Almost no magazines that I dealt with handled their own fulfillment; the Canadian magazine Geist was a welcome exception, and handled its own subscriber rolls. We talked to one person at The New Yorker or Men’s Health Best Life, etc. to set up the deal and then pushed string at fulfillment houses to get subscribers’ names added, addresses changed, records removed, etc.

Every fulfillment house demands batches in a different arcane format. Even two different Conde Nast publications might have different format requirements for the batches. When we set up a new magazine benefit, it would take hours and hours to get to the right person at the fulfillment house who actually knew the format, ad then for us to iterate through samples. “No, that’s not right, it has to have this code that I never told you about in the first two characters of every entry.”

Palm Coast, which handles fulfillment for US News, wouldn’t let its own customer service reps take our customers’ address changes and cancellations. We had to send them in the batches.

Anyway. My guess: The mail-processing or order-processing facility takes your order and sends updates to the fulfillment house every so often, and then the fulfillment house makes its roll changes every so often, and the labels for this month’s issue and the next got printed in one batch to save time, so you have to wait eons.

After all! Who cares how long it takes to get to you! No matter what day that first copy of the Saturday Evening Post gets to you, you’ll turn off the phonograph, have a little party, invite over the neighbors from the next farm, and read it aloud to each other! Over and over again!

a. Because you don’t have internet access in your bathroom.

b. Because you wouldn’t want to line the birdcage with your computer.
c. Because the guests you’re trying to impress can’t see your online subscription to [magazine name].

JJ