Topic: Magazines? What magazines?

[Francois]

I want to talk a bit about an experience I've just had that has me asking more questions than I have answers.
I had to go to a local bookstore this afternoon to pick-up an order for mom. A few streets away from there is a big magazine stand, so I decided to drop-in and see if I couldn't get something to read.
So I head-off to the photography section only to notice it's not at the same place as it used to be... strange.
I look for the labels on top of the shelves until I find it... It's now located on the floor shelf. I bend my knees to look at it and there it was in all it's glory... all 6 magazines...
I've never seen a shelf so empty in my life.

So this has me wondering: have all the photo magazines closed during confinement?
Is it just this store that stopped carrying them?
What the heck is going on?

[Sandeha Lynch]

I bought, and still have, maybe 50-60 copies of the UK 'Black and White Photography magazine' from about 2002. But I haven't bought a single photo mag in over ten years now.

I doubt I'm alone in that.

[BernardL]

But I haven't bought a single photo mag in over ten years now. I doubt I'm alone in that.

+1
Magazines told me so many times that this year's new cameras are the greatest; now I know and don't need to buy the magazine. For less than the cost of two magazines, I can buy one of these photo mini-books:
https://www.actes-sud.fr/recherche/catalogue/collection/1317?keys=
https://fr.phaidon.com/store/photography/phaidon-55/
(many more titles  for the 2nd one,  don't understand why the publisher doesn't list them; maybe out of print?)

[Francois]

I didn't know that Photo Poche was still being published.
I have one or two of their books and they are well made.

[Kai-san]

I subscribe to the UK Black+White Photography and Silvergrain Classics (previously PhotoKlassik International). I used to buy magazines at local newsagents to support them, in spite of the fact that their markup made them almost double the price of subscription. But lately they have started refusing a lot of magazines because they don't sell enough of them. I don't subscribe to that kind of behaviour so I started subscribing to my favourite magazines instead. And in doing so I also support the postal services which our current government is trying to sabotage.
There has been delays to several issues of some magazines during this mess, so that might explain the absence in the bookstores. If you buy some magazines regularly it certainly pays to take out a subscription.

[Francois]

That's the thing, I don't buy them regularly.
I usually only buy the ones that really interest me. I maybe buy 5 or 6 a year (though lately it's been less as it seems that the content is not quite as good as it used to be).
And out of those magazines, it's rarely the same title. Sometimes it's B&W UK, sometimes it's Juxtapoz (though lately they've been quite a letdown), sometimes it's Réponses Photo.

As for the postal service, here it's not the government who's trying to sabotage it, it's the employees themselves!
Last year they lost a package I had ordered. When I called them, the lady on the phone told me that they "are not responsible for the delivery of packages and letters that don't have a tracking number". There's a guy on our street who works for the postal service. At about 10am you see him come home with the truck, he spends most of the day chatting with people and just generally shooting the breeze. At around 3:30pm, he gets back in the costume and heads back to the main post office. And that's just one of the stories. The guy from Lens Rentals almost went out of business because the employees were stealing packages that were insured and had a tracking number. He regularly lost 25,000$ lenses that vanished in thin air (and got the people who rented them mighty p***** in the process). That's how bad it is right here.

[Nigel]

The only magazine I buy fairly regularly is Hotshoe, it's a UK publication where each issue is curated on a certain theme.
http://hotshoemagazine.com/

Apart from that, I'd rather save my money for photobooks.

[Kai-san]

There's a guy on our street who works for the postal service. At about 10am you see him come home with the truck, he spends most of the day chatting with people and just generally shooting the breeze. At around 3:30pm, he gets back in the costume and heads back to the main post office. And that's just one of the stories. The guy from Lens Rentals almost went out of business because the employees were stealing packages that were insured and had a tracking number. He regularly lost 25,000$ lenses that vanished in thin air (and got the people who rented them mighty p***** in the process). That's how bad it is right here.

This sounds like something that could have happened here in the '70s. There's hardly a real Post Office left in this country, I believe only the ten largest towns has got one. The rest have been outsourced to grocery stores, and if you're lucky there's just one person working in that shop. So you'll just have to wait until he or she has finished scanning the fullest trolley of groceries you've ever seen before you are serviced. A few years back they stopped delivering mail on saturdays, now it's only three days a week.

[Francois]

Here the postal counters are in drugstores... Very inviting these days. And the lineups can be memorable. The worst I've seen was in the days where they still had a dot matrix receipt printer. The lady (I still remember her name, Monique) had a client who wanted to buy 100$ worth of stamps at 0.42$ a stamp. Instead of punching in a lot of stamps, she entered it as something like 200 sales of one individual stamps. There were two lines per entry, so that gives you an idea of the length of the receipt. It took over an hour to print it all, including a change of roll in the middle of the job. The guy at the counter was mighty p***** as he went away with his rolls of stamps and two rolls of paper for his accountant...

And that's just one of the things I've seen at the post office...