They served well for many years as a source for starting my woodstove.
Dismembered
"Don't you go dyin' on me now"
Number of magazines trashed by Publishers
by Nosferatu 17 Replies latest jw friends
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Nosferatu
Okay, hopefully tomorrow I'll make some time to calculate some numbers. I have just one question, the numbers in the KM, are they numbers for the country only? Or are they for the entire world?
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Gordy
The number of magazines stated in the KM was the number "placed" as stated on the monthly reports. I say "placed" because I know brothers/sisters would not always report the correct number. Also that "placed" magazines were counted by brothers/sisters as any that they may have left in doctor/dentist waiting rooms etc, or even just pushed through someones letterbox.
When I did my stint as "Magazine servant" we would always have mags left over after each delivery. Always making announcements for them to collect their mags. We had a stack of 200 unclaimed mages at one time. Occasionally the Service overseer would go through how we were doing servicewise. He would annoumced how many hours the congregation had done, books placed, and magazines placed. When it came to how many magzines placed it used to be on average 900-1000 mags a month, an average of 10-12 mags per publisher (85 publishers). I used to think "Yeah but we get 2000 magazines a month delivered to us." Even allowing for publishers personal and family copies, I would say anywhere between 500 - 750 mags were not going anywhere. Thats 6000 - 9000 mags not being placed per year. Having visited brother'sisters homes and seeing the stacks of unplaced mags they had, I could see why.
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zugzwang
I posted this on the "dumbed down thread" but it fits here too:
Back in the day when I was a zealous pioneer there used to be a group of us pioneers who would go on the college campus to do street work. There would be large groups of students who would all walk together and if you could get one student to take a mag then every student following them would take one. Some days I would literally place 300 to 500 magazines. The really funny thing was that after a group of 50 or 100 students would walk by then there would be a lull in the action. No students would walk by for a while. So we would walk down to the bottom of the hill and check the trash cans to see how many of the mags we had just placed had already made it into the barrel. Sure enough there would always be at least a 1 to 5 ratio of discarded magazines. So we would take them back out of the garbage and then when the next group of students would go by we would place those same mags again. (As long as they hadn't been soiled by anything in the garbage.) And of course that meant I sometimes got to count 2 placements with the exact same magazine. My all time record, 681 magazines in one day. And it wasn't hard to come up with that many magazines. I was also the "magazine servant" at the time so I had an announcement made that any publisher who had magazines at home that they felt they wouldn't place could bring them up to the magazine counter and we would be glad to see to it that they got redistributed to other publishers who were in need. We literally got thousands of magazines (between 3 and 4 thousand if I recall correctly.) Now that is just one congregation of about 80 publishers, multiply that by 90,000 congos and you know there are a lot of old mags out there that never get placed.
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Aude_Sapere
Recycling: I seem to recall the society recycling before it was hip to do so. Seemed more frugal than enviromentally responsible at the time.
Trashed Mags: Whether I was pioneering or just regular or irregular! publisher, I think I only ran out of magazines maybe 1/2 a dozen times in my life. I always had leftovers. Cumulatively over time, I think I tossed out more mags then I placed. Pretty certain of it, in fact.
Crumpet: *sigh*. I remember the same 'joys' you recall from your childhood and teen years. I remember my brother gloating about how many mags he placed. I remember feeling proud that I recorded (legitimately) 12 or 15 hours. It seems so sad now. We really were odd little kids.
-Aude.
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Freedom Fighter
Crumpet wrote:
"Ihopeyouenjoyed the lastmagazinesibroughtyou and since you have a lovely garden/adog/beautifulhome/birdI thoughtyoumaybeinterestedinthearticleinourlatestcopyoftheawakewhichtalksaboutjustthat......anditsforasmallcontributionof25p"
I'm sitting here in tears of laughter.....I remember the same spiel so well. My mother has literally stacks of magazines, she feels really uneasy about putting them in the bin, as if she is committing a heinous crime.
FF
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Country_Woman
I was honest : I only accepted 2 Watchtowers and 2 Awakes......
1 for myself and one to place - but the paper recyclin bin was still full each month.....
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TheListener
If no one has crunched the U.S. numbers yet I will do so this weekend. The KM numbers are U.S. only and only reflect what the dubs put on their timesheets. It would be great if we could have this done for each major country in the world. Say for UK, Germany, Netherlands, Mexico, France, etc. We could then get a rough idea of how many magazines (WT and AW because they're not split on the reports) are trashed. Just a rough guess but it would be fun to know. I'll do the U.S. and report back on Monday.
Anyone else from around the world want to help??