They’re technically called “blow-ins”: those little subscription cards that fall out of magazines and promise the deal of the century—complete with a free tote bag!—but really just provide vexation. All you wanted to do was see some photos of Anne Hathaway’s weird wedding headdress or a prancing swimsuit model, but here you are: bending over like those poor housewives in vacuum cleaner commercials, picking up the millionth little sheet of card stock that you did not fill out and put in the mail.
Do these things ever actually work? We’ll defer to our colleagues at the print magazine on this, but we can’t help but recall a famous headline from The Onion: “It Was The Eighth Subscription Card That Convinced Me.” And don’t get us started on the paper cuts.