San Diego Union-Tribune

I am only signed up for delivery Thursday.- Sunday. I’ve had them miss papers. Lately, it’s gotten worse. I only get 4 papers a week… but they skipped 2 days last week and this week… today’s paper (Sunday).
It so frustrating. When you call the 800 # all you get is a recording, it says they’ll add a day to your subscription… I don’t want that… I still want today’s paper.
This has happened so often, I was sent to a supervisor… she gave me her number. She’s not at that number anymore. I did reach another person… last week when I missed the Sat. Paper… he said he’d have them deliver it with the Sunday paper. I got nothing on Sunday… I called him again… he hand delivered both papers. Today, I was unable to reach him… it goes to a recorder. He’s been really nice… but I shouldn’t have to work so hard for something that has been paid for, in advance.
I could have written this months ago… its been going on a very long time.

I recently, September 2015, tried to end our subscription with the San Diego U-​T by cancelling both online through their subscribers page and in person on the phone. The paper quit coming and the payments stopped being charged to my credit card. All good news right… wrong…several weeks later the paper started being left here and there and I just thought it was the same less than stellar delivery person who just could not get the cancellation straight. I would call and they would assure me the paper would stop being delivered.
The paper continued to show up sporadically and in November I receive a call that my credit card needs to be updated so charges can be applied for the last several months of papers delivered. Really… I go through the whole cancellation, dates I called and even filled in requests for someone to contact me through their online customer service on my subscribers page, and all I get is …“you owe for papers delivered and we would like to continue your service”. Seriously, now I am not only angry at the fact that over the years my paper had morphed from the North County Times, to the Union Tribune, to now being owned by the Tribune Publishing company who publishes the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, and now they want me to pay for service I cancelled months earlier.
So long story short in December… I gave up and sent them a check with the payment stub from their most recent notice clearly with my account number on the check and guess what. I get a call…“we notice that you cancelled your paper and we would like to have you back as soon as you pay your balance”…WHAT. I explain that the payment was sent and I do not want the paper, please credit the payment and do not call again.
Brings me to today, yeah go figure I get a call…“we notice that you no longer have service with us and have a great offer for you once you pay your balance we would like to resume your service”…OK this is really happening, payment was made, give them the check number and explain again that my account number was on the check and I do not understand why if I have the cancelled check which was sent with their payment stub why I have not been credited and am being harassed by them. May I note that the number this person called from appears on my phone at least 14 times in the past two weeks. And OK, I did at that point tell them to get it corrected and that I do not want their LA paper or anything else to do with LA… period.
So for any of you who think this is a local paper IT IS NOT. Even the printing of the paper is not done in San Diego.
I am sure that the fact that they are not local is why they can not even get payments processed correctly, cancel service, or for those of you who can not get the paper early enough for it to be news or redelivery… any satisfaction!
Even recently when a family member was in the hospital the Sunday paper was given to us Saturday.
The UT deserves zero as a score and I can’t wait to follow up todays call with my own tomorrow… if I can even reach a real person with their limited hours of operation. Now that is news…

We have had home delivery for a few years and I have to say unlike others our delivery person was fantastic. The paper is always out on the driveway early in the morning. We wanted to give him a Christmas bonus and the people at the UT said they would call me back and reconfirm the card sitting on the driveway was his because it is a third party that does delivery. This is two months later and still no call.
The paper has gotten very thin and not much worthwhile to it anymore including the poorly written articles so I decided today was the day to cancel and told the guy on the phone I did not want to hear all of the wonderful things he had for me like subscription ½ off and free Sunday paper. Now I feel like I was ripped off paying FULL price for my subscription I should have tried to cancel a long time ago. I noticed on the account this was a good time to cancel and the person on the phone informed me our payment was processed today and he couldn’t stop it. We asked to talk to a supervisor and just like many other Unilocalers the supervisor was to busy to talk to us. This experience has made me very angry and I will never get the UT again even if it is free. I would think that with newspapers not being purchased that much anymore you would treat your customers with golden gloves.

