The Economist cannot handle merging two subscription accounts

A friend gave me their Economist subscription back in August 2015, as he did not want it. I ended up calling the Economist and asked to merge it to my current account thus extending the number of issues I would receive. No big deal right? Wrong.

I have done this plenty of times using other magazines and it is never a big deal. I initially contacted the Economist on 2015-08-13 and they said the change would be immediate. I wish this were the case.

I called back a week later to ask why I see no change in the web portal. They tell me it will take more time. Over the course of many weeks, I called in to check the status. I keep getting different responses; 2 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 5-6 weeks.

What is the issue here? The Economist cannot simply update a row in their database? This is not rocket science!

I sit here now after my latest call where the representative says it is now escalated to their database administrator and my account should reflect in the change in 24 hours. Guess what. 24 hours has come and passed without any changes yet again.

I am going into 8 weeks and nothing has changed. I must mention that this is a weekly magazine so eight issues have been missed for no good reason.