Here is a draft letter I have put together for customers about the Fairfax TV Guide situation. It’s what I would be giving to my customers, retail and home delivery, to seek their support if I were affected by this in any of my newsagencies.
For years now the TV Guide has been provided inside your copy of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun Herald. Now, Fairfax, the publisher of these newspapers, wants us to manually insert the TV Guide in the titles and let home delivery customers choose the day on which they want them delivered.
Fairfax has said it will pay newsagents 15 cents to do this work.
We estimate that the work will cost close to 75 cents extra per delivery once we cost the insertion, managing the extra delivery and other changes in deliveries. It will also slow the home delivery process down.
Just to let you in on the process, we have two main newspapers we currently deliver. We will now have three since there will be copies of the Sun Herald with the TV Guide and copies without – depending on customer requirements. The same for The Sydney Morning Herald. Managing this extra load and similar looking packaged to deliver at 5am presents all sorts of challenges for which Fairfax is not prepared to compensate small business newsagents.
We are frustrated that Fairfax announced the change to readers without consultation with newsagents, without considering the time and financial cost to our family run businesses.
This is another example of big business treating small business poorly, pushing costs down to small business so that big business can save and increase profits.
It is like a boss requiring a worker to do an hour of overtime and only paying them for fifteen minutes. Would you do that?
If we do what Fairfax wants we will be worse off financially. Your average newsagent in Australia makes around $50,000 a year for a sixty-five to eighty hour work week and a coupe of weeks a year on holiday (if we are lucky).
Please help us by letting Fairfax know what you think of this move. You can email Fairfax at…
I am not posting this draft letter here advocating that newsagents copy this. Use it to think of what you would put in your letter to your customers.
I am not a fan of unions, but in a unionised industry they would just say no. A representative body needs to stand up rather than do nothing
Jim, to be fair, representative bodies can be restricted by their constitution as well as legislation.
Deep down customers don’t give a rats.
They just want thier paper with a cupppa on a Sunday. Why is it always the SMH readers that complain without listing to reason….
We just do whats best for us.
There are two typo’s in the fourth par – “We will not have three” should surely read “We will now have four…”?
Thanks. Fixed. I think it is three on each day unless I am missing something.
The problem is Mark is that generally customers dont really care about the problems of newsagents. The newspaper comes from us so we are responsible for its condition, the time it gets delivered and if all the bits are inside.
After trying to articulate some of our issues to a SMH subscriber on Sunday including how much money we lose to get the paper on their doorstep every morning I was told “Thats all part of being a newsagent”. Seriously.
Shayne……correct. Pathetic, really.
Why would a customer care about your problems delivering newspapers any more than you are about their problems at work?
Thanks Mark – great letter. Makes it far easier to draft one that suits my circumstances. Greatly appreciated.