Pay for Consumer Reports! They’re so committed to editorial integrity that they don’t have ads, they don’t accept free stuff to review, they send people to anonymously buy cars.
Also they’re a nonprofit. It’s the one place I don’t strip out affiliate links.
Consumer Reports also still publishes a print magazine. So once it’s safe to do so, you could dip into a Barnes and Noble when you need to look something up and flip through the most recent issue.
Does every issue contain every review of every possible product? I imagine most issues are full of reviews for things that I’m not only not buying now, but not buying ever. I only need to look up specific product types when I have a need, and then never again for a very long period of time (because I bought something really high quality).
The better play is to go the the library, and then you can find the most recent issue that has reviews of the thing you are shopping for.
No, because that’s insanity and you know it, but they are pretty chunky, last I recall, and tend to review several hundred products per issue. Last one I remember seeing had 4-500 products reviewed, and that one was basically a “best of” of that year’s reviews.
Oh dang. In all my years I’ve never actually read the physical edition. I assumed it would be like most magazines. Maybe 2 big feature articles, 5 pages of small ones, and the rest all ads.
I mean, I don’t blame you, that really is most other magazines, practically the template for them these days. I only saw one for the first time a little while back, literally because I was walking past the magazine rack in a bookstore, and went “Fuck, that’s a hefty magazine, the hell’s that about?” Practically did a double take when I saw the damned thing.
You literally spend 10 or 15 dollars when you are going to make a major purchase like an appliance and buy a subscription to read the reviews on their web version and then unsub as soon as you are done it’s a very nominal cost for a major purchase that costs hundreds and if it fails badly could have catastrophic costs to you.