SENIOR MOMENT: Managing the magazine maze

By BETTY MUNSEY/Columnist

Magazines are carefully arranged in neat little stacks on the wooden side tables in the doctor’s office. Before patients find a seat in the crowded waiting room, most will flip through the stacks and find a magazine that deals with one of their interests while secretly hoping that their wait will be shorter than their reading time.
Across town, patrons of an auto dealership are patiently flipping through magazines while waiting as their vehicles are being serviced or repaired. Next door in the beauty shop, ladies are searching through hair style magazines for photos of their desired dos. Similar scenarios are repeated on a regular basis across the country and perhaps around the world. Magazines are vital parts of our lives and definitely a boon to our economy.
Whole rows of super market space are devoted to magazine sales while most book stores save a few racks for current magazines. Within a few feet of each other are magazines devoted to quilting, men’s fitness, antiques, and crossword puzzles. Magazines inform, motivate, and keep us up-to-date with news relevant to our jobs, hobbies, families, business, religion, and the world in which we live.
As we’ve aged, so have our tastes in magazines. High style and fashion are still of utmost importance to the younger generation, but we’re more likely to lean toward senior issue magazines that deal with senior savings, retirement, and health issues. Gone are the days when copies of Highlights for Children and Cosmopolitan lined our coffee tables.
Magazines can create their own set of unique problems. How many are too many?  When stacks of magazines fill ever nook and cranny of our home and many still remain in their clear plastic covers, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate our magazine needs. Reducing our number of subscriptions is not only good for the environment (saves another tree), but it’s also good for our pocketbooks.
It’s a rare magazine that costs less than $10 per year, and most are much more.  A 95-year-old woman looked forward to receiving and reading her weekly women’s magazine.  Until her health failed, her family was unaware that she had been receiving regular high-pressure calls from the publisher urging her to renew even though her subscription was paid in advance for several years and was costing her more than the newsstand rate. She was being scammed by those she trusted.
Magazines often seem to accumulate at the rate of baby rabbits in spring. As folks who believe in the theory of “waste not, want not,” we have a difficult time throwing away perfectly good, yet dated, magazines.  Some schools, especially pre-schools and church classes, may welcome magazines for their students to cut and paste. Make sure the content is appropriate for children. Some nursing homes likewise welcome reading materials for their patients.
For years, many of us saved copies of National Geographic magazines hoping they would fetch a hefty price. The popular TV show, “Antique Roadshow,” dispelled that idea and suggested that the space these magazines were taking were more valuable that the magazines. Yet there are a few very special issues that might bring a good return.
It hasn’t been too long ago that a knock on the door led to an innocent plea from a next door neighbor’s child to please purchase a magazine subscription so they could participate in a class trip. Even though we’d rather give them money straight from our pockets, we searched through their little sale brochure hoping to find a cheap yet interesting magazine. Most schools are now limiting such fundraising efforts.
It’s not nearly as hard to say no to the van load of out-of-town college students going door-to-door selling encyclopedias, books, and yes, magazine subscriptions.  Beware; ¬these are often scams. Perhaps if you feel guilty sending them away empty-handed, give them a few magazines as souvenirs.
A retired Extension agent, Betty Munsey lives and farms in Bland County.