Magazine sales are strong for many newsagents this time of year with new customers in town for the holidays. It surpriuses me therefore that publishers do not sieze this opportunity. Instead, they shutdown and stop providing marketing collateral with which we could more easily promote titles which could appeal to holiday makers. Smart publishers would promote right now because no one else is. Instead, we are left to create our own promotions. While this is okay, it would be easier if we were provided good collateral with which to work.
Worse still they reduced the allocation of weeklies for me so I sold out on day one! They have done it again this morning and I have ordered more (again) but I cannot see why the resuction. Their website tells me that I am back to normal levels as at next week but what a waste!
The same thing has happened to us.
And to us ….. magazine publishers and Qld Newspapers tell us that all our customers are away up or down the coast and cut our supplies…..If that is the case then I can’t work out why we are so busy…..All those people coming into our shop must be a figment of my imagination. !!!!!!
We only opened boxing day because of the papers ,well after doing the paper run and the put aways there was 10 papers left to sell ,so a big thank you to north queensland papers for wasting my time
We were sold out of all papers bar our local paper by 9:30 yesterday. We recieve two Australians!!
I’m not defending them, but think they are going off a few years back where these days fell on the same days ie Christmas fell on Thursday.
Unhappy customers AGAIN and not my fault.
We are in the same boat… For the last two weeks we have sold out of papers by 9.30am. We have begged for help but everything falls on deaf ears. we check our allocations in the morning and afternoon and they are at the levels we need and then over night they are reduced…
We have now reverted to a bottle of bourbon for the paper delivery driver and its amazing what happens to fall off the truck…
I don’t know what’s going on this Christmas, but we have not been reduced nearly enough on our weekly mags (given our sales history for this period AND this year’s trade, which is very poorly).
On the newspaper side, we are ridiculously oversupplied this week as well. We handle our supplies on Connect, however, that system was locked the Saturday before Christmas. I estimated the supplies we would require, based on expected trade and subs closing, and advised Qld Newspapers that we needed them to REDUCE our supplies. Our request was successful for the first week, but not for this week (today we have 105 CMs left to sell in the shop when we would be lucky to sell 30!!). My point is, our oversupplies would have been of more use to the agents whose supplies have been cut!
Oh for the day suppliers either start listening or are no longer of any use to us!!
Happy New Year to Mark and all the readers!
Wendy
Moorooka News (Qld)
December 2007 and January 2008 were the best selling editions for my monthly magazine during the last 12 months. It doesn’t make sense to me why publishers would reduce their copies?
Happy New Year to everyone from Andrew in Bangkok.
out of stock already on my new idea mags geess lucky someone gets paid a lot of money to sort out allocations or we would be in trouble , but looking forward to the slow months coming up at least i can spend my days topping all the over supply they send me .These magazine company are the most backward run companys i have ever heard of
Why is it like this? We have more copies of the Irish Echo than the Australian. Guess which one sold out? Coles, next door who usually receive 2 Australians received more than us today. TV week sold out .With Top Gear we could offer, buy one, get three free and would still not sell out. We track our sales, we communicate and are not only ignored but overuled. What is the agenda?
Shaun –
I don’t think the distribution or magazine companies are backward – they know they have a captive and subservient market in newsagents and play us accordingly.
I’d be more inclined to call them cunning, ruthless bastards and whilst I have often thought of NDD (for example) as a basically stupid organisation, I am not so sure that I don’t have the roles reversed. We do all of the work, we carry the financial load by feeding them obscene amounts of cash on a regular basis, we suffer the consequences of over/under supply, we tolerate inefficient transport systems, we have sleepless nights wondering whether we can cover the bill this month.
I’ll guarantee there’s no one in any of the publishing or distribution businesses afflicted by any of the above.
Basically, by their inability to unite and elect association representatives capable of addressing true industry issues, newsagents repeatedly demonstrate that they are the backward ones and NDD, Network, Gotch et al must have a great laugh at our expense.
It’s interesting that when one individual proposed a magazine czar to oversee this part of the industry, the wires ran hot for months with lots of comment but very little support for the idea but I am yet to hear VANA OR ANY OTHER STATE/NATIONAL ORGANISATION or any of our recently elected representatives making pertinent comment let alone headway on the issue. I guess it just goes to prove than in a democracy the electors get what they deserve.
I lost my entire email cos I didn’t put in the stupid security code. Dam I’m not trying again
You got it Jim… the distributors are laughing all the way to the bank!
Jim is right. Every word. And we should do something about it.
But what?