We’ve Now Had a Full 12 Months of Inconspicuous Consumption

And it’s been a very good year.

Editor’s Note: This post is not paywalled, so it’s freely available to all. Enjoy! — Paul

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Hello! Today marks a milestone of sorts, because it was exactly one year ago — July 16th, 2024 — that I published the first Inconspicuous Consumption post here on Substack. That inaugural post was the one about speed bumps, humps, and lumps, which has remained something of a touchstone here at IC. A good launch topic, as it turns out!

With a full year now in the books, I thought it might be good to check in with an annual review of sorts, and also to look ahead toward the next 12 months. For that, let’s shift into Q&A mode:

Are you happy with how this first year has gone?

Yes, extremely. This project has been an absolute joy, pretty much from the very first day. When I set up the IC “About” page a year ago, I wrote that the idea was “to share some sense of curiosity, obsession, unexpected revelation, connection, and delight.” I’d say that’s pretty much how things have played out, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m having a blast, and I hope that comes through in the writing. I’ve also learned a lot, which is always a good thing.

Have there been any surprises?

I’ve published a bit more frequently than I expected. In that first post from a year ago, I mentioned that I didn’t want to have a rigid publishing schedule, “so I might do three posts in one week and no posts the next week.” As it turns out, there haven’t been any weeks with no posts, and we recently had the weeklong Boundary Issues series, where I posted every day!

Several factors have contributed to this, but by far the biggest is that I’ve been having so much fun. This project feels like something I get to do, not something I have to do. Seriously, why wouldn’t I want to write about air mail envelope design, or the best sequence for removing a dozen eggs from their carton, or street names that include fractions, or the unique arrows on New Jersey Turnpike exit signs, or ticket nippers? It’s all been a lot of work, but the work has felt more like play, so maybe my surprisingly high productivity rate isn’t so surprising after all.

Also: I didn’t expect to be writing so much about road signs and other driving-related issues, but that’s turned out to be an unexpectedly rich subject area.

Which articles have been your favorites so far?

Aside from the ones I just mentioned, here are some posts that I’ve particularly enjoyed working on:

• Bread tags.

• “Enlarged to Show Detail” disclaimers.

• The world’s most ridiculous Stop sign.

• Pruning shears that look like birds’ faces.

• Pretzel “twists” that don’t actually twist.

• The different “Fig.” notations in patent drawings.

• Deconstructing “folded” logos.

• Binder clips.

• My heirloom toaster.

• “Return to Sender” pointing hand symbols (and the follow-up piece on other types of pointing hands).

• Back-collar buttons.

• Auxiliary prescription labels. (Okay, that one was published just yesterday, so I’m still riding a bit of an emotional high from it, but I’m pretty sure it will hold up over time!)

I could go on. Honestly, I’ve enjoyed all of the topics I’ve written about in the past year, and I’m really happy with how most of the articles have turned out. (You can see the full archive here.)

Do you think you’ll run out of things to write about at some point, especially if you’re publishing more often than you initially expected?

Let’s put it this way: When I was preparing to launch this project, I made a list of potential topics — sort of a starter kit of things to write about. In the year that’s gone by since then, I’ve crossed a few items off of that list, but I haven’t even looked at the list in several months because I keep finding new things I want to write about, many of which have led to additional new things, and so on. I have more things I want to explore than time to explore them.

Basically, I find the world to be an interesting place. As long as that continues to be the case, I don’t think I’ll ever run out of subject matter. And like I already said, I’m really enjoying this work, so Inconspicuous Consumption is definitely going to keep going for the foreseeable future.

Any plans for an Inconspicuous Consumption podcast?

I don’t plan to do a traditional podcast with full-length episodes and a regular schedule. But I’ve thought all along that the “Little Stories” entries (short anecdotes based on memories from my youth) might work well as audio posts. I just haven’t gotten myself fully into the head space to pursue that. Maybe I’ll get around to it in Year Two.

Any plans for a live meet-up, so readers can meet you and meet each other?

I’m open to trying this if there’s enough interest. Maybe everyone could bring an interesting object for show and tell! Obviously, the meet-up would have to be in NYC, because that’s where I live.

If you’d like to attend such an event, shoot me a note. I’ll put out another call next week, and maybe one more the week after that, just to make sure we don’t miss anyone. I’ll report back once I have a sense of how many people are interested.

Any new IC merchandise on the horizon?

Our merch platform, Cotton Bureau, just started offering stickers, so I’ve set up a basic IC logo sticker and requested a sample. Assuming the sample looks good, I’ll announce the sticker’s launch shortly. Aside from that, I’m happy with our current selection of shirts, caps, and drinkware. If you have an idea for a particular product, or a particular T-shirt design, or whatever, I’m all ears.

