While newspapers run stories daily on the impact of skyrocketing fuel prices on families and small businesses, the publishers of these same newspapers continue to refuse to allow Australia’s small business newsagents to pass on the additional costs. In some cases newsagents are spending $100 a day extra in fuel and they are denied the opportunity to pass on this additional cost.
Australia Post passes on the higher fuel costs. Qantas does too. Newsagents are precluded from doing it because of contracts which were negotiated in 1999 as a result of Howard Government pressure and under the watchful eye of the ACCC.
Newsagents cannot control margin on the product nor recovery of higher costs of distribution of the product. This denies them the opportunity to run their business properly. While the publishers can reasonably argue that newsagents have been given an exclusive home delivery territory and therefore need to operate with some price control, the current fuel price crisis has turned some newsagencies into loss making businesses.
It would be good to see a newspaper cover the impact of high fuel prices on small business newsagencies to demonstrate transparency and to give oxygen to the pain being felt.