Do you know this joke where a person tells her friend, “I saved a dollar today! I missed the bus so I walked to work.” “I’ll tell you how to save ten bucks instead,” the friend answers. “Next time, you just miss a cab instead of a bus.”
I just discovered that I have been saving tons of money without ever realizing it. I had to buy two glossy magazines, the Bazaar and Elle, for a creative project, and I almost fell over when the cashier told me the price. I could buy a paperback book and a cup of coffee with this money. And all that for a stream of advertisements and absolutely no valuable content at all! Just imagine how much money I would have spent overall if I’d been buying these magazines on a regular basis.
Seriously, since they are purely about advertisement, don’t you think these magazines should be free?
Do you read glossy magazines?
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t read glossy magazines except perhaps in the dentist’s waiting room. I even take my Kindle to the hairdresser’s. The ladies find this very odd but I’m foreign so it’s considered just a quirky foreign thing.
I would never pay good money for one of those rags. I’m not interested in celeb culture so it really astonishes me that some people care so much about it that they are willing to fork out good money to feed their curiosity.
I have also been saving money for years, don’t know where it’s gone though… 🙂
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Yes, it would be great to go and buy something cool with all these savings, eh? 🙂
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Time is up for the glossy magazine and the newspaper. The printed book is fast running out of time.
We’re in the brave new world of the Kindle, the text message, the email, the smart phone, the tablet. Perhaps blogging will outlive the printed book.
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Actually, people who buy a Kindle begin to buy more paper books, not less after that purchase. 🙂 I say this is a proud owner of a Kindle since the very first prototype.
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Kindle owners buy more paper books! Not sure if I’m surprised or not. I bought a Nook, and expected to be able to buy most books at lower prices. But it seems to me that B&N prices most Nook ebooks same as the paper versions. So I’m still buying paper books. Hope to try the Kindle Fire soon. I’ve heard that Amazon is more customer-friendly than B&N. Looking forward to finding out.
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Oh, the Fire is amazing!
Welcome to the blog! I really like your comments. Especially the one on Obama’s policies.
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Almost never for glossy mags at all. When I do, it’s generally something like Smithsonian or Discover or National Geographic with a specific photo spread I’m interested in reading and examining in detail. Also, “when I do” means on the order of one such magazine every 2-3 years.
The money I’m saving, of course, goes directly into purchasing books both for my classroom and for me.
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There used to be a great weekly magazine– Australia’s version of “People”, called “Who Weekly”. It had some really in-depth political articles, presented from a human interest point of view. Then they did a survey of their readership and found out those air-heads wanted to see more celebrities, more tips for losing weight, the standard fare. Since then, it has been a really crap magazine.
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Penelope Trunk says Cosmo helps here with her Asperger’s syndrome, because it talks about the little social rules she’s prone to miss.
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Cosmo ‘s rules of social behavior are not ones that exist in RL. 🙂
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I sometimes buy glossy magazines. Once or twice a year I find a thought provoking article in Glamour, Playboy, or Essence. I remember an article in Glamour I read a decade or so ago about the challenges faced by children who grew up in multi-ethnic families; the specific case was children with one parent who was Italian and the other who was Irish. This had a significant effect on my opinions, as I came to believe that such children have a real advantage, since they are obliged to think for themselves instead of having a prefabricated set of opinions and values foisted upon them. This may be uncomfortable, but in the long run it leads to really thoughtful adults.
I might have come to this conclusion without reading the article, but I am not sure of it.
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