Don’t get tricked by a cute tote bag gift.

As #1 pigeon lover, when JJYY saw this offer from the New Yorker, she could not resist:

After 2 months had passed, Flora asked how good the tote bag actually looked. Turns out she never got one!

Instead, she had been stuck in a loop with the New Yorker customer service. Sending her receipt, she asked about the tote bag and the “access code” (she never received one) required to cancel her annual subscription after the 12 week trial. They replied that they could not locate her order, and asked for her access code (???!) without which they could not cancel her subscription. It went on for more than 10 emails… Thankfully, the initial payment was done via Paypal, and Flora remembered recurring payments could easily be cancelled there.

For context, both are core members of OK Feather, a kind of music band/multi-disciplinary art project focusing on pigeons.

So I decided to turn this badness into an opportunity, and make better, one-of-a-kind tote bags for OK Feather members. To be fair, this was kind of a challenge, as the New Yorker design is really nice.

Since I don’t have access to nice screen printing equipment, there is no way to get the striking red of the original. After some thought, I made these drafts:

There’s one bag for the writer and illustrator of the band (palette and quill), one for the composer, and one for the mysterious 4th member, whose main activity is pizza.

Getting dirty (with paint)

After a quick visit to the arts & crafts store, I could start painting:

The picture betrays how the sun had time to set and rise again before I could finish. It is quite precise work, so there’s no way to cut time too much. I used the palette bag as a test run, which came with some issues. I read afterwards that the “Pentel Fabric Fun dye sticks” (I love pentel, especially their lead holders) is known as the most dangerous art supply in the universe, and I got to understand that. Even as an adult it’s very hard to apply the colors cleanly, so leave them in the hands of a child who could access your clothes and you might get in big trouble. So I decided to simplify a bit the design and go for something a bit cleaner. I kept the design even simpler for a ‘supporter bag’, for some other people. Every cloud has its silver lining, and getting scammed was a nice occasion to do some DIY bonding. We get bags with a special meaning, even if they may not be better than the really good original. As an anonymous bandmate said, it’s not a very good magazine from my memory, so it’s cool that they reconverted in fashion.

Looking back at our messages, Flora had her share of snark and jokingly suspected it was a scam, unwittingly foreseeing the disaster coming:

Flora, [23/12/21 23:12]

after 8 weeks email customer service "WHERE IS MY PIGEON BAG YOU SCAMMERS GIMME THE TRACKING NUMBER YOU CROOKS"

We could learn a precious lesson from this experience:

JJYY, [4/03/22 14:13]

maybe the problem was my attitude. I shouldn't have put attention to fake pigeons, but focus on real pigeons on the street. Sorry pigeon god...

Reality vs Expectations

Despite very low expectations the New Yorker managed to outperform in such awfulness that I can’t help but be impressed. Just to give an idea, here is their humoristic metacommentary on tote bags: Archive link to the New Yorker. Funny, but even funnier is that there is zero risk of bringing a New Yorker tote bag into a rival company, since they don’t send the bags anyway.

We should have checked before:

• /r/scams
• Trustpilot

The company seems even worse than their articles, if such a thing is even possible.

Interestingly enough, the tote bags do not disappear entirely into thin air: more than 2000 sales from an Etsy seller specializing in New Yorker tote bags. What the hell is going on?