720 My Gourmet Society Experience

Unfortunately, this is not a good experience. I am going to jump straight in with my story.

One day I was checking my bank account and noticed that £34.99 had been taken out by Simbard Ltd or something similar. I thought this was a bit weird as I had no clue who they are, naturally, I did a google search. It turns out that it is the Gourmet Society website, company, and membership thing. Immediately I contacted them and asked why they had taken money from my account unannounced and as far as I was concerned without authority to do so. Sadly, their customer service was poor and ridiculous, they said tough, you should have known that was going to happen and opted out before the date it was due to come out.

After a lot of back and forth through email and social media, they explained that I signed up for a £1 trial a few months ago and the trial period has ended. Since I did not cancel, they automatically renewed the trial for an entire year. Firstly, they should see I had never used it and never actually signed in, I would write to the customer and check if they wanted to go ahead.

Now, if they had told me at the time of the trial that this will become a full membership on a certain date, I would have accepted that this was my fault, and I should cancel it for next year. However, I was never told when I need to cancel it, and I didn’t receive an email to tell me that it is coming up for renewal. After three weeks of emailing and speaking to them on social media, all they offered was a transfer of membership (give my membership to a family member as a gift and they can transfer the name) but then they would get stuck with the automatic renewal which is kind of cruel if you ask me. They did offer a £5 refund, which I did accept, and they have not followed through, I received an email asking if I want to go ahead with it and again, looking at it from a business point of view I would take an executive decision refund the fiver and get rid of the complaint without contacting the client.

Even trying to cancel this membership is a nightmare and I am not the first person who has gone through this with them. You must ring a number within certain hours of the day if you work full time this could be difficult. When you ring, they give you a cancellation code or something and I don’t know what you do with the code. Considering this, I thought I would have a look online, and see if anyone else has run into this snag and how they dealt with it, every forum I read, everyone said that they don’t care, and they don’t offer refunds and they aren’t interested in helping you.

I feel sorry for their employees, I would hate to sit there and tell the customers/members “Oh sorry, this company can’t help you, you didn’t cancel so we are keeping your hard-earned cash, cancel next year bye”. I have worked in customer service, but that is not how you run a business ethically.

I have now finally cancelled the membership but for next year, the cancellation doesn’t kick in until just before the renewal date. I might find out what the membership is for (I currently don’t know) and use it every day just to get the use out of the £34.99 they stole from me.