Clipp A Little

What does our junk mail say about us?

For years, I’ve wanted to write something about Clipper Magazine. So long that it’s no longer even called Clipper Magazine—now it’s Clipp. What’s interesting to me about these advertising pamphlets is how much of the space is full of ads for very expensive home improvement jobs.

I’m not sure if that’s true of the Clippers that go out in other places. We used to get them in Flemington, New Jersey, and while that area is pretty affluent, (Hunterdon County is one of the richest counties in America), it isn’t quite the same level as the affluent D.C. suburbs. I recall more restaurant ads than we get here, for example.

You wouldn’t guess the preponderance of expensive house project ads from the covers, which are often ads for restaurants or other assorted businesses. Of the handful I saved as examples, only two have ads for home stuff on the covers. Three are for dentists!

But the insides are somewhere around 75 or 80 percent advertising for home improvement: closet organizing, patio enclosure or sunrooms, new deck, window replacement, kitchen or bathroom remodeling, etc. Obviously people at all income levels might need some of these jobs done at some point. But the imagery is very much McMansion/upper-middle-class houses.

I especially love (as in, don’t love) these spreads where everything is for big home jobs. (“Magazine” is a misnomer—this is an ad flyer, with nothing editorial in it.)

These are pretty representative.

Now in addition to simply showing homes and jobs that are probably still above the median home/budget, even here—appealing to envy or at best to material ambition—there’s another notable thing about them.

If you look closely at the ads, you will notice—at least for these six editions, and I looked through them very closely for this—that there is not a single obvious depiction of multifamily housing.