Magazine distributors can be like credit card companies. If you don’t need it they’ll give it to you anyway. My bank wants to give me more credit even though I have not used even a quarter of what they gave my on my card. “You’ll never know” was their justification. The distributor of Reader’s Digest increased my supply by 50% despite usually selling only 50% of what I used to receive. The increase made no sense. There was no business case. All this increase would do is suck cash from my business as I would return the unsold stock a month later and get the cash back a month or two after that. In all I’d be out the cash for up to three months. The benefit for the distributor is they would have my cash. I can’t imagine that Reader’s Digest would be all that happy.
Thankfully the magazine distributor is going to correct the situation. My point is that it shold not have happened in the first place. Many newsagents would not complain. The end result would be less space, time and money for more successful titles.
The magazine supply model in Australia disadvantages newsagents. Supermarkets and others would not face the situation I faced with Reader’s Digest. Despite providing high quality sales data on time, there are still suppliers to newsagents who ignore this for their own commercial gain.
That’s no way to treat a trading partner.
I agree!