David and Michele Heinrich of newsXpress Clare have posted the following email to colleague newsagents:
Are there any other Newsagents in rural areas staring to feel the affects of the drought, covering all Australia, we are currently 1100 customers down since July 1st 2006, thanks to working smarter with a progressive marketing group we are only approximately $6000 in turnover down. I fear that this could have been worse had we not adopted different practices over the last few months,
I would like to ask this question, who will ask magazine distributors to help ease our overload that WILL put us under pressure during this time, we are awash with oversupply and those affected areas will need some assistance, again the top 200 sellers are ok it’s the rest that will cause pain.
I notice with interest how the farmers are given assistance ( great lobbyists), I don’t need government handouts , just some understanding of the situation by our government (magazine distributors) of the pressure they will put rural newsagents under.
Please other rural newsagents let your situation been known so we can start to gather information to present to our ANF friends to lobby on our behalf.
I have suggested to the magazine distributors (Gotch, Network and NDD) that they participate in a conference call or some other urgent event to agree on a strategy to assist drought affected newsagents. Such assistance could be increasing time to settle accounts; faster processing of returns credits; more accurate supply quantities; local marketing to support the newsagent as opposed to other outlets.
David and Michele are right to bring attention to this problem. Newsagents and other small local businesses are doing it tough as are the farmers.
The photo is from a CSIRO report on El Nino.
