Book Club Associates (BCA) (founded 1966) was a mail-order and online bookseller in the United Kingdom. The company came to dominate the mail order book club business in the U.K. in the 1970s and 1980s through extensive advertising in Sunday newspaper colour supplements and elsewhere, and became the largest mail-order bookseller in the U.K. The firm collapsed in 2012.
Contents
Origins
BCA was established in 1966 and was jointly owned by W.H. Smith and American Doubleday of The Reprint Society and their book club World Books.
Clubs
The company has operated a variety of general and specialist clubs over the years, including:
and many more.
In 2008, following rationalisation, the company ran seven clubs, having run as many as twenty just two years earlier.
Customer service problems
The company started to receive adverse comment in national newspapers around 2006 following the emergence of customer services problems and the aggressive pursuit of disputed customer debts by debt collection agencies. These problems were blamed by new Chief Executive, George Saul, on the outsourcing of the customer complaints function by previous management. In 2005, BCA's handling of complaints was criticised by trade regulator the Direct Marketing Authority. In 2007, the Office of Fair Trading accepted undertakings from BCA that it would revise its advertising to make it clearer.
Restructuring and Demise
In 2008, BCA was sold by owners Bertelsmann to Aurelius, a German company, who restructured the firm and sold it to The Webb Group in March 2011.
Barely a year later, along with the demise of the Webb Group itself, BCA collapsed.