Saturday, October 26, 2013

Goodies Company or Another subscription service bites the dust!

Earlier this week and totally out of the blue, I received an email letting me know that Goodies Company would ship the October Goodies box and that would be it - no more subscription boxes from Goodies Company, a subsidiary of Walmart. I mention the Walmart connection because you would think that with this much money behind it, Goodies Company would be stable. Yes, granted that the boxes were relatively cheap for only $7 a box, but the contents were a lot of samples and the intent was to introduce more healthy and expensive items to Walmart customers. The hope was that people would then order the items full-size from the website, which I did a few times. The prices on the website were reasonable, often cheaper than amazon.com and I got introduced to several really unique and nice products that I will serve to my family on holidays and family dinners. I loved their chipotle sauces with Mango or Raspberry. The fruity and peppery taste of the sauce was great for dipping or to simply put in crackers. They also introduced me to Biscoff spread, which I like much better than Nutella. And do not even get me started on the chocolate from my chocolate box that I won for submitting a food-centric picture.

copyright Durhamonthecheap - one of the Goodies boxes that I received earlier in 2013
So the concept of Goodies should have worked, but after Cravebox, we now have another subscription box that is creasing business. There are still plenty of boxes around, but you start to wonder why subscription services seem to go out of business. Is it the business model? Assembling a box of products and sending it to consumers at reasonable rates to boost business for the companies whose products are included. I would think that this model should work, but then I do not know at what discounts Goodies Company got the products that they included. I would think they got the products at a decent discount since the boxes were basically free advertising for the products of the companies included.

So what now? I have $7 each month that I can spend on a treat for myself. So maybe some milk shakes at Cick-fil-a are in order since they company will continue to exist and maybe I find another subscription box service at some point in the future. I will definitely miss Goodies Company, but $7 each month to have available as extra spending money is kind of nice as well!


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