When I was in high school my grandfather predicted that daily news would be delivered straight to computers. At that time it sounded far fetched, it was before Larry Paige and Surgey Brin met and founded Google and there was not really an internet.
He was a true visionary and I wish that he was alive to see the internet now. But I still prefer to read the printed page and get my hands covered in cheap newspaper ink. I have subscribed to the San Diego Union Tribune for about 20 years and would expect to be treated like a good customer.
For the past month or so the newspaper has been arriving very late, it is 10:00 am and the paper has not yet arrived. Reading the newspaper is a morning ritual so if the paper does not arrive it becomes old news, garbage. When a product passes it’s expiration it is not valuable anymore. There is no market for old news.
I finally called to ask about all of the delivery issues and the customer service person «V» was about as sympathetic as an iceberg. She offered to make a note in my file with an attitude of sheer indifference. It is loyal customers like me that pay her freaking salary. She bumbled something about the newspaper being printed in LA and that is why it is late, a diversionary tactic that was very effective at pissing me off.
After she escalated my frustration to the point of being pissed off, I asked for account credit for the missing newspapers. It is not a lot of money but I wanted them to pay attention to the failure and be accountable. V told me that they were well aware of the delivery issues that are going on in the supply chain yet she was only willing to give me credit for a single newspaper. I thought that I was being nice to the newspaper courier by not ratting him out every time that he was late. Apparently being nice backfires and they are totally unwilling to credit my account even though they are 100% aware of the fact that it has not been delivered on time every day in 2016. This horrible business practice left me upset and frustrated enough to ask for a supervisor. Guess what? That supervisor was unavailable and busy on another call, apparently I am not the only one getting fed up for being charged for expired products and ice cold customer support.

Bought two items from San Diego Union Tribune Daily Deals. I ordered the beginning of December and it took almost three weeks to get the items to me. It was too late for me to ship them priority to the East Coast as I had planned in time for Christmas. I had to send 4 emails before I got anyone to get back to me then I was told there was no refund allowed. I honestly don’t know why I expected any type of good customer service from the UT, they are the worst company to deal with. I will not be using their daily deals in the future and plan to cancel my UT subscription when it’s up in March. Hey UT, maybe you can jump on the Chargers bandwagon and leave San Diego too, nobody would miss you.

This newspaper is the worst company ever. As everyone else has stated, once you sign up with them, they refuse to cancel your subscription and continue to run up a bill for you. They also have a special hidden box on your sign up form that says that you agree to get special papers and pay extra for them if you don’t check the box. Such a scam of a business. What ever you do, don’t sign up for this horrible business unless you like throwing money away. Oh, and you have no choice about the trash they throw on your driveway every week because they feel it is their right to litter your property with their advertisements. Call the businesses in the ad sack and let them know that you will not use their businesses as long as the union tribune litters your house with their ads.

I routinely look at the 10 news website for local news and then at the UT’s for additional info, and the UT seems to be a newspaper from another city or another time. Their preference for only sports stories and Charger anything to the exclusion of most news features is utterly ridiculous. 10 News: guy with assault weapon in Banker’s Hill — UT: something about the Chargers. 10 News: woman murdered in communal shower in downtown SD — UT: something about the Chargers. 10 News: guy drives 40 miles the wrong way on the I-​5, kills 3 — UT: something about the Chargers. What the hell?

I have called them twice to cancel my subscription but they won’t do it! I called them before my billing date and told them I was done; they charged me anyway. I called them again when I noticed the unauthorized charge. They said they would reverse the charge. That was almost a month ago. The charge still stands. I wish they would just go out of business. These guys suck.
p. s. DID NOT EVEN RECEIVE ONE ISSUE DURING MY SUBSCRIPTION!

I have been a loyally subscription holder for 35 years and it will end today. I can except a late paper periodically with «production problem» but it is becoming the norm. When you do talk to a human at customer service it the standard «Sorry but nothing we can do production problem». In my line of work if I had production problem I would be fired so that is what I am doing.
Union they are fired!

I think it’s time you change your third party deliveries, it’s apparent they are not doing their job, for a whole year I did not receive my newspaper, each time I call it’s an apology and guarantee I will get my paper delivered, I did not receive my paper again today and I waited over 20 minutes on the phone for someone to answer but I give up. I am very disappointed. What happened to your company ??

Five weeks ago I signed up for SD Union-​Tribune Sunday paper for $ 52 for 52 weeks. In five weeks I got the paper once, all the other times I had to leave multiple messages and got it on Monday. I got it because it’s all I can afford at the time and now I want my money back because they can’t handle a simple Sunday subscription. They should be doing all they can to please their customers but they don’t seem to care. Newspapers are a dying business and they are helping kill themselves!

I support our local media outlets and rely on The Union Tribune to have an insight into San Diego. My complaint is with their customer service or should I say lack of one. What happened to the ability to actually speak to someone. I know interest in newspapers have gone down and there has been some budget cuts, but man you would think some customer service would still have some sort of priority. I will try for my third time to reach someone from their contact us email bs.

