Back in February the Telegraph’s business columnist Liz Dolan wrote about Book Club Associates, the Bertelsmann-owned clubs that cater to people who like receiving like-minded books all the time. Or, as she found out a month later, those who try desperately to cancel their subscriptions but kept getting harrassed by bill collectors or frustrated by unanswered phone calls and queries:
Marelle Clements’ problems began when she moved house in July 2005, arranged for her mail to be rerouted from her previous address in Wales and cancelled her contract with Quality Paperbacks Direct, a BCA book club. A few weeks later, she received a letter from a debt collection agency demanding £65.93 for books she had never seen. After several threatening letters, she drove from Hertfordshire to her old cottage in Wales, found two “rather weather-beaten packages” in the shed (she has no idea how they got there) and returned them to QPD.
The letters from the debt collection agency (always to the Welsh address, despite QPD having been supplied with Marelle’s new address on several occasions) finally stopped in October. But then, last month, she received a demand from a completely different debt collector, this time for £35.98. She says: “I confess to almost exploding with rage when I phoned this company. Had the rancid creature I spoke to been within arms’ reach, I would have had to stamp on him. It became clear that he was guessing what the money was owed for (he said it was because I hadn’t bought enough books to cancel my account but, when I joined, there was no obligation to buy). He also accused me of being sneaky for withholding my current address from QPD.”
.There’s more, of course. Lots more. And as the Telegraph discovered through these letter floods, the BCA deals well with complaints “quickly and efficiently when asked to do so by organizations with sufficient clout but, otherwise, still seems reluctant to pour sufficient resources into a proper complaints handling service.”