I hope my remaining friends in the Hartford Courant newsroom don’t think the company…
… the one that ended the six week Christmas bonus…
… the one that ended the free medical coverage…
… the one that eliminated the discounted stock-option purchase plan (when there was stock, and it was worth buying)…
… and now has decided to eliminate free home delivery of the newspaper to employees…
… is really giving them a 72 percent discount on the newspaper they will now have to pay for starting next year.
The so-called discounted rate is the one I have now — not as an ex-employee, but as someone who heard about the rate from his wife’s co-worker and just called up and asked for it.
Good thing they gave it to me, too; because with the economy bad and all, I was looking for 
ways to cut expenses. I read the Courant on the Internet mostly, so my newspaper subscription was getting hard to justify. (There are some things for which dead tree news is superior. Try lighting your woodstove with a laptop, for example.)
Anyway, my point is this: The Tribune Company, for as long as I can remember, has tried to put a positive spin on every change that took something away from its employees. I didn’t really buy it when I worked there, none of my friends in the newsroom did, and I hope they have not become naive enough to start now.
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Nice piece. When I left the Courant, I received a letter saying that I would no longer get the free paper. Well, I’d gotten it free for 25 years so I guessed I could pay for it for the next 25. I called the number to change my status, just as I was idly opening the day’s mail.
They told me that they would honor me with a 50 percent discount in respect for my eons at 06115 — exactly as I opened a “dear occupant” letter from Ye Olde Hartford Courant offering me, as a complete stranger, a rate of 67 percent off.
It was all sort of funny, in a very sad way.
denis
I got a call a few weeks after I fell victim to the February massacre.
“I understand you are a new retiree from the Courant,” an unctious female voice purred.
“Uh, well, I guess you could call it that,” I said.
“Well, I’d like to offer you the ‘special retiree rate,’” she said. Sort of secretively and seductively. Wow, imagine that. I am in this exclusive club now. Cool.
“Yes, for just $2.79 a week..”
I told her I was already getting it for $1.75 a week. (We re-upped with a coupon shortly after I got the boot and my free subscription ended milliseconds later)
“But that’s not the retiree rate,” she protested.
I started laughing.
“And another thing,” she said in a righteous, accusatory tone. “Why is this subscription in your husband’s name? To get the retiree rate, it has to be in your name.”
She then laid the big one on me.
“You know, if you get the retiree rate, in six months, it might get changed back to free. But you have to have the retiree rate first.”
By then I was laughing so hard I just quietly hung up the phone. Why wreck her day.
Adele, that is hilarious. My encounter was far less humorous. I called to cancel my subscription before they could begin charging me for it – I was in no mood to even see the paper for a while, let alone lay out cash for it – and got into an tussle with the person on the other end of the phone, who tried his best to keep me as a customer. I finally blurted out “Look, they laid me off last week okay?” and he finally gave up. The next day I received a final paper with a note from my carrier saying he was sorry I got fired.
Wish I’d known about the “retiree rate.”
I worked at the Courant for a few months shy of 10 years and never ONCE received my “free” subscription.
At first, it was because I lived in Waterbury and it was out of the normal delivery zone.
When I moved to downtown Hartford in an apartment above a business (around the corner from City Hall), they said it was a “commercial motor route” in which someone delivered to all of the surrounding businesses, but couldn’t do residential deliveries (though I was one block from The Linden, which does get deliveries … they said that carrier couldn’t expand the route by a block).
Tried several times to get the paper and always got this answer. Finally gave up and just read it at work. Sigh.
Why ever would The Courant deliver to downtown Hartford, Steph?