Six Flags takes a beating after posting loss

Jeff said:

Am I the only one who bought their required 3 CD's immediately and cancelled in college?

As a teenager in the 90s, I'd sign up for a plan. Then, the first time I'd forget to the send in the "no thanks" and got the default CD, my mom would call and tell them they allowed a minor to enter a contract, which wasn't allowed. They'd cancel the account with no money owed (and an extra CD!). Don't know if she was just BSing or not, but it worked.

Went through the different companies at least twice each.

ApolloAndy said:

I think I did at last 4 different membership to BMG and referred myself. Started a nice little CD collection that way. Never paid for more than the bare minimum.

Same. I used my college and home addresses and kept bouncing them back and forth. I liked BMG because you only had to buy one CD, and with the self-referral you ended up getting like 12 CDs for the price of one.

In college, we used fake names and empty dorm mailboxes to get our CDs and then ignored the bills

But back on Six Flags, I just lowered my monthly membership payments from $9.95/month to $5.75/month. I went online to cancel and when the check box for reason came up I checked "I don't go enough to make it worth it." Which is a true statement.

It then asked "would you consider staying if we could offer a lower price" and I checked "I would strongly consider." Then it offered $5.75. That's about the price of one ticket per year, which is about how often I visit a SF park.

The catch is that the new pricing starts a new contract and therefore locks you in for another year. I'm satisfied with the new pricing because it works for me. I'm nowhere near a SF park, but I travel a lot and it's nice to have the membership in my pocket just in case.

Yikes, that's mail fraud, yo.

It's not sexy, but it's got teeth! Ten thousand dollars and five years in prison. That's ten and five for each act. Have you really looked at that? You've got every partner in the firm on overbilling. There's two hundred fifty acts of documented mail fraud there. That's racketeering! That's minimum one thousand, two hundred fifty years in prison and half a million dollars in fines. That's more than you had on Capone.

Jeff said:

Yikes, that's mail fraud, yo.

Apparently, there's a 5-year statute of limitations. Maybe Tommy can write a memoir of his college life, throwing in music references from the albums he collected through the fraud.

I always heard that part of the reasoning behind pushing the monthly membership payments was to pick up some cash flow in the leaner months of the offseason. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, but it makes sense on some level.

I did a lot of stupid stuff in college. Not proud of it, but hey...

At least that way, the artists still got paid, as opposed to the music piracy of today, which I can proudly say I do not take part in. (Unless you count streaming. Some people say artists are criminally underpaid by streaming, but hey, at least I pay for it!)

Yes. A band I was in has some music on Spotify that streamed a few thousand times within a couple weeks. After the cents rolled in, I joked that we should go celebrate...and buy a single cup of coffee for the three of us.

Jeff said:

I was going to congratulate you on your taste in music until you listed Cinderella.

I thought Cinderella was the best thing in that list. I'll admit to a very short REM phase (maybe a week, borrowed the CD) and had a Cure record, but Cinderella rocks.