Stop into Robeks smoothie shop in Arlington, Virginia, and you can pick up a copy of DC Modern Luxury for free. It’s a large-format, about-200-page, glossy magazine (cover price $5.95 per issue) that helps you figure out what to do and what to buy if you’re extremely wealthy. I picked one up when I went into Robeks for a smoothie. While I don’t usually consider myself to be extremely wealthy, I am by profession cheap. It was free!
Luxury magazines are becoming a new media battleground. One observer of the burgeoning entry and competition in luxury magazines has expressed skepticism about the size of the market:
The luxury market and luxury magazines have been built on a myth: that there’s an endless supply of new jet-setters dying for glossy spreads telling them how to spend their millions.
This analysis neglects demand from cheapskates, fantasizers, voyeurs, and economists not otherwise specified. At DC Modern Luxury’s cover price of $5.95 per issue, demand from these groups is likely to be negligible. But offering the magazine for free is a sure way to boost its circulation.
I bought a Pomegranate Passion Smoothie for about $6. What a luxury! More than 1.4 billion persons around the world live on less than the money equivalent of one such smoothie every five days. I’m grateful that I’m so economically fortunate. But I’m not in a good target demographic for advertisers in a luxury magazine.
Offering an expensive luxury magazine for free in a smoothie shop doesn’t seem to me to be a propitious indicator for the future of its business.