Even if you aren’t old enough to remember the heyday of Columbia House, you’re probably familiar with the scam at its center. The mail-order club would offer customers eight to 12 CDs, tapes, records — and, in later years, DVDs and blu-rays — for a penny. By agreeing to the arrangement, users were signed up for a scheme where they agreed to purchase a certain number of products over a specific amount of time at full price. Each month, they were sent a mailer promoting the “Selection of the Month,” and if the customer failed to return the rejection form, Columbia House would send them the new release and charge their account.
The practice of requiring customers to opt-out or be charged is called negative-option billing, and it inspired no end of complaints from customers. Columbia House drew further claims of bad business by allegedly refusing to acknowledge payments, discounting items so that users’ purchases fell just below the agreed-upon threshold and being a notoriously difficult subscription to terminate.
That Columbia House was owned by massive record labels for much of its existence, and that the club manufactured their own cheaper versions of the releases to cut costs, gave the whole process an even more corrupt odor.
Columbia House was a bum deal for musicians as well, selling the CDs at a reduced price and offering the artists a smaller royalty percentage, the argument being that the cut paid for the mail-order club’s marketing. That Columbia House was owned by massive record labels for much of its existence, and that the club manufactured their own cheaper versions of the releases to cut costs, gave the whole process an even more corrupt odor. Pearl Jam protested the practices of Columbia House, and the bum deal it gave artists, but made little headway as the club boomed to 16 million members in the 1990s.
Given all that, I was somewhat surprised to see heartfelt eulogies for the mail-order racket when Columbia House announced it was ceasing operations later this year. Social media buzzed with stories about how “magical” it was to get CDs in far-flung locations. One academic who immigrated to the United States said junk mail from the retailer helped convince her that she’d really become an American. Others lamented the death of a “part of their childhood.”
Most of the rosy posts made some mention of the fact that Columbia House’s operation was unethical at best, but that the customer-service runarounds, unwelcome bills and general scuzziness had all faded with time. Where the company was once the best-known name in media rip-offs, it now leaves behind only mass-produced plastic and fuzzy memories.
Like Blockbuster, which was decried in its time as a killer of mom-and-pop video stores that ripped off customers with steep late fees, Columbia House died long after the average music consumer ceased doing business with it. That can account for at least some of the paeans to building a music collection on the cheap, or paying extortionate prices for movies once your skeevier dollar-video-shop was run out of town, but it’s far from the whole story. Awash in constant robot spam callers seeking sensitive information, in a country where the president is running his own cryptocurrency grift, the Columbia House swindle feels quaint.
In part, this is thanks to the technology at the heart of Columbia House. In an era before widespread tracking technology followed everyone’s consumption habits around the internet, Columbia House was remarkably easy to scam back. People signed up their pets, used aliases and played games with mailing addresses to bilk the company out of new releases for less than the cost of a penny. The ads, which came as paper mailers — in contrast to soon-to-be popular malware, pop-up ads and phishing emails — were decidedly less invasive and easily ignored. (After all, their easy-to-miss nature was a key part of the Columbia House business model.)
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And unlike the bank-draining, generative AI-boosted rip-offs of 2026, you did actually get something for your trouble. Customers who forgot to send a postcard saying they wanted nothing to do with ‘90s Steven Tyler can still point to a copy of “Nine Lives” on their shelves. My own classic-rock-loving father ended up with copies of Whitney Houston and Alanis Morissette albums that he, left to his own devices, wouldn’t have sought out. But “Heartbreak Hotel” and “You Oughtta Know” were regularly spun in the car.
Nowadays, the taboo around scamming has fallen out of fashion with Gen Z, who see devious business models as a way to get ahead in a rigged economy. Amazon and other online marketplaces created a boom for drop-shippers to mark up products without providing any further value to customers. The internet-savvy and unscrupulous were quick to cash in. More than a decade after scam rap emerged from the buzzier, grimier corners of Detroit hip-hop, a scammer anthem from a South Floridian is arguably the song of the summer.
Americans lose more than $100 billion to scams every single year. As more and more of the country’s citizens feel like they’re being had, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to be rushing to stop the con. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that they could be in on it.
White House insiders are reportedly using privileged information to place wagers on grey-area betting platforms. Nine accounts on the platform Polymarket made millions on U.S. military actions in Iran, winning nearly all of their 80 wagers on U.S. strikes and ceasefire negotiations. The former White House teleprompter operator allegedly made tens of thousands placing bets on what words Donald Trump might use in his speeches. The president himself has spent much of his second term accepting luxurious gifts and donations that sure read like bribes in the right light. Trump has increased his net worth by more than $2 billion in his second term, largely through the launch of a crypto firm operated by his sons. He accepted a $400 million jet from the royal family of Qatar and has pardoned multiple people after their families made large donations to his campaign. Former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen told the Washington Post that Trump had “fully monetize[d] the Oval Office” and was carrying out “corruption on a scale that . . . has few rivals in world history.”
What’s paying full price for an Ugly Kid Joe CD you never wanted compared to all that?
