I don’t remember where I saw them first. I didn’t order a lot of magazines as a kid, and they showed up a lot as magazine inserts, those non-glossy pages a little thicker than all the others that invite themselves to be torn out just to preserve the slick continuity of flipping through the rest of the pages.
Maybe it was the Sunday paper, which my family had received from my earliest memory and I still receive today just because it’s become ingrained in me that you’re supposed to get a big newspaper on Sunday for it to be a Sunday. Maybe they turned up in the subscription my parents had to Newsweek magazine for so many years, which would have made sense because they were so ubiquitous at the time, they would have even been in Newsweek.
They were so hard to avoid that it was all too easy to breeze on past them without a moment’s consideration. Each one featured the freshly-scrubbed face of some happy person trying to wrap their arms around what you were led to believe was their newly-acquired stash. The person shown was always an adult, though not too old of an adult to have their coolness ruled out by age, because we were supposed to think that, yes, this was the kind of thing even responsible adults habitually did, even though no adult with a modicum of common sense ever would have allowed themselves to get locked into this kind of backward pyramid scheme.
They were filled with multi-colored images, displaying the most recognizable icons of the day, almost cultural watermarks themselves in how they chose what should be the most prominently displayed. All it took was one of those pictures to connect with you and get you curious enough to spend a few minutes perusing the sampled list shown on the single advertising page, the whole time your eyes being drawn back to the literally too-good-to-be-true promise parked at the top of the page. Of course, somewhere on the page, because it was about to become part of your legally binding agreement, there was a small circular space left blank, other than the fine print telling you that was where you were supposed to actually tape your penny to the order form before you stuffed it in an envelope and sent it in.
And this was how you were able to buy 13 records or tapes for only 1¢!
Thousands of seventies and eighties kids like me fell for this marketing scheme over and over. Just imagine the excitement that came with the arrival of that package in the mail! At our house it was one of those days when I’d get off the school bus, dig my key out of my pocket since my sisters and I lived the life of early-eighties latchkey kids, pull open the storm door and find there was a huge cardboard box tucked in there! It had size and depth and weight and substance! It was like a personal Christmas morning, if Christmas morning was the type of holiday when you celebrated it by yourself and your sisters were slightly hopeful you had bought thirteen albums that didn't suck and your parents tried to hide how ridiculous they thought the whole thing was. Actually they didn't try all very hard to hide that. I cannot, for the life of me, ever remember having a conversation with my father like the following exchange:
FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD ME: So, Dad, you know those record and tape order forms? I’d really like to send one in and get my thirteen new albums for only a penny. I’ll still have to buy another eight or nine albums from them at full price to take advantage of this, which means I’ll be paying a few bucks more than I would if I bought the exact same records at Musicland at the mall, but hey, what’s a few bucks when I pool all of my money from my allowance and the few ten dollar bills I receive annually from my aunts on my birthday? I just have to make sure I send back the order form each month when they send me one for a new album, and tell them I don’t want it until they have one I like. And sure, I’m kind of hyperactive and forgetful, but of course I’m going to remember to take care of this one thing and I’ll never procrastinate or miss the cut-off date! Right? How funny to think that would ever happen! So you see how this is the kind of once in a lifetime opportunity it would be foolish for me to pass up on. Anyway, you’re cool with me taping on this penny and committing myself to this unforgiving enterprise, right?
MY DAD: Yep. Go for it.
At face value, there wasn’t anything wrong with these clubs, as long as you were more capable than me of remembering to do things like find stamps to put on return postcards that have been sitting on the bedroom desk for three weeks. My music collection began to grow rapidly. I ended up with a good number of albums I wouldn’t have otherwise bought, but the problem was that living out in the most rural of rural areas made it difficult to ever arrange for the return postage. And I had to use return postage, because I didn’t have the savvy at the time to simply write “REFUSED” or “RETURN TO SENDER” on the boxes I didn’t want. I'd crack them open to see what they were, and often would open them and listen once or twice just to check. Which was always the mistake, because I once I did that, there was no way I’d ever get around to sending it.
Does this sound at all like addictive behavior? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought so.
I don’t remember exactly when I finished my love/hate relationship with the world of Columbia House and all of its bastard siblings. Time moves on I guess, and the day came when the flyers showed up in the Sunday paper less often, and the inserts didn’t appear in magazines anymore. Online music stores were still decades away, to say nothing of pirated evildoers like Napster or Limewire, or even the legit streaming services of the modern day. If one of those flyers popped up now, it’s entirely possible I’d join a club just for old time’s sake.
It still might be kind of fun.
At least at first.
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