Get Ready to Pay a Whole Lot More for Your Tabloid Mags Like People

Some of your favorite tabloids are increasing their prices in response to drastic sales dips, which prompts the question—do you even give a shit?

If you’re still reading, you probably do (maybe?) at least enough to know that starting Friday, People (which The New York Post calls the “industry leader”) is raising prices by $1 to $4.99.

While issues like “Sexiest Man Alive” and other specials were already at that price, the regular weekly issues will now be there, too. It’s the first hike in the weekly cover price in almost six years. The gamble is that even if circulation drops by 10 percent again this year, as it did in 2013, the losses will be more than offset by the 25 percent price hike.

Naturally, a lot of other magazines have quickly followed suit. It’s a move that industry experts say could financially ruin nail salons across America who rely on tabloids magazines to keep their customers from going on a boredom rampage while waiting for their nails dry.

American Media was quick to match the price hike, moving OK!, Star and the National Enquirer to $4.99, a $1 increase, effective this week. Still at $3.99 — for the moment, at least — is Us Weekly, but sources say a price hike may take place as early as next week.

You won’t have to pay more for In Touch or Life & Style, which are known as the “industry weird cousins you reluctantly speak to a family reunions until your sister shows up with the weed.” At least not for now anyway. According to The New York Post, Bauer Publications will keep those two at $2.99. But it introduced a magazine in November, Closer, which sells for $3.99 now.

Sales of celebrity news magazines plummeted more than 12 percent last year, for some pretty obvious reasons. Even more so than other specialty magazines, the tabloid rags are facing a crisis of timeliness. By the time they publish their stories on something like the Chris Martin-Gwyneth Paltrow split, a lot of people have already exhausted themselves on the story reading about it on this fancy new thing they have called the Internet. (And it is exhausting to read about them, isn’t it?)

I know, I know—you guys never read those awful things, not even when you’re getting your hair done and there’s no other reading option except Salon Today so instead of a gripping feature on new barber comb sterilization practices, you pick up that four-year-old copy of US Magazine with a “heartbroken and lonely” Jennifer Aniston on the cover, promising that you’re only going to read the blurbs about fashion until you find yourself, 20 minutes later quietly asking your stylist if you can take it home with you so you can finish reading that story on Nene Leakes and her latest feud. No, I know. You never do that.