UK newsagents will find out this week is the Office of Fair Trading will maintain current distribution arrangements for distribution of magazines or replace it with a system with less restrictions. Read this well written report Becky Barrow of the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt:
The problem is that newspapers and magazines rely upon each other, using the same wholesaler and the same vans to deliver to the same shops in each exclusive territory. If the two are separated, the system could collapse as costs become prohibitively high. The supermarket chains would be able to negotiate good deals with big discounts and the wholesalers would do battle with each other to win the contracts.
This would sound familiar to Australian newsagents still dealing with the flow on from the decision by ACP to supply many petrol and convenience outlets direct rather than through the newsagent.
Newspaper and magazine publishers and distributors need to understand that isolating individual products in this makes a previously viable distribution system less so. The losers are small business.