This rating (low!) is based on the customer service of the San Diego Union Tribune, and not the content.
The website is terrible and timed me out of my account any time I clicked on something after logging in. I tried to email a complaint about my billing and the «Contact Us» page would just reload after I hit Submit instead of submitting my issue. It is very frustrating.
This started because I was not delivered the paper for almost an entire month yet I was billed for that month anyway. I tried calling to cancel and was kept on hold for an hour, when I had to get back to work. They only accept these phone calls during the average person’s work day, so it is extremely inconvenient.
All around difficult to deal with and frustrating!

Bought a subscription via Groupon. Two personal attempts from me and three from Groupon have produced zero results. It’s going on six weeks and I have not received a single paper. Maybe I am a Groupon pariah in their eyes. Then they shouldn’t make the offer. I was willing to give them a second chance after dropping the paper years ago. Silly me.

It is a true challenge to get the UT early. O have always picked it up early in the morning at a 7 Eleven in the old days (pre merger) by 4:30 — 4:45. Now they say it will be there by 5:00 and it is not even there by 5:15 am. The news stand in front of my work building (my used to be last vestige) has been broken for over a month, even after I have reported it twice. I am a years long newspaper reader In The Morning. I am so disappointed. It is really a crock! I wish there was another choice. How does one sell papers when they are in truck?

Recently I had to utilize the SD UT for professional/​legal purposes and contacted their legal advertising department. I must give Jan Allshouse and her team in the Oceanside office a huge pat on the back and «thank you» for their professional, courteous, service during what was probably their worst time. Although they were in the midst of a huge system upgrade and working mass amounts of overtime, they were there for me every step of the way. Not only did they get their job done but they put up with the feedback of my attorneys, which can get quite annoying if you ask me. Thanks again!

There are no negative numbers, so I give these guys a 1. I love waking up on a Sunday morning and reading the paper cover to cover. Problem is my delivery service is so poor, I never know when the paper is actually going to show up at my door. I have complained numerous times to them on the phone and in writing, but nothing changes. Wish they would get their act together, as this is a recurring problem with poor customer service unwilling or unable to improve.

My roommate subscribed to the Union Tribune and it was the worst mistake. We never got the paper delivered to our door because their lazy, idiot paperboys don’t want to make the effort to go to our apartment. We live in the back of our apartment complex, so it might be hard to find us… but come on! We get packages delivered right to our doorstep all the time from UPS, USPS, and FedEx. It’s not that hard to find us, and if the mail person was really lazy, they could always leave it at the base of our stairs since it’s a private staircase.
As a result, our paper was always stolen by our neighbors because they didn’t know who it belonged to. Don’t blame them because if there’s no name, it’s up for grabs, right? After we received our first bill in the mail by UT my roommate (whose name is spelled wrong on the bill, btw) threw a fit and yelled at them because we didn’t receive ANY paper.
We finally received a paper that same week delivered to our doorstep. However, in the next coming days I noticed that our paper was delivered at the front of our building with our apartment number in black sharpie and the text «DO NOT STEAL». Yet our neighbors get THEIR papers delivered to their doorstep or on the base of their stairs at the very least (!). Had I not checked our mail every morning I wouldn’t have known we would be getting our paper. Even though these paperboys are pretty aware of where our apartment is, they just don’t want to take the time to throw it on our stairs because it’s just too many steps to get to the back of our building. *eye roll*
If you are an apartment dweller, don’t get UT delivered to your door. Just pay a little extra to buy it at the grocery store every week and save the headache for something else.

I personally stopped my subscription when i was informed by the then editor that the news paper now considers Tijuana as part of the city of San Diego.
But my concern now is the monthly advertisements they keep throwing on my property. I’ve attempted on several occasions to get then to stop littering on my property.
After reading previous complaints about this issue I now understand why they won’t stop tossing these packets of advertising onto everyones property no matter how many times they call to complain and and ask/​demand that they stop.
The local police refuse to enforce the littering laws. I suspect because of the power and sway any newspaper would have over the local politicians.
The only effective ways to resolve this is:
1. Get your local politicians involved as they are the only ones that can force the local police into enforcing the laws. Us as regular citizens have no sway over the police.
2. Contact the local businesses in the advertisements and let them know what you think about this type of adveritsements.

The UT is a total waste. I want my old NC Times back. The UT is normally a waste of good paper, but the ongoing delivery issues are enormous. At least once a monthly they don’t even deliver and today (April 19^th) tops the cake… they delivered last Sunday’s (April 12^th) paper. Maybe Papa Doug should stay in the hotel biz… where you can vote on service with your dollars… used one star… would give less but wasn’t available. $ 39.95 a month… hope LA times gets a north san diego edition.