I was sitting in a chair reading a magazine this morning when one of those annoying advertising postcards they stuff into magazines fell in my lap.  It was a pitch for renewing the subscription.  And that’s fine, but at the bottom of the postcard is a message imploring me to “GO GREEN WITH OUR ECO-FRIENDLY AUTOMATIC RENEWAL PROGRAM.”

Now, let’s review.  This is a magazine, printed on heavy, glossy paper in billions of colors, bound with staples and glue and sent in the mail.  And inside this magazine is a postcard, printed with ink on paper, begging me to spend more money to get more copies of the heavy, glossy billion-color magazine, but to do it in the “eco-friendly” way of ordering online. Like I’m the one ruining the environment.

So, who is the villain here?  The guy who mails in the subscription renewal instead of doing it online, or the company that manufactures the magazine?

OK, so the answer is both, but let’s not get crazy about it.  If no one bought magazines and no magazines were printed, what would we do with all those trees, really?  Not to mention all those writers who would be out of work with absolutely no other marketable skills. 

But while we’re at it, what is the deal with all those postcards they stuff into magazines?  Isn’t it enough that there are a thousand pages of advertising for every page of content?  Do they really have to add more?  I used to love reading Vanity Fair. But the articles got so hard to find I had to admit I was just buying it for the ads. 

Magazine types call those cards “blow-ins” because that’s the way they add them to the magazine. A machine literally blows the postcards into the magazine.

A “blow-in” is also slang for an unwelcome visitor, like a blizzard of postcards that fall in your lap when you open a magazine, for instance. And don’t they realize that the first thing most of us do is grab the front and back covers and turn the magazine upside down and shake out all those blow-ins anyway? 

Personally, I save them to write phone messages on.  It’s eco-friendly.