What are your opinions/experiences with subscription boxes?
I have been seeing SO MANY ADS for different subscription boxes and services - it's blowing my mind. Food, meals, clothes, jewlery, dog treats, books, etc. I personally find them to be a convenient way for people to spend money on things they probably don't need. However, they must be popular for a reason. What are your opinions and/or experiences with susbscription boxes/services?
Answers ( 1 )
What are your opinions/experiences with subscription boxes?
They are good for some things, bad for others, and are often evolving so quickly that what you sign up for isn't what you'll be getting in 6 months.
I signed up for an "ugly" vegetable box once every two weeks. At first, the amount of vegetables we could use in between boxes was just about right, slightly too much, so we'd pause every few weeks. The boxes would force us to find new recipes and think about food differently.
Then the vegetable we started to get had less variety. We literally got one box that had several 1-pound+ vegetables and a few potatoes. It wasn't worth the money. So we put it on pause and they changed the business model. Instead of getting mystery vegetables, we had to "shop" for a certain amount of food for each package. Well, that would be awesome if we lived in an area that had no markets, but I live with 10 miles of almost a dozen markets, large and small. I can go "shop" at a local green grocers, and don't need the box. So we cut the subscription a year and a half into it. It had lost its novelty.
Other box services do other things, for instance meal prep - I have family memebers who love those because they are exactly the amount of cooking they want to do, and no more. There are even candy and toy box subscriptions. In all these cases subscriptions cannot be quite worth the money they cost, so they must be worth the time saving or novelty.
Meal box subscriptions are explicitly about saving time - the time it takes you to plan a menu, shop for the food and make the food. If I lived alone, I'd probably subscribe every once in a while, because while I can cook, I don't enjoy it as my wife does.
So, let's take a different kind of box service - Bokkusu does a Japanese candy subscription box. For about $25/month, you get a box full of random (and seasonal) Japanese candy. Flavored KitKats and fun hard candies, Pocky, some crispy random things. Very fun and random.
For that same $25/month I can buy easily 5x the amount of the same candies because I live near-ish a store that carries those candies. I actual fact, I do buy those same candies and pack them into "Lucky Boxes" I sell when I'm cleaning out my house of random stuff, so I know exactly how much they cost at a retail rate here and how much less they are at wholesale, which the box services usually do.
BUT, if I didn't live near-ish a Mitsuwa Marketplace and couldn't get flavored KitKats and Pocky and Calpico / ramune / azuki bean candies, then the box is a super cool novelty and that $25/month is a great idea - especially if my friend in the middle of nowhere has a birthday coming up - what a great gift idea! We subscribed to the veggie box for the novelty. When that wore off, we unsubbed.
So, basically subscription boxes are never savings in cost, but may potentially be savings of time, convenience and/or novelty.