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Am I the only one that's concerned about the environmental footprint of this publicity stunt? We've come so far to have disposable cell phones! With a processor
by smartician 14y ago
Am I the only one that's concerned about the environmental footprint of this publicity stunt? We've come so far to have disposable cell phones! With a processor and camera that are more powerful than available consumer electronics 10 years ago. And now we put them in dead tree magazines just to display some trivial tweets and to be thrown away a few weeks later? Sure, I'm tempted to get one just to play with it, but there's this other voice in my head saying that this is a whole new level of crazy.
I sincerely hope this is some kind of recycling effort? But then, how did they get the same recycled phone model in large numbers? Maybe a production run that was completed before a model was taken off the market?
- slaven 14y agoAll I could think about was that Li-ion battery should a) be recycled, and b) not in the paper recycling bin, where this magazine will probably end up.
- Zenst 14y agoVery true, can see some bulk paper shredder having a bad day.
- 6g 14y agostfu ho.
- batterseapower 14y agoI can't imagine this advertising method is cost effective once the novelty value has worn off, so I can't really see this being a major environmental issue.
- eckyptang 14y agoWhat is slightly more worrying is that if this based on the usual magazine distribution methods, 1/3 will be pulped without being sold.
- Chaotic 14y agoWait, what? One third of magazines never reach a pair of hands? Do you have a source for this claim?
- eckyptang 14y agoMore than that in most cases: http://www.ppa.co.uk/about/activities/environment/ppa-environmental-position-statements/ http://www.ppa.co.uk/about/activities/environment/ppa-enviro...
- vidarh 14y agoMy dad used to work at a magazine distributor, and I'd not be surprised at all by that number. Lead times to print magazines tend to be long. They could print them quickly, but the cost would be substantially higher. So it can be anything from days (expensive) for topical magazines that don't carry news, to weeks or months (for things like comics, that are often printed in low cost countries). It is/was generally far cheaper to use cheap print options like that, and over-order substantially over expected retailer requests in case of extra demand, than to be prepared to do multiple print runs. Each retailer would request more copies than they expected to sell, given that they'd take the copies on consignment, and nobody wanted them to run out of copies - more distribution runs was far more expensive than sending them more copies initially. Given that sales for each retailers could fluctuate substantially from one week to the next, that meant a large number of unsold copies. So there's two large buffers that by design lead to unsold inventory. Usually the only thing that varies is that the size of the unsold inventory varies from issue to issue depending on well they're at forecasting demand. Most retailers would only get a distribution run once a week (this distributor didn't handle newspapers) unless a particular issue of some magazine proved successful way beyond the norm. As a kid I used to love that he had that job - we used to get a huge pack of free comics and other magazines every Friday due to fluctuating orders from retailers - staff got to freely pick from anything that was too old for them to take further orders.
- eli 14y agoThe sell-through rate is the percentage of magazines that make it into a customer's hands. 66% would be very high; it's typically much less. (Keep in mind that once a new issue comes out, the old issue is pretty much instantly worthless)