How big is the IC readership, and how are paid subscriptions working out?

Today is the perfect day for that question. Up until now, assessing the size of the IC audience has been tricky, because so many IC readers were originally Uni Watch readers whose subscriptions carried over into the IC project. As those subscriptions have come up for renewal over the course of the past year, some of the readers have said, “I like this new direction Paul’s taking, so I’ll renew”; others have said, “This project isn’t for me, so I’ll let my subscription lapse.” I figured I wouldn’t really know where I stood until all of those Uni Watch holdover readers had been given the opportunity to opt in or out.

Now that a full year of IC has gone by, every subscriber who signed up during the Uni Watch era has had to make that choice. So now there are no more holdover subscribers. Every current paid subscriber, whether a renewing Uni Watch reader or a first-timer who signed up during the past year, has made the affirmative choice to be on board with IC.

So where does that leave us? My assumption from the start was that Inconspicuous Consumption would have a smaller audience than Uni Watch. Was I right? Yes — here’s a look at paid subscriptions over the past 12 months, according to Substack’s data:

As you can see, we’ve gone from 2,421 paid subscribers a year ago to 1,625 as of yesterday — a drop of about one-third. According to Substack’s data, IC got 218 new paid subscribers over the past year, so that means we lost 1,014 of the 2,421 subscribers who were Uni Watch holdovers as of a year ago, or about 42%.

The falloff from Uni Watch holdover subscriptions is about what I expected. The number of new IC subs is, honestly, a bit disappointing; I had hoped to attract more new readers than that.

Still, that chart doesn’t tell the whole story. Let’s pull back and look at paid subscriptions going back to October 2022, which is when I started writing for Substack (with a few annotations added to explain some of the subscription spikes):

The falloff over the past 12 months doesn’t look quite so bad when viewed in that larger context, right?

But even that doesn’t tell the whole story, because it only shows paid subscriptions. There are also lots of free subscribers — they receive every post via email, just like the paid subscribers, but they get to read only the first few paragraphs before the paywall kicks in (plus they get to read the entirety of the occasional non-paywalled posts like this one). So here’s a chart showing all subscribers since I started writing for Substack:

So even though paid subs have declined over the past year, total subs have actually increased (thanks in part to a spike in free subs after IC got a nice write-up in the popular newsletter Recommendo).

Now, I want to make it clear that there’s nothing wrong with being a free subscriber to a mostly-paywalled site, including this one. I know that a lot of people with free subscriptions are never going to be passionate ICers — they’re more IC-curious, or happy to read just those first couple of paragraphs of the paywalled posts, or maybe they just delete most of the emailed articles because they’re too busy to read them. All of which is fine — I do that myself with several paywalled Substacks.

All of that said, it’s hard not to think of all those free subs as a huge block of untapped potential, so I do wish we could convert more of them to paid. And if you’re a free subscriber who’s read this far in this post, that indicates that you care a fair amount about IC, so come on — please go ahead and upgrade to paid. The price is very reasonable (less than $3 per month!), you’ll get a shit-ton of very niche-specific content, and you’ll join a fun community of like-minded eccentrics. More importantly, you’ll be casting a vote in favor of sustainable, user-supported media, which is increasingly important as journalism’s old economic models continue to crumble. Please — your support matters, and it would mean a lot to me.

Of course, I’m grateful to all my readers, whether you’re an IC newbie or a long-timer from the Uni Watch days. THANK YOU all, and here’s to the next year of obsessive explorations of minutiae, esoterica, artifacts, rabbit holes, and related arcana.

If you have additional questions about Inconspicuous Consumption’s first year, or about its future, feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to respond. Thanks!

Prescription Label Update

(Photo by Amber Sexton)

Yesterday’s post about auxiliary prescription labels prompted an interesting response from reader Amber Sexton, who works in a veterinary office. Since they dispense prescription pet meds, they use auxiliary labels, just like a regular pharmacy. Amber snapped a photo showing their label supply (shown above) — looks like they could use one of those label organizer/dispenser thingies!

But there’s more. Take a closer look at the strip of labels that Amber is holding in the photo: “Give with Food.” Amber says, “That’s the difference with vet meds — it’s not ‘Take with Food,’ it’s ‘Give with Food.’”

Fascinating! As it happens, my boy cat, Waffles, is currently on a daily medication regimen, so I took a closer look at his pill bottle. Sure enough:

I hadn’t noticed the different wording until now. Thanks, Amber!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.