to. I just kept going in circles. I then sent an email to Columbia House customer service via the website, which also took a long time to find. On this site, it said that they would make every effort to contact me back in 2 days. This did not happen.”

In a follow up interview with ConsumerAffairs.com, Keefe said she was finally able to navigate through the Columbia House Web site to find the right place to contest the invoice. She said it took her about six weeks of effort to resolve the matter.

“As far as I know they don’t have my credit card information, but I’m going to keep a close eye on my statement for the next few months, to make sure I don’t get charged,” she told us.

Keefe and others have complained that, while Columbia House is not putting unauthorized charges on credit or debit cards, the company has made it clear that if the invoice for the unsolicited membership isn’t paid, the account will be turned over to a collection agency, impacting their credit rating.

The New Jersey Attorney General’s office says it has received about a dozen complaints like Keefe’s in the last 12 months, according to Jeff Lamm, of the office’s Consumer Affairs Division. Most, he says, mirror the complaints received at ConsumerAffairs.com in recent weeks.

“The basic allegations against Columbia House involve billing discrepancies and sending unsolicited merchandise,” he told ConsumerAffairs.com.

Lamm says when the Department of Consumer Affairs receives complaints like these, they are analyzed for patterns, and when one is determined to exist, an investigation is initiated.

The complaints received by ConsumerAffairs.com recently appear to fall into two categories – those, like Keefe, who said they received an unsolicited DVD and an invoice, and those who say they signed up for the club but found they were unable to cancel their membership. Consumers in both categories complain about the difficulty of reaching a human being when they call the toll-free customer service number.

GetHuman.com is a Web site that has compiled a data base of companies’ customer service operations, and assigns a letter grade to each. The Web site has recruited a number of volunteers who make test calls to companies on a regular basis to see how easy – or difficult – it is to get to a human on the line.

The site says some companies frequently change their systems when consumers figure out how to reach a human. Lorna Rankin, the site’s database director, describes Columbia House as a “challenge,” noting they change their change their system frequently.

“Many companies don’t want customers to get to a human,” Rankin recently told the Burlington (NC) Times.

Columbia House has been increasingly aggressive in its marketing and two years ago settled Federal Trade Commission charges that it violated federal law by calling existing or past subscribers of its home entertainment clubs after the subscribers had placed their telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry, and after the subscribers had made specific requests to the company that they not be called. The company agreed to pay a $300,000 civil penalty and is barred from making illegal telemarketing calls in the future.

Columbia House is a division of Bertelsmann AG, a multinational media company based in Germany. In 2005 the company reported revenues of $22.2 billion.

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