Luxe Box shell game switcharoo. Not good.

Not good, Luxe Box.

I’ve been raving about Luxe Box for a while now. I got my first box in February as one of three (on a three-month subscription), and while there were some hiccups I decided the pluses outweighed the minuses and signed up for another three-month subscription…

The May box from last week had an extra box, which was a nice surprise. And then got an email from them announcing “An important and exciting update to your Loose Button Membership” with an invitation to sign in and view it — what could it be? A wider variety of vendors perhaps? Home-type products? Another tie-in (like they did with Flare)?

Guess what? The important and exciting news is that it’s going from monthly to quarterly. With 7-8 samples per box. And it will cost $26 per box. So, wait, what now? You’re taking me from 4-5 every month for $12 to not quite twice that many samples for more than twice that cost and it will happen a third as often? How is that exciting?

I’ve just signed up for another three, and I’ve only received one so far. They say they’ll give me the August one ‘for free’ (wait, that’s not free, I am already paying for it, don’t call it free) and I’ll have a $12 credit towards the third (wait, if the August one was ‘free,’ wouldn’t I now have a $24 credit?). Is that even legal? I signed up for three at a set price, now I’ll have to pay a bit more for the third one. Not very transparent business practices here, murky at best. I don’t know about you guys, but for me, it’s not as much about how full the box is but more about how often it arrives, it’s always an exciting day! And now they’re taking 2/3 of those days away from me.

Oh, they’ve also changed their language a bit — they were referring to the samples as ‘deluxe’ before, but now they call them ‘trial-sized.’ That sounds suspiciously like ‘smaller’ to me. Also, what’s a ‘lifestyle’ item? Am I going to get a hemp hippy bracelet? And what happened to the ‘earn free boxes by recommending to your friends’ link? I’ve had two friends that I know of sign up using the link I’d given them (as provided by Loose Button, here try it yourself: http://luxebox.loosebutton.com/friend-sign-up?referrer=ZmFjZjJhYjQ=), neither of them show as having signed up, and the link now leads to an error page — and that option is now nowhere to be found on the website! [UPDATE: according to their Support pages, ‘Referral Program is currently inactive and is temporarily unavailable’ — so there it is.]

Well, I’m going to wait to see if the August box is any better than what I’ve been getting so far, maybe I’m expecting the worst when it will really be amazing. It wouldn’t be the first time I made a huge deal over nothing. But I’ll tell you one thing — if it’s not leaps and bounds above the previous boxes, I will be cancelling after the third and not looking back.

What do you think of this “important and exciting update”? Me, I’m losing faith.