You have a darn good magazine. I admit it, I enjoy it. The articles and the pictures. You obviously have some sort of infrastructure to develop and produce this product, and you have a 1-800 number to facilitate customer support. Thus being said, I must ask:
Why the F*CK does it take you two months to change my mailing address?
I politely called you back in February of 2000 to change my address from one street to another. No town change, no intrastate moves, even the Zip code is the same. It’s one simple address line. It has been 5 months, and I finally recieved your magazine – at the old address. And even when I called your Customer Support hotline today, yer arrogant snot-assed operator decreed unto my being that it would take 2 months to change the mailing address.
Are your morons in the distribution department that dumb, or are they just too damn lazy? I refuse to believe that enough of your subscribers are changing mailing addresses to the rate that it would back you up TWO MONTHS. I challenge you to this: Someone get the fuck back into the labelling department and tell those asswipes to stop spanking themselves at the pictures and get back to work.
Tripler
I won’t get another magazine until I’ve already left for Kuwait. Jeezus. . .
Trip, I think it’s a conspiracy. When I moved, I had my change-of-address in to the post office a few weeks before hand with the date of activation clearly labeled. The only thing that got forwarded was bills for the first few months.
I haven’t gotten a Playboy since last October and my subscription started in July. Even better was Newsweek: I had a two year subscription to these guys, starting last February. I stopped receiving anything around December yet around April, I started getting messages that my subscription was going to end and that I should re-subscribe. WTF? I wrote them and even though they said they show no record of me even having a subscription (funny, the check cleared and I been receiving the magazine for months) I suddenly found a months worth of issues in my mailbox, all at once, last week and this weeks showed up yesterday. Odd, that.
When I had this problem with TV Guide, they told me the reason it happens is that the magazine covers are printed several weeks in advance and their fulfillment people routinely have the covers for the next few weeks’ magazines printed and addressed in advance as well. (I wondered if they already had my address when the covers were attached to the mags, but didn’t ask that.) So the delay is because they continue using the covers already printed and addressed.
Dunno if I believe that, because this same woman told me it’d be four or five weeks before the address change occurred, but after my last move in June it was only two weeks later that TV Guide arrived at my new apt. with the new address in place. So maybe they’ve managed to speed it up in the world of weeklies.
When I subcribed to Discover magazine, I asked them to change my address once and it NEVER got changed. Every magazine for a year and a half had the old address on it, with a bright-yellow USPS forwarding sticker as well. I was surprised the USPS kept forwarding them, because the forwarding order was only for one year, but oh well. And when I called Discover to tell them, they told me their systems did show the correct address and had no clue why the old address kept appearing on the magazines, and they’d take care of it right away. Never did, though.
Well, i moved out from home seven months ago, the exact week i moved out, i started getting Stuff magazine. I have no idea why, nor have i gotten a bill from them, they haven’t touched my credit cards, but i have Stuff magazines waiting for me whenever i go home. Too bad Playboy doesn’t do this.
Something similar happens to my brother. He and his housemate are still getting the Victoria’s Secrets catalog the previous (female) apartment resident used to receive. Not that my bothers my brother.
I had this exact same strange experience with Entertainment Weekly. Just started getting the magazine out of the blue. Sometimes it would come several weeks in a row, sometimes it would not come for two weeks and then start again. Never ordered it, no one (I know) ordered it for me, never got a bill. Weird.
I’ve heard (and this so far is an unconfirmed rumor) that if you cancel a magazine subscription, the company will still mail a handful of issues to the house anyway, in order to advertise it to the new folk. Sorta like dangling a carrot in front of you.
But this does not explain why the fuck Maxim didn’t correct the address, “forgot” to send me a few issues, and even when they did, they fucked it up. To top it off, the bastard that moved into my old place owns the old place and is trying to rake us over the coals for over $3,000 of damages. I’ll be damned if he gets to look through my damn magazines!! I’ll see his ass in court!
How the fuck do you get so lucky? I never get anything cool like that when I move. I either get copies of “Modern Maturity” (Hey, AARP! I got almost 20 years to go before I qualify for the old farts discount, and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna look at that shit before then!) or worse, so-white-its-ethnic Christian magazines that are too dull to read for enjoyment. (“Lutheran Magazine” anyone?)
