Several people have contacted me to say that newsagents were not fairly portrayed in a story on A Current Affair on Wednesday night.
I did not see the story so cannot comment.
On YouTube you can see a video posted earlier this year which was apparently mentioned on A Current Affair and partly played in the story they aired. Read the comments posted on YouTube following the airing of the story.
I have posted this here today for anyone who wants to comment. I’d be particularly interested in comments on the ACA approach.
The work involved in crediting customers for the non delivery of a newspaper for a day like Christmas Day is easy with most newsagency software.
The poor newsagent was hijacked by a customer who went in with a hidden camera and antagonised the bloke to get a reaction. All over a $1. It would be nice if the customer appreciated the fact that his paper was delivered at all for the year.
ACA often appears to take a biased and sensationalist approach and this story was nothing more or less. You only have to listen to the show’s presenter (Grimshaw et al) that always say at the end of a one sided biased segment “and if you have been affected, had dealings with (or whatever) we would like to hear from you” Don’t worry about getting the other side of the story – it just might negate or balance the whole topic and we wouldn’t want that would we?
The newsagent in question was able to quickly fix the error and print the customer an amended account, I do not understand the customers anger when I am sure they have made mistakes (one of which being putting this video online to be ridiculed). What frustrated me the most was when ACA returned to the store to set up an account and the newsagent informed them that they should organise a subscription directly through the paper to “save themselves money” the reporter again made it appear as though the newsagent was ripping them off.
As many of the comments on the youtube video state and many posts on this blog comment on the public can be difficult to deal with, since this story aired I have had 3 customers ring to question thier accounts, all 3 are on a weekly special rate from Nationwide ($4.95 for 7 papers a week) 2 understood that this rate was a weekly rate that was not affect by the 2 non delivery days of the year but the other told me she was going to take this to ACA also
That’s exactly why I don’t watch ACA! This happened a year ago, pathetic then and pathetic now. They are as bad as the guys that filmed it,
Is filming someone without their permission legal?
The newsagent coped so well, it scares me that if that had happened in my shop it could have turned into an ugly brawl as I could not imagine customers or other staff standing by and allowing that harassment to continue.
Jessie, we still credit for non delivery days or misses if a customer is on a $4.95 rate. This is how our billing works.
Curious if he still has to deliver old mates paper ,
The story was a dog.
Having said that the newsagent was awful. A smile, an oops and two seconds on the keyboard and problem solved, whats more, that sort of service gets the chap more customers.
Why would you want to be a delivery agent? Thank god we got out years ago and went retail only.
Must be slow news week. We credit any subs with us but any other subs which are carrier collect direct with News we do not credit as we where advised by our rep a couple of years ago not to. If anyone askes why they are charged for the 2 non publishing days we refer them to News along with the phone number. If this has changed we have not been advised by News.
Mark is this your software?
Having seen how ACA film their stories in real life and the dreggs of society that they are often but not always representing in these stories I would imagine the story was another load of ACA BS. Lets face it, if you have even a modicum of intelligence you know that most of these stories are manufactured to give a certain point of view and demonise one party while making the other come out smelling of roses regardless of the truth involved. It’s petty journalism at its worst.
The story I saw filmed a few years ago was so heavily cut and the reporters noddies, interjections and questions so heavily filmed, refilmed and inserted in the story that aired in a way to present a particular (biased) viewpoint that you had to wonder why they bothered interviewing anyone at all and didnt just film their reporter ! The story back then also failed to mention the “complaintants” prior dealings, their reasons for making the complaint and the federal law they were actually breaking had they received what they were saying they were “missing out on”.
People wonder why Gordon Ramsay and others have gotten upset when dealing with these idiots.
No, this newsagent is not using Tower software.
On a differant track. Mark a while ago you wrote about stollen magazines. I do not always arrive magazines but today found 1 people and 1 picture missing from bundle. We have been picking this up regularly for years. If magazines are not counted when they arrive 1 magazine missing from lots of newagency bundles would add to a lot to sell illegally. Could the distribution line be the source of stollen mags. Do all newagents count their magazines. Ours arrive when we are open with customers standing waiting and I know staff don’t always count but I am going to insist they do from now on to see if there is a pattern . This adds up one hell of a lot of dollars over years.
Hi Mark & everyone I just have a gut feeling that there is something more into this story. Firstly this is actually a non-story, the Owner did the right thing to refund the customer, he explained that its a system error and the story should have ended there, things like this happens everyday everywhere and ACA even choose to make this a story and on holiday period when millions people are watching makes me suspect that someone has an agenda against newsagent in particular delivery newsagent. I am wodering whether this is a planned media attack to disencourage people from ordering delivery direct from Newsagent rather through Publishers. I mean this story happened amost 12 months ago why only went to air now? Of course I am only speculating and I have no evidence to suggest otherwise, I just like people to keep an eye open to see how things develop.
