My wife picked up an issue of ShopSmart Magazine recently on the newsstand, and after reading through it, I was left with some rather conflicted thoughts.

First of all, ShopSmart is an offshoot of Consumer Reports. It features the Consumer Reports logo quite largely on the upper right corner of the cover, and the interior has a lot in common with CR as well - neither magazine features any ads for items aside from “ads” for other publications and services from the CR family. This is a feature I really like in a magazine, and it’s one of the big determining factors for whether I like a magazine or not. For example, I’m utterly enamored with Make in part for that very reason - no ads makes reading a magazine a much more pleasurable experience.

The biggest difference between ShopSmart and Consumer Reports is the target audience. While Consumer Reports is at best gender-neutral and on occasion male-leaning for their audience, ShopSmart is unabashedly female. This issue alone has a lengthy article on women’s shoes and a nice two page spread on tampons. While CR will occasionally feature a gender-biased article like this, ShopSmart carries this right up front.

Another major change: no rankings, just specific product recommendations. Consumer Reports is famous for their extensive ratings and rankings, and I love poring over those multiple pages of data just to get a real feel for how the marketplace stacks up for specific products. That’s not happening here - ShopSmart basically provides one (and occasionally two or three) very specific recommendations in specific product areas. For example, in the four page article on washing machines, rather than listing a whole ton of models and saying how they rank, it just gives three recommendations. The good news is that these agree strongly with the recommendations in Consumer Reports.

In fact, the content overlap between Consumer Reports and ShopSmart is quite large. Just leafing through the issue, I saw several articles that were basically rewrites of articles that appeared in the last few months of Consumer Reports, with almost identical conclusions.

What changed? The layout, for one. ShopSmart is laid out much differently than CR, obviously going for a more modern feel that reminds me of Real Simple. It’s got lots of whitespace, small blurbs of text, and lots of pastels and lighter tones for the colors. It’s clearly meant to be browsed - the articles are short and barely continue from page to page. Most of them, in fact, are 200 words or less, and often two or three appear on the same page.

If you like the conclusions of Consumer Reports, but find it to be too dry and overly detailed (especially if you’re a woman), then ShopSmart might be worth reading. It often provides the same end product recommendations as Consumer Reports and the tips themselves throughout the issue are strong. However, if you like the detail and data of Consumer Reports (like I do), this one will frustrate you.

As for my wife? She seemed to enjoy the issue of ShopSmart a lot and read it far more than I’ve ever seen her look at Consumer Reports - for better or worse. For me, I’ll stick with the “boring” Consumer Reports.