Just renewed online subscription yesterday. Sometimes has relevant information; other times the reviews are out of date as models have changed. Good for a quick overview of variables to consider by product. Grateful it doesn’t add to household paper.
We still get it. DH prefers hard copies to searching for and reading reviews online. It helps with reliability of appliances, electronics; cars, etc, but I find it less useful than it used to be when the reviews were more comprehensive.
I let mine lapse without meaning to because of the fact that they send renewal notices for 6 months or whatever it is. I just ignored them and didn’t realize when I needed to pay attention.
As I thought about it, it occurred to me that nonsense like that is the sort of thing they should criticize, not engage in. So I didn’t renew.
Check your local library, most likely they have an online subscription.
I go to the library and read it when I’m in the market for the kind of things it reviews. I agree that for any review to be useful it is important to read about the methodology. CR often downgrades products for things I don’t care about. I will never forget the ice cream ratings where their reviewer down-rated Hagen Daaz for being “too rich”! =))
The big problem with CR, as others have noted, is that when you actually go to the stores to try to find an appliance, it has almost always been replaced by another model, and their ratings of models within a brand vary widely.
I also read online reviews from other sources, and similar caveats apply. You have to read what the user reviewers actually say, and determine what is important to you. Some people will downgrade a product because there was a problem with the retailer, not the actual product, and so forth.
H gets it but I think it’s a waste since he hardly ever reads it. It is occasionally useful. For most of the tech stuff we buy, there are better sources of info online.
As others have found, I can access the on-line edition free through our library. I do use the hard copy special car report edition which I’ve found useful when we are car shopping. I get that at the library also. The magazine itself rarely has anything I’m interested in on a month to month basis.
We let ours lapse. We just found that it wasn’t that useful to us anymore. There are lots of other info sources and we can always access CR through the library.
I had it for 15 years but gave it up when we weren’t buying much anymore. I just renewed it last month as everything we own seems to be on the edge of giving out. It was useful for a recent dishwasher search. It is not the same magazine that I used to love reading cover to cover each month.
We still get it. I don’t have much success going to the library to read a specific issue of any magazine.
Reader reviews are useless. Opinions. The pool of reviewers is only those who subscribe to it- which is only a small number of any buyers of a product I’ll bet. Plus- most won’t bother to post comments, especially if things are fine. May as well read the other consumer reviews that are plentiful online.
CNET has good reviews of many electronics.
The latest issue of CR in the library discussed brands of toilet paper and size changes in recent years. They should have turned back the clock even more. Plus, their rankings do not correspond to the features I value in TP. It is a lot cheaper to just try different brands than to spend time on that review. Other rankings I dislike include taste testing ones- I do not always like the same flavors their “experts” do. When we subscribed to CR we never bothered with the surveys. The annual car repairs report does have value- and the library does have a copy. But there are also good car reviews online now.