Literate civil disobedience: Send those magazine cards back blank
Filed under: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Shopping, Technology
Magazine and catalog publishers know that everybody hates blow-in cards -- the postcards that fall out when you read. Yet they keep on putting them in. I just got a new WIRED Magazine with three blow in cards and a fashion supplement I won't read, all bound up in a polybag. Like many consumers, I'm tempted to send the blow-in cards back blank. Many people have suggested this over the years. But how much will it really cost WIRED and dissuade them from these totally annoying, eco-unfriendly tactics? How many people would it take to do it? According to Direct Marketing Magazine, they do it because the cost of blowing in a card that I'll ignore is about half the cost of sending out a letter I'll ignore. But the response rate is abysmal: only 0.35%. That means they have to do 300 cards to get one back. The 2006 story put the cost at $30 to $40 per thousand.
If WIRED conformed to all those norms, it would be spending about 3.5 cents per card put in the magazine and roughly $10 for every card it gets back. (It's offering subscriptions at only $8 year, but that's part of the fuzzy economics of magazines today, which are supported more by ads than sales.)
I checked with the post office to see how much postage they would pay for every card returned. A high volume mailer like WIRED has to pay several thousand dollars a year in fees, then 24.7 cents per card actual postage and .006 cents for processing under its special Business Reply Mail permit. So, basically it's a quarter for every postcard. Let's assume WIRED wouldn't consider the blow-in cards attractive if the cost doubled -- making it the same price as mailing a letter. What would it take for the process to cost $30 more per thousand? At 25 cents a pop, it means that 120 of 1,000 postcards would have to make it to the mailbox. That's what I think it would take to get the blow-in cards to stop: better than one in 10 people sending the cards back blank.
Are you up for joining me?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-14-2008 @ 6:50PM
DDK said...
Yes! I'm with you. There annoying and a waste. I will send them back with a NOTE. Maybe this will stop the practice
Reply
8-14-2008 @ 10:38PM
Tom Barlow said...
Years ago Abbie Hoffman, in Steal This Book, suggested gluing such self-mailers to bricks before sending them back.
Reply
8-15-2008 @ 4:19AM
KevinKane said...
I MORE THAN AGREE with Tom and Abbie on this. I actually started just dropping them back in the mailbox myself a few years ago but I wait until I have a nice large pile , usually at the end of the month and mail them ALL back. If you have a subsrciption with a magazine, you should, at least, be given a choice as to weather or not you wish too be given these cards or not. It's not like they are part of the magazine and they only fall out on the floor anyway and then you pick them up and throw them out. Maill them back, they paid for it anyway.
Reply
8-15-2008 @ 1:11PM
mayala2372 said...
What difference does a blowin card make? Just ignore it. I use mine as bookmarks and as a handy spot to jot down notes. When I'm throw using them, I recycle them. Wouldn't it be a better idea to complain to the magazine company rather than overburden the post office? If you must send the cards back, at least put a comment on the card so that the company will know why you're doing this.
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8-16-2008 @ 4:17AM
sarah gilbert said...
Carol, you're brilliant. nothing makes me so angry as having to remove a bunch of paper (the kind that's just ripe for papercuts, btw) before I can read my magazine. the worst offenders are the airline magazines, stuffed with double-strength ad pages and blow-ins, I can never read more than an article without getting irked.
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8-18-2008 @ 10:48AM
Brooklyn Rider said...
Interestingly enough, WIRED addressed this issue in their "Things that Suck" issue in February (with Sarah Silverman on the cover)
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/su_subscription_cards
"You know all those subscription cards cluttering up this issue of Wired? Well, um ... sorry. We understand you detest the deforesting paper rectangles — "bind-in" or "blow-in" cards, to use industry parlance. Honestly, we do, too. But they're part of our business model. It's not just about money, really — it's about your eyeballs. See, advertisers pay based on audience size. And blow-in cards are a cheap way to snag subscribers and boost numbers: It costs a glossy monthly about $10 to acquire a new reader through one of those cards. But using direct mail? $25 — or more.
We'd be happy to get your business through the Internet, which we hear is the wave of the future. But for now, just 10 percent of new subs come via the Net. And 12 percent come from those damn blow-in cards. The worst part about 'em? They cover up some really good stories."
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