Criticizing the latest Fortune and Money

TheDeal.com executive editor Yvette Kantrow criticizes the latest issues of Fortune and Money magazines for being overly positive about retirement. She takes particular issue with their covers, which show smiling people in happy settings. The Money cover, she added, could be mistaken for a Land’s End beachwear ad.

Kantrow wrote, “These scenes recall countless other water-and-sky-themed images that routinely grace the covers of the personal finance glossies, implying that we are all just toiling, saving, and investing for the day when we can quit our jobs and live out our lives at the perfect resort, where the sun always shines, the pina coladas always flow, and we always wear (and even look good in!) bathing suits or other leisure gear.

“How ironic.

“Because if you actually thumb through these magazines, you’ll discover that that’s not their message at all. Instead, they seem strangely intent on convincing us of the benefits of the ‘new retirement’ — the one where we all keep working until the day we expire, mostly because we can’t afford not to (even if we follow their copious investment advice). ‘Growing numbers of us will spend at least part of retirement not in leisure at all, but working — sometimes for pay, out of necessity, and sometimes for free, just because it’s so personally rewarding,’ Fortune coos in the intro to its retirement package. ‘It’s a different picture from what we usually see, but it’s fuller, richer, more complex, more real.’

“It’s also a different picture from what’s on the magazine’s sun-soaked cover. But we suppose showing a pensionless senior citizen serving up fries at McDonald’s or bagging groceries at Safeway — and praying they don’t get sick while doing it — would war with the magazine’s thesis that this retirement is ‘fuller’ and ‘richer’ than the one with beach chairs and golf clubs.”

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