Allow me to introduce myself. Chance…Jonathan Chance. Currently Director of Marketing for a medium-sized publisher in the Washington DC area. I’ve also been in charge of circulation, delivery, sales and customer service at various publishers over the years. Please don’t ask about the telemarketing thing, Fenris told me Hell wanted to hire me due to that one!
In large part, you’re estimations are right. While the covers aren’t printed up months in advance, the names for each issue of any book are cut out of the database anywhere from one to six months prior to the mail date. This allows a few things:
It allows the publisher to know exactly how many copies to have printed early enough to budget for it. Other than payroll, printing and postage is the single largest expense for any publisher. And for the larger magazines (with print runs in the millions) it can pass salary and benefits on the ledger.
For those magazines that earn a significant fraction of their revenue from ad sales (and most do, those prices you pay to subscribe usually don’t even offset printing and postage) it allows them to tell advertisers making purchasing decisions months in advance the precise number of impressions their ad can get. This is a big help in landing new clients who may be skittish.
If a magazine has its circulation audited then cutting the list early allows for better documentation being available for the auditor.
That’s basically it in a nutshell. The tightest I’ve ever run is about 3 weeks. That’s the drop dead minimum lead time for a four-color, slick magazine. Newsletters and such with smaller runs can get away with less because they can use smaller printers and do a lot of the labelling by hand. It’s pricey per-piece but if you only have 500 it can be absorbed.
I’ll be glad to take any other questions. MAN, I love publishing!
I have a question for you (actually, it’s more of a Maxim Magazine gripe); how can the Canadian Edition of Maxim be stupid enough to print a calendar for July and not have July 1 labelled as Canada Day (our equivalent to the American Independence Day)? They labelled it as something stupid like “Be nice to your plants Day” or some such garbage. This really toasted my buns. In the words of George W. Bush, we’re your largest neighbour to the north; could you pay just a little attention, please?
I’m still not fuckin’ happy at A) it taking six plus months to get one fuckin’ address line correct, and B) the ungainly feeling that operator left me with: “Oh, sorry sir, I can’t help you.”
Whatever, Communist.
Tripler
Commies everywhere. Even at Customer Non-Support.
Tripler, I feel your pain. My problem was especially bad when I was in college and I had to keep switching addresses to keep my magazines going to the dorm during the school year and home during the summer. Here’s how things would go:
Get one of those little “cheap magazine” offers at student bookstore in fall. Order magazine. Get magazine monthly. Things are good.
Get magazine at beginning of April. Realize “Oh, shit, it says it takes 6-8 weeks to process change of address!” Dash off change-of-address letter. Things should be good for June, right?
Fast forward to June. Run to hometown post office to pay POSTAGE DUE on magazine that the dorm’s front desk staff has forwarded because the damn change of address didn’t go through in time.
Get magazine in July. Realize “Oh, shit, it says it takes 6-8 weeks to process change of address!” Dash off change-of-address letter. Hope for the best for September.
September comes. Call from Dad–“This magazine for you came in the mail today here. Didn’t you send in your change-of-address form?” AAAAAAAAAAGH!
It was tough to always have to be thinking two months in advance all the time.
I’ve found that, with perpetually incorrect addresses, if I check “Bill Me” on the renewal form and cross out and correct the incorrect address on the bill, that seems to get results. Not always, but usually.
In the publishing world we have a technical term for this:
“Dumbass editorial assistants”
Two things:
First, they may CALL it a ‘Canadian Edition’ but not change the content. Canadian postal laws make it very expensive to ship magazines in from the US. It’s been made pretty clear that if you want to have north-of-the-border circulation you’d better be willing to have a print run in Canada as well and call it that. But that change can be limited to resetting the cover plate with ‘Canadian Edition’ and moving forward. Me? I would have tried to personalize it for the Canadian market. Second, we’re dealing with Maxim here. They’re not what I would call a high-prestige editorial pub.
And Tripler? You’re right in that you got bad customer service. Call and complain. I used to run those people and I’d land on them with both feet when I got calls like that. On the down side, you might cost someone their job. I could staff (even in these tight hiring times) a 10 person call center in about 2 weeks if I was still doing that.
You have a right to be treated respectfully and courteously. Even if there’s nothing the CSRep can do for you, he or she should listen to your concerns and apprise you of the situation, good or bad.
Strangely, for the past two years I’ve been getting Popular Photography sent to my house, without even subscribing to the magazine. When I moved to Florida, the subscription followed me down – my new address was listed on the mag, with no USPS forwarding label.
