The Magazine Insert Lunacy
I just opened my latest copy of Men's Health and, no bullshit, seven insert card stock tear outs for subscriptions to the Men's Health. A magazine I'm already subscribed to and don't think I really need to re-up it anytime soon. So why do they do this? What marketing genius came up with the plan to make it so that the first thing I do with any new magazine is tear the stupid inserts out and throw them away.

The only reason I can see is they hope they'll fall out and that someone else will pick them up and then mail them in to start their own subscription. But that's fundamentally flawed logic because they fall out yes, but they fall out on my floor and I throw them away. Now multiply this by the number of subscribers now multiply that by the number of magazines each household gets each month, now multiply that by 12 months in the year.

And now we're talking about hundreds of thousands of trees needlessly destroyed for inserts that no one uses and damned near everyone throws away instantly.

So now I'm thinking about how to remedy this situation. Not withstanding the fact that the magazine industry destroys an amazingly huge amount of trees to produce their issues all the time. I know the magazine's aren't going away anytime soon but corners can be cut and those stupid card stock inserts are a really, really good place to start.