Periodical Problem of Lateness : Magazines: Consumers complain about delays in getting publications by mail. But the postal service won’t take all the blame.

By the time People Weekly hits the mailbox, are the poseurs du jour already passe ? Is Field & Stream’s arrival more erratic than a salmon run? Does Opera News arrive two days after the fat lady’s final song?

Publication junkies take their periodical fix seriously. When Modern Bride arrives after the divorce, a subscriber is likely to get peeved.

And lately, some magazine subscribers say, the delivery situation, especially in Los Angeles, has wobbled between the unpredictable and helter-skelter.

“I get 20 magazines or more (but) I never know when they’re going to come,” said Larry Berg, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. “Often I get two issues of the same weekly magazine in one day.”

But deliver delivery complaints to the people in the magazine business and the blame gets passed around quicker than a copy of Playboy in a junior high boy’s gym.

Still, most fingers wind up pointing at the U.S. Postal Service.

“We all pretty much are getting a ‘What can we do?’ attitude about the post office,” says Jim Fischer, circulation director for Gralla Publications, which each month mails 22 business titles nationwide. “We hear of cases where the February issue arrives before the January has been delivered.”

Time after time, Los Angeles comes up as one of the worst logjams in the magazine “mail stream,” Fischer said. “Once it hits the regional level, there doesn’t seem to be any real emphasis that the mail has to be delivered in a prompt fashion . . . Los Angeles is among the worst. We have constant complaints about delivery.”

But David Mazer of the U.S. Postal Service in Los Angeles replies: “We’re an easy target. In the Los Angeles Basin, we deliver 35 million pieces a day. If we’re 99.1% on time, we’d still have 35,000 late deliveries. . . . People certainly have a right to complain. But what company delivers that efficiency? General Motors would kill for that record.”

When a magazine arrives late and a subscriber complains, the Post Office puts a “watch” on that publication. “In the current week, we have 51 publication watches on,” Mazer said. “Every day we deliver to 920,000 families and 94,000 businesses. . . . We’re actually amazed that (the problem) is that small.”

Besides, he says, contrary to what they would like subscribers to believe, publishers do on occasion run into snags before they get a magazine out the door.

In fact, given the growing avalanche of magazines--584 new consumer titles were launched last year alone, up from about 250 in 1985--and the complexities of getting them delivered, some say it’s a wonder subscribers receive publications at all.

At U.S. News & World Report, for example, writers and editors are tinkering with stories right up until the magazine goes to bed at midnight each Friday, says Susan Levy, circulation director. Two hours later, the editorial content and color pages are faxed to printing sites in Torrance, Pewaukee, Wisc., and Nashville, Tenn.

The first copies of the magazine hit loading docks at 8 a.m. Saturday, she said. Newsstand copies head off in trucks and airplanes to be delivered to newsstands by 5 Monday morning. Subscriber issues are slapped with mailing labels delivered weekly from a Midwestern “fulfillment house”; the issues then are delivered to 36 postal service “entry points” nationwide.

Ideally, “65% of our subscribers get their magazines on a Monday, 30% on a Tuesday and the balance on Wednesday,” Levy says. “We shouldn’t have anything delivered after Wednesday if we had a normal week.”

But keeping the week normal can be something of a cross-country chess match, say consultants who advise publishers on how to move their product smoothly through the mail stream.

Magazines, by definition, are “Second Class” mail. The postal distribution system is built “like hubs and wheels,” explained Charles Pace, a Wilton, Conn., consultant who previously worked with the postal service. The farther from a hub a subscriber lives, the more difficult it is to deliver a magazine.

“Let’s say you’re going to Butte, Mont.,” he explains. “You print somewhere in Wisconsin. More than likely you’ll take the mail into Chicago, Chicago will deliver it Denver, Denver will put it on its transportation to Billings, Mont., a state distribution point, and Billings will get the mail on their transportation to Butte. Then they have to get it to the carriers.”

And the more often the mail gets handled, the more possibilities there are for delays.

But a Butte philatelist who receives Lin’s Stamp News a day after his bidding competitor in Des Moines doesn’t really care where in the mail his magazine went astray, Pace said.

Consultants and publishers continually meet with postal authorities to work out kinks in the system, Pace said. All told, he adds, “It’s surprising that the system works as well as it does.”

Meantime, at least two companies now help publishers circumvent the postal service. Private carriers for Alternative Postal Delivery Inc., for example, deliver 20 titles, including Better Homes & Gardens and Good Housekeeping, directly to subscribers’ homes. They tuck them into screen doors or under doormats--since mailboxes remain the territory of the U.S. Postal Service.