Michael As my preferred reading material for bed and bath, I have been reading the Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, which comes with the Friday edition, for decades. With a few exceptions, such as the perpetually boring Georg Diez, almost only top journalists write for this extremely entertaining color printed supplement to the newspaper. The selection of topics continually amazes even the newsletter editorial team, which is not exactly lacking in astonishing topic ideas.
Since the magazine cannot be ordered individually, we are grudgingly subscribing to the entire Friday edition. It comes through the importer GLPnews and arrives by mail in San Francisco a week after publication, and in a ritual that has been practiced for years, I open the surrounding plastic wrap, take out the 100g light magazine, and immediately throw the accompanying pound-heavy newspaper into the trash without reading it.
Imagine this: Forests are being cut down to print a newspaper that is flown by plane directly into a recycling bin on the other side of the planet, just because the SZ subscription service is stuck in the last century and can't manage to send me just the magazine. It also seems that the subscription department of SZ is made up entirely of unionized slackers who fundamentally ignore my emails with the attitude of "Not my job!" How is the struggling newspaper industry supposed to survive with such a work ethic? Fire them all!
Additionally, the SZ delivery service often decides to simply withhold the magazine from me. As shown in illustration 1, the newspaper then states that the magazine is "not included with the entire foreign edition." The delivery manager won't explain why that is. Why should he care about his customers? They should be grateful if they receive the newspaper at all! They shouldn't have moved away from Germany; if they had stayed in Munich, this problem wouldn't exist!
Funnily enough, some Friday issues now prominently display a notice about the missing magazine, but when you open the newspaper, it's inside. You've got to just shake your head. If the magazine is missing again, I write a short email to the importer service, and then simply get my subscription extended for free, because that's how it is in America; you don't upset the customer over a few dollars. Hopefully, the whimsical SZ service will take pity and include the magazine next time. According to the importer, you can't talk to the SZ people; they don't listen to small importers. Oh well.