By the time People Weekly hits the mailbox, are the hot items already passe? Is Field & Stream's arrival more erratic than a salmon run? Does Opera News arrive two days after the fat lady's final song?
Publication junkies take their periodical fix seriously. When Modern Bride arrives after the divorce, a subscriber is likely to get peeved.And lately, some magazine subscribers say, the delivery situation, has wobbled between the unpredictable and helter-skelter.
"I get 20 magazines or more (but) I never know when they're going to come," said Larry Berg, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. "Often I get two issues of the same weekly magazine in one day."
But deliver delivery complaints to the people in the magazine business and the blame gets passed around quicker than a copy of Playboy in a boys' gym.
Still, most fingers wind up pointing at the U.S. Postal Service.
"We all pretty much are getting a `What can we do?' attitude about the post office," says Jim Fischer, circulation director for Gralla Publications, which each month mails 22 business titles nationwide. "We hear of cases where the February issue arrives before the January has been delivered."
In fact, given the growing avalanche of magazines - 584 new consumer titles were launched last year alone, up from about 250 in 1985 - and the complexities of getting them delivered, some say it is a wonder subscribers receive publications at all.
Magazines, by definition, are "Second Class" mail. The postal distribution system is built "like hubs and wheels," explained Charles Pace, a Wilton, Conn., consultant who previously worked with the postal service. The farther from a hub a subscriber lives, the more difficult it is to deliver a magazine.
"Let's say you're going to Butte, Mont.," he explains. "You print somewhere in Wisconsin. More than likely you'll take the mail into Chicago, Chicago will deliver it to Denver, Denver will put it on its transportation to Billings, Mont., a state distribution point, and Billings will get the mail on their transportation to Butte. Then they have to get it to the carriers."