Jumbo Magazine House in Hong Kong is a magazine oasis – plenty of titles in various languages.
Their display varies between full cover, horizontal overlap and vertical overlap. They fit a lot of stock into a limited space. What is interesting is that they pre-bag many of the magazines – you can see the stacks at the front of the shop.
I am sure there is an operational reason for this. It must be labour intensive though. I took these photos yesterday afternoon and there were two people in the shop busy putting magazines in plastic bags.
See the flat stack on the left – two deep.
Walking away from the shop I wondered if this was the newsagency of the future for some – a small footprint shop in a high traffic area. Doing some quick math for a 50 sq metre shop and I reckon it’s a model worth considering in some centres. Some are playing in this space – Magnation – but the Jumbo Magazine House is different to that model.
For years we have been adding to the retail newsagency model and maybe, for some, the future is to be found by taking away and becoming more focused on one or two core categories. As Chris Anderson writes in his excellent book, The Long Tail, there is good money to be made selling small numbers from a large range and if, sometime down the track, there are fewer magazine retailers of range, who knows.