Fill it up.

26 February 2002—Premium. What’s in a name, indeed.

You may already know this, but it’s recent news to me: calling high-octane unleaded gasoline “premium” is essentially a marketing scam. Through this terminology, gasoline companies subtly lead motorists to believe that high-octane gas will make their cars run more efficiently, thereby earning more miles per gallon than that weak low-octane stuff. They never come out and make a direct comparison; just the name, “premium,” suggests the value: you pay more, you get more.

I’m used to paying more money for higher-quality items because they’re generally worth more to me than the difference in price. My first pair of waterproof Timberland boots, for example, lasted me several years of almost daily wear. I already felt like I’d gotten more than my money’s worth, so when the soles eventually cracked, I went back to Timberland to get another pair. I was disappointed to find that the style had changed over those several years, and now the same boots were no longer as tall (fashion–feh), but I still felt quality won out over a quibble in aesthetics. So I went in to get a new pair.

The sales clerk asked me why I simply hadn’t sent my boots back to the company headquarters. “They’re guaranteed for life,” he said. That was just too good to be true, but sure enough, for the price of the postage to send my boots back, in a couple of weeks I received a brand-new pair, in my beloved original style. Years later those boots gave out as well, the soles not cracked but just smoothed down too much, and I bought a new pair. Guess which company got my business?

My attitude about paying for quality extends pretty far. I prefer high-quality paper towels and toilet paper (the latter especially so), good batteries, non-schlocky electronics, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Calphalon cookware.

But recently I had a discussion about gasoline with my boss in which he essentially said that I’ve been throwing my money away all these years. I had never seriously questioned it before, to be honest. In my early driving days I thought I noticed a difference between my mileage using different grades of gasoline, not to mention brands. That impression stuck with me, but since my boss challenged my assumptions, I decided I ought to take a closer look.

From a cost-value standpoint, it turns out, there is nothing special about “premium” gasoline. At one time, fuel companies included additives in their premium grades that prevented fuel-injector clogging; these days, fuel companies usually include such additives in every grade they offer. At its most basic definition, premium gasoline is about octane and nothing more. Octane is a component of gasoline that affects the performance of the engine. Engines are rated for a particular octane level, and if fuel of a lower octane level is put in, the engine will ping or knock, meaning that it’s not compressing the gas properly, and an engine can sustain serious damage if you continue to use lower-octane gas than is recommended for your engine.

It turns out, however, that many if not most consumer automobile engines are rated for 87 octane, or what we know as “regular” unleaded, two grades down from premium, and usually anywhere from 15 to 25 cents less per gallon. If you drive a sports car, you probably need a higher-octane fuel, but it appears that most of us only need the basic stuff.

So let’s see: if I have 50,000 miles on my car, and I average about 34 miles to the gallon, I’ve put roughly 1,470 gallons of gas in my car since I got it seven years ago. If I’ve been spending, on the average, 20 cents more than necessary per gallon, that’s $294 that I never needed to spend.

In the scheme of things, that’s not a great big lot of money spread out over seven years. But it’s money that never needed to be spent. (Some may argue, quite rightly, that the other thousands of dollars I spent on gas didn’t need to be spent that way, either, but let’s save alternative energy source discussions for another essay. Guest entries are welcome, by the way!)

The basic point is this, however: there are simply times when “premium” is just not the answer.

Take Salon, for example. Salon is an online magazine that has been around since late 1995, back when its domain name was salon1999.com. (I’ve never known why they had that peculiar domain name. Perhaps they never expected it to survive past 1999. My suspicion, though, is that founder David Talbot has an everlasting love in his heart for the old science-fiction show “Space: 1999.” Either way, they eventually saw the light and changed their domain first to salonmag.com and then finally bought salon.com from some hair salon, throwing off literally dozens of befuddled people desperately in search of a haircut.)

Salon is kind of a daily magazine, as content gets added every day, though in terms of the amount of content consistent with how we usually conceive of magazines, it’s more of a weekly magazine that gets revealed slowly throughout the week.

Like everything else in the dot-com world, Salon rose to great heights (at least by online-magazine standards) and fell just as rapidly. Its doomsayers are bewildered, but Salon has managed to hang on by its fingernails, even as its stock was delisted by NASDAQ for remaining below the floor of $1 per share. NASDAQ was even generous about that – the official rule, until it was amended to be more liberal last fall, gave the index the option of delisting a stock after it stays below the floor for 30 consecutive days, but it seems to me that Salon spent months in the cellar before the index announced its intention to delist the ailing magazine. It’s now on a side index, the equivalent of being sent down to the minors, trading at around twelve cents a share. (300 of those shares are mine, if you're wondering.)

Salon dealt with its financial troubles in a number of ways: there were several rounds of layoffs, one of which was tied as a condition to an investor’s promise of a substantial cash infusion; there were salary cuts; there was a heightened presence of advertising, including larger ads pushing stories to the side as well as pop-up ads, horrible, annoying things that open new windows that drive you nuts trying to close; and then they announced Salon Premium.

