My parents had a huge stack of them piled up in the laundry room.
Back in the early 1970s, a group of us brothers pitched in and helped clean out an elderly brother's garage and adjoining back room. He was moving to a retirement home.
We were absolutely astonished to find in that room, among the hoarded chaos, huge numbers of rolled up bundles of Watchtowers and Awakes rotting away unopened. No one dared estimate the total number of unopened bundles that dated back several years but I'd guess several thousand magazines at the least.
We were silent as we threw the sticky bundles onto the truck but our judgements were palpable. The truck groaned under their weight.
The elderly get forgiven a lot; none of us ever spoke about what we found but I know we would have had many an unkind thought about him.
This elderly brother had been a pioneer until infirmity had set in and he was forced to stop pioneering. I took a closer look at the dates on the magazines and they predated his stopping pioneering by years. He continued ordering bundles of magazines that he never opened long before he stopped pioneering.
So, for several years, this loyal brother contributed to the mushrooming circulation of these two magazines and - best of all - no one read any of them.