Well, the chickens have come home to roost! Who would have thought that the most-read magazine in the country would be going down the tubes?
I can't say that I'm sorry, however. For many years Reader's Digest made a practice of mailing out huge volumes of mail to older people promoting contests and books of all kinds. After my mom died twelve years ago, we cleaned out her house and found piles of Reader's Digest mailings stuffed in drawers and unopened boxes of books stacked in a back room.
Now Mom didn't have much income, and I'm sure that she entered those contests in hopes of winning something to leave to her family. It makes me both sad and angry that she was taken advantage of that way.
When you multiply that by the thousands of other elders that were bamboozled, you can understand the scope of Reader's Digest's scam. As for all those Reader's Digest condensed books that they promoted so heavily? They are now so undesirable that you can't even give them away! Thrift stores refuse to take them. They wind up as landfill or being recyled.
So, it seems to me that advertisers and subscribers gradually lost respect for Reader's Digest and it finally caught up to them.
3 comments:
LOL Ms. Sparrow, you are fiesty today!
Guess karma caught up with Reader's Digest, eh?!
Readers Digest is an era long gone. We now have The Enguirer, Time and Newsweek. Then there is the TV genre- TMZ, Extra, Entertainment Tonight. And, don't forget about the ease of the internet. And, how about those BLOGGERS !!!!! LOL
The only good that came from Readers Digest as far as I can tell is the the foundation money from the families, some of which endows Macalester College, while other parts of it have helped museums and other arts organizations.
At least there is one upside of all that. But it's kind of like being glad Bill McGuire of United Health had money to give to the Guthrie. Ugh.
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