APS Membership Discount

Makes perfect sense to me, as long as the 25% incentive results in at least 25% more buyers due to that incentive. Anything less than 25% new buyers is a loss, and anything more is a gain.

I guess the long term effect could be that buyers now know that an incentive will be offered in the last quarter and will hold back their purchases until that quarter, resulting in a net loss overall. It's kind of like watching my spouse wait until that one special day at Kohl's when the prices dramatically drop, you get double coupons, and lots of other incentives. Any other day we shop there, she says, "Nobody pays those normal prices. They always wait until the sale days."

Exactly this.

To be fair, that isn't the entire picture, as those additional 50 memberships aren't pure profit. There is a cost associated with those 50 memberships: the 50 copies of The American Philatelist and their associated printing and (likely the biggest component) the mailing costs.

I agree with your general premise, but it's not pure gain.

And if 100 percent of The American Philatelist was paid for by membership dues this would, theoretically, be a significant cost. So we'll earmark the $15 of the $45 that is the annual support for the AP from dues and the loss might come from another service.

While members did help underwrite major items (the digital library, Stamp SCHOOL are 100 percent donor financed). The business operations still exist and pay for the rest. Though Roger Albanese, who contributed $2.2 million to debt retirement was never an APS member and the last $1 million of the debt was paid off by APS surpluses accumulated over a five year period (some commenter here has been told that before but ignores it).

I am struggling to reconcile why a discount is so problematic. If the APS spent $15,000 advertising membership, people would hail the genius of it. But discounting the membership and letting the grassroots push it out is effectively another aspect of the same activity. But somehow, it's not viewed the same way. It is a business expense much the same.

It's just because any time-limited discount devalues the MSRP of the product and makes prospective customers wonder what the real cost and value of the product are, and why they should ever pay full price as opposed to waiting for another discount. It makes them wonder why the organization can't permanently reduce the price. It also makes people who just paid the full price feel like chumps.