The truck carrying magazines on the Albury run this morning apparently hit a kangaroo, putting the truck out of action and delaying supply of the Wednesday delivery for most of the day. It too k an email from me to a management person within Gordon & Gotch to find out what happened. That was at 1:30pm. Newsagents had been waiting for their magazines since before 6am.
I would have thought that in this era of modern communication newsagents could have been informed sooner than seven hours later.
Given the sales decay of weeklies in newsagencies, the impact of the accident today will not be recovered. Many of those customers will have got their Wednesday fix elsewhere – especially with no visibility as to when newsagents would have the stock.
I don’t know how the kangaroo is doing but I suspect not well.
The kangaroo is probably in a better position than newsagents even though he/she may be dead – at least death would have come fairly quickly – not the prolonged agony that newsagents in the North East are forced to endure every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
NDD have blundered big time in moving away from CMD to 1st Fleet. Most newsagents up here probably wouldn’t have remembered who CMD were, so reliable was the delivery that there was virtually no reason to call them or their subbie.
With 1st Fleet taking over the delivery of NDD mags, I expect an invite to John Morello’s (NDD logistics guru) next Sunday bbq as I feel I know this bloke fairly personnally having communicated with him more times in the last two months than I have with my immediate family.
Today’s magazines arrived here at 2.30pm despite repeated assurances from all down south that they would arrive at 8.00am, 10.00am, 11.30am, Lunchtime and finally “no later than 1.00pm”.
With a significant financial interest in a local freight company, I know that if the kangaroo story is true then that should have added no more than 2-3 hours to the delivery so what the hell was happening in the additional 7 hours.
Bottom line – the kangaroo story is crap, the freight company involved do not have the infrastructure to handle or honour on-time deliveries on the required scale and, once again, the newsagent loses out.
NDD took an ill-advised decision based on financials and in short, THEY WERE CONNED!
The sooner publishers are alerted to the fact that distributors are cutting corners to maximise their own bottom lines to the detriment of resellers and the public then the sooner things might be rectified. Until then, stand by for more kangaroo stories – they will only be bettered by stories of driver’s broken legs, NDD not being allowed to pack at Laverton and any other excuse 1st Fleet, JPR Logistics and NDD can throw at us!
Jim,
Perhaps a good answer might be to move the monkey –
When your titles are late next Monday, make a telephone call to the Advertising Managers of the 6 largest advertisements in those titles and advise them that, due to the publisher and the delivery structure failing, the tens of thousands of dollars your company spent on advertising in that edition has been wasted.
If the problem became the publishers and caused cash flow problems on their books and not yours, perhaps a new focus might appear.
100% agree with Jim.
Really nothing more to add other than;
“here we go again!”
Vaughan
Beechworth Newsagency
Where I am, the current sub contractor picked up Australia Post contracts not long after they got the magazine contract.Of course, the Aust Post contracts require they be given priority, so delivery times have slipped from a consistent 2am to anywhere from 4am to 7am, with all the obvious problems as a result.Does anyone with authority in the freight company or the distributors care? Of course not!