Subscription to Annoyance

For those who subscribe to magazines:

Have you ever noticed that you receive renewal letters several times throughout the year, even when you have many months left on your subscription? This happens especially around the end of the year, where they think they can dupe you into renewing early, as though the subscription runs Jan to Dec as opposed to whenever you initially signed up. I know they are not trying to cheat us- they’ll just tack an extra year on to what they already have. But still, what happened to the concept of sending a renewal once a year, close to the time the subscription is up??

I just received a notice from Glamour Magazine, and on the mailing label you can clear see that my expiration date is June 2009 (they duped me into thinking my subscription was up LAST year, and I had 8 months left!) Then we are also bombarded by notices asking us to extend our subscription and buy a gift subscription at the same time. Last year I bought a gift subscription for my sister to The New Yorker- to date, I have received 4 renewal notices by mail and 2 emails. Man, the amount that they are wasting on postage, paper and manpower severely slims down the return on investment on my paltry subscription.

Just had rant about that a little bit... thanks.