The Magazine with 15 Million Subscribers That Nobody Actually Reads

AKA how the magazine world died so Costco Connection could live.

If there’s one thing life today offers, it’s a lot of things to lament. I save the worldly and political laments for those more aware and involved than me but I have spent much time lamenting the fact that all the magazines I loved and longed to write for and eventually wrote for are now gone.

Meanwhile, Costco Connection has a circulation of over 15 million.

There’s no way to explain how bad this magazine is. And there’s also no way to explain what it was like to work in the magazine world in its 90s heyday. First of all, the words “magazine” and “world” could go next to each other in a sentence. Secondly, when I was an intern at the just-launched Entertainment Weekly in 1992, I was paid—not because they had to pay interns (no one paid interns in 1992 and few in 2025) but because they could.

They had staff parties at Limelight and day-long events at resorts upstate. The lobby had a row of movie theater seats. People went out for boozy lunches. Editorial Assistants were having affairs with married Senior Editors. It was glam, man! On my first week, I filled in for an Editorial Assistant who was out for the week, possibly on a romantic getaway with a married Senior Editor. I was opening her boss’ mail, which was premiere invite after premiere invite. One of them was for a movie premiere that very night. When the editor walked by my desk I showed it to her, pointing out that it started in a few hours. She shrugged and said, “Never heard of the movie. Want to go in my place?”

That premiere, my friends, was for Reservoir Dogs. I had never seen any movie like it; neither had anyone else. The day after that premiere, the movie no one had heard anything about became a sensation and the EW editor surely regretted giving her premiere ticket to a rando intern. The night of the premiere, I got wasted at the afterparty, ended up flirting all night with one of the producers and then went to an after-hour bars with said producer and the entire cast and crew.

My first week! As an intern!

Now, of course, Entertainment Weekly is digital-only, interns don’t go to premieres if premieres even happen and the internet took down everything from Allure and Mademoiselle to Teen Vogue and Details to every random publication that ever employed me. I had a good run of it, doing reported stories, essays and celebrity profiles, where magazines like Cosmo would pay me $2k to go hang out with Jessica Alba¹, Kate Hudson or the like and then have a transcriber take whatever I’d recorded and make it into an article. I went to the Oscars, the Golden Globes and every premiere you can imagine. Missoni dressed me, a journalist, for the god-damn Oscars in 2001!

It wasn’t just gratifying on a shallow level (though it was that; forgot to mention how much free sh*t I was sent). I also wrote the first mainstream story in existence (for Details) about how the uber successful were using crystal meth. I wrote first-person essays where I found my voice in a way that prepped me to write books. I had a “Modern Love” published in the New York Times. I built up my “name” enough that literary agents were pursuing me. This was all because I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

While some publications remain alive today (I will be a die-hard New York magazine stan until the day it stops printing), for the most part we’re left with, well, Costco Connection. The articles in CC, as some unfortunate souls who are so familiar with it that they have a nickname for it may call it, include “Would you rather eat a hot dog or hamburger?” and “Diverse and beautiful,” an article about the Pacific Northwest which begins “The Pacific Northwest is diverse and incredibly beautiful.”

As a writer who’s been trashed online, I do my best not to trash talk other writers (or anyone) but doesn’t a publication that couldn’t be bothered to capitalize the word “beautiful” in a title or writes an article about hot dogs vs hamburgers that doesn’t even answer the damn question² deserve it?

But what do I know? Apparently, CC nabs celebrities like Oprah and Jimmy Fallon for its cover. I, meanwhile, emailed a bunch of writer friends to ask if I could highlight them in this Substack and like three responded.

My point is this: it would be easy to expend a lot of energy lamenting how sad it is that instead of the sort of stories Lena Dunham listed in her exquisite newsletter Good Thing Going, we now have articles like “Juvenile arthritis” (about, well, juvenile arthritis) and “Sweet stuff” (about managing sugar intake). It’s easy to sigh about the fact that a magazine with an article called “Don’t get foiled” about what “business leaders can learn from the sport of fencing” is the third most popular publication in our nation while clever, brilliant magazines have been virtually erased from our consciousness.

But here’s thing: CC is outrageously popular because Costco members automatically receive it and also because there are a gajillion copies in their stores. In other words, it’s not so much liked or even read as it is distributed. It is tolerated like Taylor Swift’s love in “Tolerate It.” It’s safe to say that no one has ever read an article in Costco Connection and felt moved, or had their life changed as a result. So, here’s a “would you rather” for you: Would you rather be everywhere and easy to ignore slash dismiss, or less ubiquitous but more impactful? It’s so easy to compare numbers and metrics and subscribers and likes and downloads and feel like you come up short. But isn’t Costco Connection all the proof we need that it really is about quality over quantity?

Tell me: if you had to pick between 14 million indifferent subscribers—13 million of whom probably never read you—and a few thousand or hundred or dozen people who are thrilled to see your name in their inbox, which would you choose?

Keep in mind: choosing the latter means never having to write about whether or not people prefer hot dogs or hamburgers.

1. She told me I had great boobs. TRUE story. She was maybe the coolest famous person I’ve ever met and I’m not (only) saying that because of her compliment.

2. They just printed answers from a “poll” they conducted on their social media