Salon Premium was, in essence, no different from a subscription to a magazine printed on paper or a pledge to a public radio station, and for a comparable cost: $30 a year. For that price, subscribers would get some exclusive content and a few other benefits, one of the most notable of which was the elimination of advertisements. It took me a little while, as I had lost a significant sum of money investing in Salon stock (more than I had spent upgrading my gas to premium, and in far shorter a period, by the way), and I felt the magazine owed me something for the loyalty I had shown thus far.

The magazine needs money to function. I can appreciate that. I generally like the writing and turn to it for interesting cultural criticism, as well as for some of its investigative journalism. (David Horowitz I could do very well without, thank you, but it’s good to hear the grandiose idiocy of the other side once in a while, just to keep you on your toes.)

After a month or so of suffering the new advertising deluge, I signed on. I did it partly for me and partly for Salon. I did, however, think it took a certain amount of chutzpah for the magazine to ask for $30 a year at a time when it only had enough in its cash reserves to last it another few months. But I split hairs.

Overall, I’d have to say I was more or less satisfied with my Salon Premium experience. The horrible, horrible ads have indeed vanished, and I’ve downloaded some music, not even breaking anyone’s copyrights to do so. And yes, I get a whole bunch of extra gossip every Friday in the Dirt column, for whatever the hell that’s worth.

But I’m actually feeling the pain of the non-subscribers. At the beginning, there was really only a little extra content that Premium subscribers were supposed to get. These days, it seems that far too many of the stories have the little gold star denoting them as Salon Premium Exclusives. I feel bad for the casual reader who no longer gets to see most of the articles that might make them want to subscribe for the rest. By contrast, people who don’t subscribe to my local public radio station still get to hear all the programs; members, knowing not everyone who listens subscribes, take on part of the burden because they want to. Sure, if everyone subscribed it might cost less, but it’s a price the true believers willingly pay in the meantime. Similarly, anyone with access to a newsstand or a public library can leaf through magazines reading however much they want. It has seemed to me that Salon is kind of shooting itself in the foot, but I’ve put up with it in a way.

Then there was the article that appeared last Wednesday. The top story of the day, “Too Late to Stop the Hangman?” brought to light the terrible situation faced by Joseph Amrine, who sits on Missouri’s death row. His accusers have all recanted their testimony, but the state says Amrine has exhausted his legal appeals, and they don’t believe the recantations anyway. At this point, apparently, the only thing that can stop the execution is a call from the governor, a tough-on-crime Democrat who hasn’t stopped any executions since taking office. (His predecessor, acting on a plea from Pope John Paul II, commuted one sentence.)

It’s not the best-written story I’ve ever seen on Salon, I’ll admit. It’s pretty one-sided and wears its politics on its sleeve. But even if you believe firmly in the death penalty (which would put you and me in two very different camps), you can see from the bare facts of the situation that at the very least that a new trial should be in order.

It was a story that everyone, particularly death-penalty supporters should read. And now everyone can, but last Wednesday, that wasn’t true. Why? Because it was – and still is, oddly – a Salon Premium Exclusive.

When I read it, I was of two minds about its publication. On one hand, it is the kind of Upton Sinclair-style muckraking that Salon does well, and with an international pulpit to boot. More than that, Salon published the story before it is truly too late, before the damage is absolutely impossible to undo.

But then, why make the story unavailable to a large percentage of its readers? If the purpose of the story is to publicize a grave injustice that can still be fought and won, why restrict access to it?

I was livid, gigantically disappointed in Salon, and I said so in a letter to the editor. The letters for that story have yet to appear, so I don’t know whether they’ll publish it, but something very curious has happened: in going back to the story to get some of the details to relate here, I found an editor’s note now attached to the story: “Because of the urgency of the death penalty case examined in the following article, we are taking the unusual step of making this Premium story available to all Salon readers.”

Did I simply miss this note when I originally read the story? I don’t recall its being there before. If it had been there all the time, then why call it a Salon Premium Exclusive in the first place, which it still is? I don’t know what I hope for more: that I was wrong in my accusation, and Salon always had its full readership in its heart where this story was concerned; or that protest, in the form of letters by me and who knows how many other outraged readers, got Salon to change its mind. If the latter is the case, why can’t Salon acknowledge its error, rather than suggesting that making the article available to all was its idea all along?

Sadly, Salon has just such a history of failing to acknowledge its defeats and missteps. Quarterly reports are spun until dizzy, unkept promises and projections are swept under the rug, and we are asked again and again to keep the faith.

Well, OK, tonight I’m still keeping it, since Salon eventually did right by its readers, even if it didn’t own up to its original error. But Salon needs to find another way to make something premium out of Premium, because holding back the most important content can only alienate potential subscribers. Unfortunately, these days financial supporters are running at quite a premium.