"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
29 October 2003Please include your address labelIt's four weeks until closing on the house, so I sat down tonight to hit the Web sites of the magazines to which I subscribe, in the hope that I could run the standard change-of-address scheme without actually having to talk to some poor soul in Customer Service. (Not that I object to poor souls, mind you; it's just that they might hate picking up the phone as much as I do.) Thirteen of fifteen magazines contacted over the Web were able to process the change with a minimum of folderol. The two exceptions were Automobile and Out, neither of whose databases seemed to recognize me, and Out further sinned by resizing my browser. Two magazines — Consumer Reports and Mother Jones — actually responded with email confirmations, although the response from CR contained, inexplicably, the old address. "What kind of nitwit subscribes to fifteen magazines?" you ask. I don't know. I have about a dozen yet to go. You subscribe to Out? I have NOT been paying attention. ;-) Posted by: Dan Lovejoy at 11:25 PM on 30 October 2003It's not like I'm part of their, um, target audience, but I do buy it for the articles. :) (Come to think of it, I'm not exactly the person being targeted by Harper's Bazaar, but I buy that too. Probably for the pictures.) I used to take a lot of magazines too. It finally dawned on me that I wasn't reading most of them and therefore wasting my money so I trimmed the list. I now only take "Entertainment Weekly". I would like to take "People" again but they made me mad with their "cover price times x number of weeks" subscription rates. Posted by: ms7168 at 11:35 AM on 31 October 2003OK, I understand. You are a marketeer's nightmare. And I mean that as a compliment. Atlantic Monthly is my only. Can't do without it, but sometimes I don't get it all read before the next one comes. Posted by: Dan at 12:52 PM on 31 October 2003I am a difficult target, at least in this regard. The Atlantic Web site is a little better than most at subscriber services, I think, though most of them could use some improvement. One nice thing I found was at Hachette Filipacchi: if you post a change of this sort, they open a window with a list of their other magazines, so you can get everything of theirs to which you subscribe (in my case, a total of two) without leaving the site. Of the magazines I get now, probably only two would survive renewal time if I happened to be in a bad mood. One's "The Highlander," dedicated to Scottish heritage and history, and the other is "Range," dedicated to the struggle by Western farmers and ranchers to maintain their way of life in the face of political movements overtly seeking to run them all out of business. "The American Spectator" is up for renewal and they're finally going back to monthly. I guess maybe I'll do the web renewal thing today and be done with it. I'm only a tad surly today, and that's because the neighborhood kids took all my fun-size Milky Way bars last night. Posted by: McGehee at 12:11 PM on 1 November 2003 |