MySpace, MSN and back to school blogs

Do a Technorati search for newsagents and all manner of things come up. Unfortunately, close to home I found two blog entries from the last 24 hours bagging newsagents.

Melissa, 37, Brisbane Australia tells us, in part: For two days we couldn’t find any A4 64 page books. That was fun. Visiting K-mart, Big W, Woolworths and Sollies.. to find they had massive stocks of everything else .. except the 35 cent books they had on sale…. The newsagents however are willing to sell them too me for almost $3 each. We will keep walking!

Then I find an entry from De-Anne, 14, Brisbane Australia which says, in part: “omg yeterday was ssoooooo boring i went school book shopping for my brother. we had to go all the way into the city cause no stupid newsagents had the books he needed. normally we get them through the school but when mum went to hand it in they wouldn’t accept it, (long story)”

What is annoying is that Melissa is wrong and De-Anne is inarticulate. Newsagents are matching Big-W, K-Mart etc on price on most school items. I cannot find exercise books of the sort described for ten times the price at newsagencies. With De-Anne I’d suggest they were looking for something more specialist which a newsagent would only order in as a special order.

While I respect the right of people to blog whatever they like, including junk like this in a Technorati search is unfortunate because you have to wade through a fair chunk of MSN and MySpace hosted crap to get to the better quality material.

On another level, newsagents are being bagged out here unfairly. However, they will not respond. If this were Coca Cola, Pepsi, General Motors, McDonalds or some other major corporation they would be on to these two bloggers in an attempt to get a more accurate spin. Newsagents, being small business and independent will not respond and these blog entries only serve to further pitch that we’re not relevant and we’re expensive.

Even though each of our 4,600 newsagencies in independent we need to respond corporately to blog entries like these and get our spin out there. We are not expensive. We have an excellent range. Customers purchasing Back To School product from newsagencies are doing more for the economy than buying from K-Mart or Big W.