It is almost a year since magazine distribution changed from Monday, Wednesday and Friday to Monday and Thursday. Newsagency sales data I have seen indicates that high street newsagents have been confronted with the most significant impact. In one case Thursday sales are down 33% and the change can be tracked to the change in magazine distribution.
If your newsagency is in a high street situation I urge you to look at your Thursday data, compare the last four weeks to the same four weeks ago. If you see a considerable decline ask yourself what you are doing to fix the decline in traffic. Action is essential to rebuilding the lost traffic.
If I was in a high street newsagency situation I’d be focused on making my newsagency the destination for everyday magazine traffic. I’d work hard to lock in the habit based visit – so much so that shoppers go out of their way to get their magazines from me and not the supermarket with their weekly shop – as the change in distribution facilitates.
Check your data. Understand the impact of the changes on your business. The knowledge in your data can guide your business decisions.
why are they down when that’s the day you have more on offer to sell ?
Shaun in each situation I have seen they have strong supermarkets nearby.
Just did a report for last month and compared to last year same time and last year was better ,lotto was the big one that stood out which I figure there must have been a pretty big jack pot floating around .It is hard to compare the 2 when you cannot remember the lotto activity from last year .
Are you comparing the overall 4 weeks or just magazines ?
For the week ending 5/5/2013 Oz was $30M and Powerball was $60M. So there would have been some extra sales for the weeks before that for the Jackpots before. There was a Superdraw for the week ending 12/5/2013 also if that helps in comparison.
That’s a good point Clive. The other option is to look at 8 Thursdays from 2013 and compare to the same Thursdays in 2014.
My goal is saying this is for newsagents to be informed if there is a change they need to respond to.