What the Hell, Land’s End?

The message I just sent to Land’s End, which is apparently sending out as a special “bonus” to loyal customers copies of the “men’s” magazine GQ.

What the hell? What . . . the . . . hell? I get the mail this morning and find in it a copy of GQ with a mostly naked young woman on the cover, with the tiny little note on the mailing label that it’s a “bonus” from Land’s End. Not that this will get to the person responsible for the idea, but: Are you bloody stupid? We’ve shopped at Land’s End to get things like kids clothes, and chinos, and classic dresses. How does that suggest any interest whatsoever in getting a magazine like GQ? A magazine that preaches a coarse, vulgar, self-centered Wolf of Wall Street materialism more suited for overgrown boys with too much money and too little class than the kind of adults who order clothes from Land’s End. National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, okay, but GQ? You’re not Abercrombie and Fitch, you’re the guys who sell preppie clothes. I mean, really, what the hell?

The salacious picture on the cover is bad enough, but what really bothers me about the magazine is, as I tried to indicate, its moral vulgarity. It would be gross if every woman pictured in it were dressed like Queen Victoria.

Corrected to identify the right preppie store. My apology to L. L. Bean, which remains the Down East old New England crunchy granola (those are all compliments) store of my youth.