So... On one level, I can understand this. I honestly had been wondering how much longer Birchbox was going to be able to be in Canada at the price that it was, considering the falling Canadian dollar, so I'm not really surprised that they are exiting the Candian market.

(Keep reading for rant....)

That said, I think this has been handled absolutely deplorably, since most subscribers found out on Friday that Birchbox was suspending Canadian operations and have only now heard from the actual company about it. Also, the fact that they're refunding annual subscriptions with Birchbox points rather than the cash equivalent of the services they've failed to provide to those annual subscribers is absolutely unconscionable - and possibly illegal? (Gonna look into whether or not they're even allowed to do that.) One problem with this is that when you purchase things on the Birchbox shop, you have to pay pretty ridiculous "handling" fees, even when you qualify for free shipping, which means that all of those purchases will be extra expensive. But also, that's not what people paid for. They paid for a subscription. Not cool, Birchbox. OH. And. What about the 50 points per month that would have come from reviews? Since that is a huge part of the deal, those should be credited as well, don'tchathink?

Also, I think a better course of action would have been to simply transfer Canadian accounts to the American site and begin charging in US$. Yes, they would have lost a lot of Canadian subscribers, but they also would have been less shitty. Dear companies, let's shoot for less shitty, shall we? This would have made perfect sense, since the boxes as well as items from the Birchbox shop have always shipped from the US anyway. Even if they had only transferred the annual accounts to the US site until they ran out, this would be - again - LESS SHITTY.

For those of you who have an annual subscription and want to be credited what you paid in actual money rather than points, try contacting your credit card company and alert them that you want a credit for services not rendered. Hopefully this will help!

I'm going to finish out the last 2 boxes, spend my points, and call it day. I'm not sure if I will be blogging the last 2 boxes, simply because my annoyance at this whole situation is pretty over the top, but we will see how that goes when I get them.

Byebye Birchbox. Poor form, very poor form.