Diary of a newsstand clerk

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct 15, 1994 by Diane Cyr

You want to know about the state of the industry? No problem: Trend reports are easily available from analysts, consultants, PR firms and other talking heads in the publishing world. But finding out what really happens to your magazine once it hits the newsstands is a little more difficult. For that, you must find the person who handles it. She's the newsstand worker, the last link in the long chain of sale.

Each week, hundreds of titles pass from the printer to the national distributor to the regional wholesaler, who trucks them to her newsstand. If a title sells for, say, $2, her store will keep about 30 to 40 cents; the wholesaler will keep about 50 cents; the national distributor gets about 10 cents--and the publisher gets the rest. When a magazine doesn't sell or winds up shorted during delivery, her store receives credit from the wholesaler, who in turn receives credit from the publisher.

In a system where pennies are traded around for hundreds of titles, there are a lot of leaks, a lot of shoulder shrugging, and a mystery or two: a couple of copies short on Time one week, or the inexplicable disappearance/reappearance of Dog World another. Such fluctuations don't mean much for the individual newsstand, the wholesaler or even the publisher. After all, nobody actually loses money if a title is short; it's just a sale that wasn't made--and the publisher is out only the cost of production. But when you consider that this magazine seller is just one of 180,000 nationwide, pettiness acquires magnitude. Think, for example, how a late delivery cost one newsstand alone about 40 lost sales on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. No tragedy--until you realize that all the other stores served by this distributor probably had the same problem.

To determine exactly what happens on this real-life level, we located a newsstand worker who volunteered to keep a log of everything that happened on magazine delivery days. She's nameless, and so is her store. But we will say that her particular newsstand carries about 900 different titles, sues both wholesalers and direct distributors (about 10), and is located 30 miles outside a major metropolitan area.

What follows is an edited transcript of our anonmous newsstand worker's two-week journal.

Newsstands are for magazine lovers

I've been at this job 18 months, and I hate to see the way magazines are so often treated by the people in the business of selling them on the newsstand. There's no reason for it. People who buy from the newsstand really like magazines. If they come into the store and find the magazine they want, they'll remember where they got it. They will never take a crummy-looking copy, ever. You can see they have a relationship with a magazine, a loyalty. People who get subscriptions don't have as high an expectation.

I don't think retailers realize this. I work for a place that sells paperbacks and hardcover books as well as magazines, and frankly, the managers could care less if they sell magazines because they don't make as much money off them. But people come in every week or every month for their magazines--they're not here looking for John Grisham's latest and coming back in nine months. We have someone who calls each week to see if Billboard came in. Magazine people are here all the time.

I'm not sure wholesalers get it, either. If they skip an issue, you call them and they say they'll credit us if it's on the invoice. They think all you care about is the money. I know I would rather have the magazine than the credit, and so would all the people who come in and look for magazines.

This past February, it snowed on our Thursday delivery day, so we didn't get the delivery. No one came Friday, either, and then the Monday driver was on vacation. On Tuesday someone showed up, but told us we wouldn't be getting the whole Thursday delivery; they'd rather give us just the bundled magazines and credit us for the loose ones. So for a month we didn't have Better Homes and Gardens, we didn't have Country Home, we didn't have all kinds of magazines. All we got was about seven or eight single bundles, including the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue--which, by the way, we lost tremendous sales on because it came in late. The impression I got was the wholesaler did not think the magazines themselves were important enough to deliver.

But magazines are our biggest display. It's what you notice when you walk in the store. I like to keep the rack very tidy; I'm aware of everything on it. I know where everything is, I know when the next issue should come out. Sometimes I'll even hold a magazine for people and call them when it comes in.

What I can't figure out is, why don't magazine distributors care that much?

For a month in the spring, I kept a diary of exactly what happened on our weekly Monday and Thursday magazine delivery days. Here's what I saw:

Thursday, March 24:

More new drivers today. For some reason, our Thursday driver is always a different guy; the Monday guy is pretty steady. We didn't do too badly, only short one issue of one magazine--Science Fiction Age.