On Paper Trail for Subscription Glitch

Question: Along with half a dozen catalogues from local department stores, every day’s mail this month (and last) has also brought at least two or three “holiday” magazine subscription offers--soliciting renewals for my own magazines, of course, but also making a strong pitch for me to enter Christmas gift subscriptions for friends or relatives or to renew gift subscriptions that I have given in the past.

I have no objections to this--in fact, it’s rather helpful to be reminded of what I have given in the way of subscriptions in previous years. But I’ve run across something that’s a little baffling, and I’m sure that if it’s happened to me it’s probably happened to a lot of other people too.

Two Acknowledgements

I have just received acknowledgement and the bill for a gift subscription to Vanity Fair that I did, indeed, reorder recently for my daughter-in-law. At the same time, though, I also received a similar acknowledgement and bill for renewal, for the same daughter-in-law and myself, from Smithsonian magazine, which I did not order.

The thing that is baffling is that, except for the different type faces and different post office box numbers in Boulder, Colo., everything else on the bill is identical--the same subscription amount ($22 for the two subscriptions) and, in particular, all of the computerese coding identifying both me (as the donor) and my daughter-in-law (as the recipient).

I’m curious to know how such things happen and, in particular, whether this means that my daughter-in-law is going to get a year’s subscription to Smithsonian as well as Vanity Fair.

I’m tempted to send in the $22 to Smithsonian, even though I didn’t order it, because I think the real subscription price for Smithsonian is probably more than the $12 charged for my subscription and the $10 for the gift subscription--total, $22.

But, at the same time, I’m uneasy about the prospects of being dunned, month after month, for two subscriptions I didn’t order in the first place.--J.T.

Answer: Indeed, the Christmas season is bargain time in the wonderful world of magazine subscriptions, because the “list” price for a single yearly subscription to Vanity Fair is $24 and $18 for a single subscription to Smithsonian, which makes your bargain offer lessthan half price for Vanity Fair and about 60% off for the regular Smithsonian price. Both are published monthly. In this strange merchandising field--as the offer you received typifies--replete with “holiday” specials, “midsummer” specials, “Valentine’s Day” specials and “Just-Because-You’re-Such-a-Great-Subscriber” specials--the “list” price for a year’s subscription to a magazine has about as much relevance to its “special” rate as head bumps have in determining a person’s character.

One of the miracles of the magazine publishing business is not that those fat, slick periodicals roll off the press every month (or week) on a predictable schedule and with relatively few boos-boos incorporated in their contents, but that they ever get delivered. Subscribers move constantly, change their names, subscriptions expire, new subscribers come on board, and the whole process involves tons of mail quite apart from the volume of the magazines themselves--renewal notices, expiration notices, payments, changes of address, complaints, responses to complaints and on and on. How all of this was handled before the dawn of the Computer Age boggles the mind.

What keeps the whole thing from falling apart are the “fulfillment houses,” which take all of these nitty-gritty circulation chores off the backs of the individual magazines. And it’s not really a coincidence that both of your mailings came bearing Boulder, Colo., return addresses because that’s where one of the large fulfillment houses is located: Neodata Services--a peg or two down from General Motors in the name-recognition department.

In all, according to executive vice president Tom Mines, Neodata acts as the alter ego for about 120 magazines--not only Vanity Fair and Smithsonian but also Playboy, Popular Science, U.S. News & World Report, Esquire, the New Yorker, Vogue and so on--with a combined circulation of about 45 million.

All of which doesn’t mean that Neodata is physically mailing all of those magazines.

“We print the labels and mail them to printers all over the country who affix them to the magazines as they’re printed,” Mines says. “In some cases they go out in the form of magnetic tape. The technology keeps changing.”

Processing Fee

What Neodata gets out of this is a processing fee that can range from 45 cents to $2 a year per subscriber--depending on the frequency of the mailing and the other services required--but which averages out to $1 a year per subscriber--or a gross to Neodata of roughly $45 million a year.

These “other services” include the mailing of renewal notices, billings and the collection of the subscription checks, Mines says. These, however (unlike the magazines themselves) are printed and mailed directly from Boulder--as are those acknowledgment notices that you received from both Vanity Fair and Smithsonian.

“We make about 20 million mailings a month,” Mines adds, “or about 240 million a year. But every one of those monthly mailings can represent, maybe, 5,000 separate jobs. One of them, for example, might be the fifth renewal notice for Vanity Fair, and this could involve as few as, say, 20 individuals.”

And that 240 million a year translates to about 2% of the nation’s entire mail volume.

All of which conjures up the image of a post office building in quiet little Boulder (population 76,000) that, in size, would represent a cross between the Parthenon and the Pentagon.

“Not really,” Mines says. “The volume is such that practically all of the mail--both in and out--goes directly to either Denver, about 50 miles away, or bypasses Denver and simply comes and goes from the nearest sectional post office. Boulder’s post office gets some credit, of course, because there are some bookkeeping chores involved, but, physically, the post office here is just about the size you’d expect to see in a city of 76,000.”

What a Gargantuan mail user like Neodata is doing in a city like Boulder in the first place goes back to 1963 when A.C. Nielsen Co., better known for its TV-rating service, bought the small fulfillment house, which, at that time, was handling Esquire magazine. Shortly after that, the service was expanded to 14 other magazines and then the real growth began exploding.

Neodata’s competition in this strange field is, principally, Communication Data Services in Des Moines, Iowa, which is a subsidiary of Hearst Corp. and which handles such Hearst publications as Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan magazines as well as many independent publications. In terms of mailings, it runs neck and neck with Neodata.

Still a Mystery

What happened in your case--so that you ended up with an acknowledgement for two subscriptions to Smithsonian that you didn’t order--is still a mystery, however.

“I ran J.T.’s name through the computer,” Mines notes, “and, sure enough, we found her and her daughter-in-law’s names in the Vanity Fair file, but we drew a complete blank with Smithsonian. Because she’s not in the Smithsonian file at all, it’s very unlikely that she’ll receive any dunning letters, but, of course, after 22 years in this business I won’t say it isn’t possible. If she does, however, be sure to let me know, and we’ll certainly put a halt to it.

“It’s really interesting to me because the process is so automated that fouling up this way is pretty tricky,” Mines continues. “But, obviously, somebody goofed some way. “

With a photocopy of both the acknowledgements in hand, however--which Mines will have in short order--he’ll be able to decode the computerese on them and retrace the bizarre path that the Smithsonian bill took in getting to you.