Carol,
My wife arrives magazines every mon, wed and fri and we found it best if the one person always does it. We regularly report damaged mags and shortages we seem to go through stages where we are short and it is always the lads mags or popular expensive mags. Over the last 12 months since we have been jumping staraight on G&G and Network it is occuring a lot less.
What a load of old cobblers. Some customers get unreasonably disgruntled about something as minor as the delivery of a newspaper and ACA want to take it out on the poor guy doing his best to provide a public service. Our experience in business is that there are far more dishonest customers out there than there are dishonest newsagents. Why don’t we get Today Tonight to do a segment of how customers try to rip off newsagents, or how many papers get stolen of people’s front lawns each and every day.
Tracey Grimshaw must get off on simply being outrageous. Some people need to get a life.
Carol,
We had an issue this week from Network, that the invoice had 18 copies received of a certain magazine, when we counted we where 3 short.When I went to claim on Netonline it said I had been supplied 28 copies.When I rang Network to check this, they said I had definately been invoiced for 28 copies eventhough my physical invoice with the magazines stated I was only receiving 18 copies. I was told this must have been a glitch.Then told I should check each invoice I receive with the invoice reports on netonline. If I was not originally short 3 copies I would have just thought I was charged for 18 copies as this is what was on my invoice.
More work to check quantity we are invoiced and quantity we are actually charged.
Dm was it a split delivery ? aww ?
No Shauns, it was my supply of Zoo on Monday
I only saw a snippet of this on ACA and it made the newsagent look bad but having seen the whole thing he was far more refrained than I’d have been. There are some customers businesses are better off without and those clowns rank at the top of the list.
While it is easy to do a non delivery for the papers on Xmas day etc it is also quite easy to forget to do it when things are so busy at that time of year . ACA must have run out of news storys to run this , 12 months old and all forgotten about and these clowns think they are onto a hot news story .
For the curious, this is the video on ACA: http://aca.ninemsn.com/article.aspx?id=8585232
Carol you should always count stock and report shortages.
Mal, thanks – I had not been able to find the link.
Mark best plans sometime go astray when you are flat out and mags arrive with people waiting to pick theirs up.No to count some weeklies is a judgment we have to make at times to provide customer service. My point is that this happens so often with the same magazines. I have reported it and suggested their is a problem somewhere and that it is not just a ramdon mistake but no one ever gets back and obviously the problem is not corrected. You suggested stollen mags are appearing on the streets – well is this where they originate from.
Rubbish story from what is really a rubbish program.
I wonder if the consumer would have been so aggressive if it had been a true blue Aussie owner. The owner attempted to fix the problem, but was met with unnecessary aggression from the consumer. My opinion is this consumer is just a racist!
If it were in my store, firstly i would have cut him off straight away from future home deliveries.
Secondly.. I would not have missed with the punch !!!
Amanda , i think you are spot on .
An absolute disgrace from ACA.
Amanda – you are on the money – with his attitude, this bloke would qualify as one of the world’s biggest dickhead troublemakers who probably got his kicks as a kid competing with his brother pulling the wings off flies.
I can’t imagine why this mongrel would have even bothered to contact ACA in the first place. Perhaps he and the newsagent have a bit of history – who knows, but to get your 15 minutes of fame with something like this makes me think he may have missed his medication that day.
Clearly the U-Tube video shows the Newsagent in a better light and with more factual substance than channel nine’s editing. No wonder that mob (9) are in strife and little wonder I gave up watching this low-level sensationalist TV back when Hinch arrived on the scene.
Being a Distribution NA that no longer has Home Delivery accounting thanks to News Ltd’s migration of customer accounts, life is heaps better now. No more having to manage such sad reactions to simple accounting errors.
So if you’re feeling a little glum about the coming migration program, just think of all the negative aspects of maintaining HD accounts and get ready to smile as it all disappears.
I have sent a message to A Current Affair via their Twitter account, and thereby to their followers, complaining about their handling of the story.
It looks like pos solutions software. They say they do automatic updates for bumper editions. What happened?
Automatic updates?
This is a record we got through 31 comments before we went off topic (David !!!!)
ricky, it looks like andrew at 31 slightly changed the topic?
but i think your post at 33 is the first totally new topic in this thread, and funny enough, its about being off topic.
me replying to your off topic post, is just as bad so im going to stop here.
THE ANTI OFF TOPIC BRIGADE
Andrew and David I can’t help you with this. I know it’s not Tower software. If you think it’s POS, ask them. I know they say that their software automatically handles things like non delivery days (Christmas Day) so I am not sure how it could be them.
tongue in cheek mark?