Buyer beware!

Imagine you just bought a new sports car (lets say BMW M3 as an example) and you climb in and go on your first drive. Upon starting the car up the first thing you hear isn't the engine roar but a man's voice "Buy an M5, you'll love it". You find it odd but then you engine starts roaring and you hit the gas and hit the road. You are feeling really happy about your purchase as you zip through traffic and take corners at 60mph then someone cuts you off and you hit the brakes but realize something is blocking the pedal from going all the way down so you swerve out of the way and barely avoid an accident. When you feel it is safe you look down and see a stack of BMW brochures under the brake pedal so you kick them out from under the pedal and continue to drive. Again later another car almost cuts you off so you hit the brake and slam on the horn but instead of a loud beep you get "You have been honked at by a BMW M3 which has an m.s.r.p. of $39,000. Get yours today". At this point you are baffled and about ready to drive the damn car off a cliff.

This is exactly how I feel about every magazine subscription I have. These magazines are all crammed with offers to buy subscriptions. There are no less than 10 offers in each of my Newsweek, scientific american, popular science, and wired. They are filled with a collection of loose offers that fall all over the floor when I try to read the magazine and stapled offers which due to their thickness make flipping through the magazine nearly impossible. Whenever I get a new scientific american (which is the worst offender in terms of the quantity) I spend a few minutes and go through the magazine and careful remove all the ads so that I can easily read the magazine that I already paid for and have no desire to order a second parallel subscription. But the worst of all is Wired not just because of their self ads but because they allow a variety of different paper types for paid ads. They allow advertisers to use plastic pages or cardboard ads and the end result is that if you even dare to think about flipping through the magazine these ads pop right up. They even put web popup ads to shame in terms of how annoying they are.

It is like having a clingy lover who is desperately worried that you are going to forget them so they write their number all over your bedroom with offers of a good time.

All I want from Santa (even though I haven't believed in him since he didn't grant my wish and lower the drinking age to 19) is for all magazine publishers to stop putting ads for themselves in the dang magazines they send in the mail.

P.S. Quick note about the picture. I typed "clingy" into Google image search and this was one of the first images and I thought it was so cute/funny/random that I used it as the image for this post even though it really doesn't have much to do with what I was talking about :-)