A charge to list items on TCA Headquarters News

I never use the for sale portion but whoever does should pay a fee. Nothing is free in this life.

It only has a charge if you mail in the submission. If you post it online it is free. I suspect that few reading this would have to submit their listings by mail.

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I never use the for sale portion but whoever does should pay a fee. Nothing is free in this life

Use of the swap sheet is supposed to be one of the benefits of membership. Next they will charge to mail paper copies of the National Headquarters News and the TCA Quarterly.

Before the days of the Internet and Ebay, I used the various club swap sheets quite a bit to buy and advertise for items I wanted. I only used them to sell on very rare occasion.

But that was long ago, I cannot remember the last time I used one

I agree with this reply. The membership fee was raised to $50.00 and now they charge to list items for sale in the HQ News. I posted a couple of items for sale on the TCA Xchange but they never got posted in the newsletter like they were supposed to.

It's not free. I paid my membership dues and will pay the new raised dues in January just so I can go to York.

My opinion:  They should do away with the printed Headquarters News altogether and place important announcements in The Quarterly as well as on the TCA website (members only section).  It's a waste of perfectly good trees to be offering that read-and-discard newsprint publication (not in the same league as the magazine) in this day and age.

Again, just my personal opinion.

Based on the number of member ads a lot of people seem to use the printed version.

I agree with Allan for the most part. One thing clubs should do is no longer have any printed magazines. Everything should be online only. The buy/sell portion is months out of date before members even receive it In the paper version, it's useless in this day and age. 

Online only excludes people who are not on the internet. (I know people, including IT professionals who do not have computers at home). There are also people who still prefer to do their reading from physical media, such as books or magazines.

I am sure there are many peoples whose jobs are based on the cycle of printing magazines, including recycling.

Eliminate the National Headquarters News, and the TCA will have one less benefit to list in their recruitment and retention materials.

As I posted earlier, while I don't use the National Headquarters News advertising section to buy or sell, I guess there are still people who do

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 It's a waste of perfectly good trees to be offering that read-and-discard newsprint publication (not in the same league as the magazine) in this day and age.

It's doubtful that they are wasting many trees with today's recycling. According to my understanding, trees that are used for newsprint aren't good for much else anyway.

And that quality of paper is probably mostly recycled anyway. I did use the Wanted section once, though.  The ad sat there like a time bomb, and months after publication, a chap from Canada answered me.

They are having some issues with postings. I have posted items for sale over the past several months on the TCA exchange site and they were supposed to appear in the printed edition. That never happened.

Called yesterday and someone is supposed to get back to me.

They up the dues and lower the services. It figures.

Finally got an e-mail reply. Seems that if you don't choose 90 days for an expiration date, the default is 30, it might not get into the printed edition if the timing is off.