Coin-operated machines change single copy sales

Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 2003 by Bradshaw, Katherine

Social changes that followed suburbanization led to a dramatic growth of coin-operated newspaper vending machines to support the emerging importance of single copy sales of newspapers.

With a flamboyant eight-month, multi-city promotion campaign USA Today drew news media and public attention to itself and to coin-operated newspaper vending machines. Beginning in September 1982, USA Today put 135,000 flashy vending boxes on American streets and in places where no one had ever put newspaper boxes before. The weekend prior to the New York City launch party, 3,000 blue and white USA Today pedestal boxes with tilted display windows were bolted to the city's sidewalks.1 This caused other papers to respond and put more boxes on the street, providing a boost to the coinoperated newspaper vending box business.2

Single-copy sales of newspapers have changed since newsboys shouted lurid headlines from downtown street corners and sellers nailed a canvas bag to a telephone pole next to a stack of papers and hoped the buyer would be honest and toss in a coin.3 Today coin-operated newspaper vending boxes are everywhere. They line concourses at airports, stand outside hotels and restaurants and sit on suburban street corners in most metropolitan areas and many small cities. Newspaper vending boxes are now taken-for-granted as part of everyday life. Although almost entirely neglected by scholars, along with the study of newspaper circulation generally,4 the boxes nevertheless have played a role in the changing circulation patterns of U.S. papers as they responded to the social changes that followed suburbanization.

In Newspaper Circulation: Marketing the News, William Thorn and Mary Pfeil wrote, "Until recently, neither leaders of the newspaper industry nor scholarly commentators gave much attention to newspaper circulation. It got ... only the most cursory mention in histories of the press."5 Their book begins to remedy the oversight.6 As a further contribution, this article examines the growth of coin-operated newspaper vending machines before the introduction of USA Today in 1982 when the quantity and new style of its boxes caused other newspapers to increase their use of boxes.7 According to Thorn and Pfeil, "The emergence of USA Today, with its heavy reliance on single copy sales and the competition it generated, has forced competing newspapers to pay greater attention to the nonsubscriber."8

The vending box sellers provide the best beginning to filling in the historical record on the use of coin-operated newspaper vending boxes. While the pattern of suburbanization has varied from city to city9 and individual newspaper circulation departments are idiosyncratic, vending box sellers had the entire nation as their marketplace. Research is being conducted on the legal challenges to the boxes, but no one as yet has begun to examine the use of vending boxes by newspapers.10 As seen by sellers, the use of coin-operated racks began slowly and then had an explosive burst in the early 1970s followed by ever growing sales, until the introduction of the USA Today boxes prompted another sales spike. Individual papers in different cities responded to local conditions. However, the sellers of the vending boxes were connected to many papers in multiple cities and therefore provided an excellent beginning to telling the story of the use of the coin operated boxes that are now a ubiquitous part of everyday life.

Metropolitan areas in the United States steadily expanded following World War II.11 Central cities lost their domination of outlying areas as suburbanization changed where people shopped, voted and relaxed. Drastic changes in where people lived also altered how they got to work. For example, more than a quarter of the population of metropolitan Detroit used public transit in the early 1950s, but that fell to only 3.6 percent by 1980. In 1960, nearly two thirds of the workforce lived in the central city, but by 1980 that fell to 27 percent.12 Changes in living patterns transformed cities, creating distribution problems for newspapers. Increased delivery distances affected circulation efforts at the same time carriers proved more difficult to hire and retain.13 During the 1950s, newspaper circulation paralleled urban growth, but circulation slowed in the late 1960s. By 1970, newspaper circulation trailed the number of households and has since continued to drop.14 Individual newspaper circulation, departments were affected and responded differently: Circulation is highly localized,15 especially single-copy sales.16

Before, during and after World War II, honor systems were used to sell single copies of newspapers. In addition to the canvas carrier bag hung on a pole beside a stack of newspapers, a cigar box for coins sat on top of wire racks, or a small tube attached to the side of the rack allowed the buyer to drop in a coin.17 In 1952, nearly half of America's papers used honor racks when newsstands were impractical.18 Ray Mack started the honor rack system at the Washington Daily News in 1942 when he was the circulation director. That paper's first honor rack was a wooden crate Mack built and put in the cafeteria of the Veterans Administration building. He spread honor racks, both wire and wooden, to most government buildings, selling 50,000 papers a day from them.19