Scary facts about door-to-door magazine sales

"They're in their late teens and early twenties, tired from a long day of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door, but excited about the money they think they're going to get...

It's a blast, they say. You lie all day to sell subscriptions, and you unwind afterward with some smoke. You tell the customers that you live a few streets over, that you go to the local school and play on the soccer team, that you just sold subscriptions to their neighbor, and the idiots buy it because by now you've got it down to a science. And on to the next town. And the next.

In the eight months the Press investigated door-to-door magazine sales across the country, the industry has seen at least three murders, one rape, two attempted rapes, one stabbing, one attempted murder, one vehicle fatality and one attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl.

Interviews with former agents reveal a constant party atmosphere where agents have easy access — often thanks to their managers — to drugs. The agents come primarily from two populations: reprobates who need to leave wherever they are fast, and vulnerable kids from unstable families who believe that hopping into a van full of strangers is better than what awaits them at home.

(Full - very long - report at the Houston Press. It's grim reading.)

I'll add one other caveat. I renewed a magazine subscription through a valid local school-based drive. Some months later I began receiving junk mail tagged with the same variant address I had used for the magazine; when I called them to complain about their apparent violation of their privacy policy, I discovered that it wasn't their fault - my name/address had been resold by the school's magazine-subscription fund-raising service...