Consumer Reports

I was excited about subscribing to this magazine. I had bought into its reputation as the standard for advocating for consumers and being a good guide for selecting products. However, this turned out to be much less the case than I had thought.

While you expect to receive renewal requests any time you subscribe to a new magazine, what I got here was beyond anything I've experienced before. My first renewal request actually arrived before the first issue of the magazine! Then for the rest of the year just about every week I received other requests to either subscribe or donate to their organization. While the cause may be a worthwhile one, the continual bombardment of pleas was a complete turn off.

Their concept of a year's subscription is also unusual. While you can get a 2-year subscription of 24 issues, a 1-year subscription includes only ten. I must have also subscribed concurrently with those two phantom months, because instead of ten issues I received only eight. The last issue I received was the same as one printed on the mailing label, so I evidently had two issues chopped off from the front.

While understandably it's impossible to fully cover every make and model and publish it in a monthly magazine, I was disappointed with the low number of selections that were covered. While you might get two dozen lawnmowers reviewed, for example, once you go to the store to buy one you quickly realize how many more choices there are that were not covered. You're also out of luck if you're looking for a product that just hasn't been reviewed in this year's issues. Access to their web site could ease both of these problems, but then that's another subscription not included with the magazine itself.

I found this magazine slightly helpful when looking for an item that was reviewed. While I would never base my entire decision on their recommendation (from my own experience I disagreed with many of them) it is a helpful starting place for gathering information on products you might purchase. All in all, though, the benefits gained from it weren't worth the cost and aggrivation of renewing my subscription.