Stuff the polybag! One circulator's ruminations about why those unsightly plastic packages should be sacked

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 15, 1997 by Steve Simon

It started quietly enough, with a single polybagged magazine in the computer game section. Then another came along. Soon, general computing magazines began to follow suit, until finally the computing and computer game sections of every newsstand were awash in a sea of polybags. And now, this petrochemical pestilence is leaching into other sections of the newsstand as well. The polybag invasion is upon us--and it's time to stop it.

I have no doubt that the first publishers to use the polybag thought it a wondrous gimmick to increase single-copy sales. An added premium, offered gratis, can sometimes be enough to persuade a tentative single-copy consumer to make the purchase.

But since then this questionable practice has expanded and its effectiveness has predictably declined, especially given the similarity in what every other magazine is giving away. Maybe it's time for pro-polybag publishers to ask themselves a few hard questions. Why is someone specifically going to want to buy your polybagged magazine, with its giveaway premium, when almost every magazine in the category seems to be doing the same thing? Why will your free AOL disk be more attractive than your competitor's AOL disk, which is polybagged to his issue right next to yours on the newsstand? How will text superimposed on a plastic bag covering the front of your magazine entice a prospective customer to notice your magazine's cover and pick it up?

These are just a few of my concerns about the polybag. What follows are others about this new and unwanted creature, concerns that I believe are shared among many retailers, and particularly by those who operate high-volume, destination newsstands.

Polybagging cuts into sales. A wrapped magazine is a magazine that will not be browsed, effectively reducing the impulse buy that newsstand sales so heavily depend on. Polybagged magazines often take up more room on the rack, meaning fewer of them can be displayed at any one time, and fewer magazines on the rack means reduced potential sales. Not only does the polybag reduce the sales of its own title, but its extra height reduces the sales of those magazines unfortunate enough to be placed behind it. So long as more and more magazines go the polybag route, there will be more and more innocent, back-row bystanders with depressed sales. At some point, the magazine behind the polybagged title is going to be your magazine, and in this way, the proliferation of polybags has a negative impact on all publishers.

Polybags add clutter. This is the aesthetic argument. Magazine racks are messy enough as it is, but one filled with polybagged titles, each adding an extra inch or two of plastic above the magazine, eventually starts to look like a rummage sale. And you can't blame customers for giving up rather than trying to cut through this visual chaos. Neat, well-merchandised newsstands are attractive to customers and result in higher magazine sales. All that extra wrapping directly detracts from this.

Polybags increase labor. Sometimes, this means leaving the retailer literally holding the bag. Certain customers are so determined to browse a given magazine that they'll rip open the polybag just to take a look. Then the unfortunate retailers have to pick up the discarded bags--and dropped premiums--that these people leave behind. And retailers who strip covers on their returns face the added burden of having to unwrap the magazines from their polybags and then rip off the covers before shipping them back.

Polybags demean the magazine product. I also have--no kidding--philosophical concerns about the polybag. In an industry that averages less than a 40 percent sell-through on a disposable product bought with disposable income, it's more than a little absurd and wasteful that this disposable product comes further packaged in a disposable bag. And why are publishers putting their magazines' contents under wraps in the first place? Shouldn't a magazine that's sold at a fair price, with solid editorial and an attractive cover, be enough to appeal to consumers? Why is something more needed to entice a purchase? If a gimmick is required to make your customer buy the book, then perhaps you need to re-examine the contents of that book.

For those who feel a powerful need to polybag, I offer a few suggestions. First, talk with others in the retail community and see what they think about this practice. Chances are you won't find overwhelmingly positive responses. And if you must polybag, then try to at least keep the polybag clean of color and clean of text. Make sure it fits snugly around the magazine. This way, the process does the least possible damage to the magazine and to the newsstand as a whole.

Ultimately, only publishers can stop the polybagification of America's newsstands. Only publishers have the power to stop this insidious packaging before it kills another magazine sale.