A customer has been covering Monster Children magazine. I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday and had not seen the cover. It’s confronting. I showed it around the office and everyone asked why there had not been media coverage. While I find this cover challenging I still think it’s a terrific magazine.
I had a confrontation this morning about a magazine called FETE. A customer came into my shop asking for it and I sold
it to her. She came back to return it and said “this is not the latest edition – they’ve got it at the shop around the corner”. I gave her back her money and
went around the corner to a small gift shop about 60 metres from my shop and sure enough this magazine had a poster in the window and was advertising and selling this mag.
I am about to cancel it with GG as I object to a company using my retail premises and then going to a card and gift shop which has never ever had any mags and putting the mag in there.
To add insult to injury I haven’t got the latest edition yet.
The mag is $14.95 and I get 12 and sell them all so it will be skin off my nose to
cancel them but it aggravates me no end
that our industry is so disjointed that one
hand doesn’t know what the other is doing.
I don’t mind competition (I have a coles next door) but to put mags into a gift shop is totally wrong.
I’m not blaming the lass who owns the gift shop as she hasn’t been there long but the mag itself is naming her shop as a stockist and I am not on that list.
Some of these publishers want to have their cake and eat it too but I’m not sharing my cake this time.
We need to take a stand sometimes.
June, I had a similar problem yesterday with Horse Deals. We have a regular putaway customer who advised she didn’t need this issue as they were at a horse event in Victoria last week and the publisher early-released the magazine for the event. Grrr!
Judy – we used to put-away 16 or so copies of Horse Deals and sell another 3 or 4 over the counter – all up about 20 copies per month. All of a sudden sales dropped to about 3 per month and I discovered that it was being supplied to a local produce store – fair enough I suppose as they did sell horse-related product but it was also being supplied to them 2 days earlier than us. Apparently the demand for a lot of the items advertised in it is very strong so guess where all my put-aways went!
I was told by the owner of the store that they are supplied direct from the publisher.
I then tried to drop my allocation with the Bandits of Silverwater but because of my sales history I couldn’t, in fact we now get about 25 copies – 20 go straight back and the rest we try to sell.
Distribution within this industry stinks and although I can sort of understand why publishers attempt to short circuit the system like this but to do it for no incremental sales and at the same time disadvantage those who have sold the magazine in reasonable numbers for years says a lot about the publisher as well!