Here is a photo from the inside of the tine magazine store on the upper west side of Manhattan covered in my previous post.
Check out how the magazine titles are displayed. No full covers on show. There is a greater cover overlap where they have more titles in a category segment.
On the top shelf, not shown in the photo, barely an inch of a cover is on display.
If newsagents displayed special interest titles like this we would free up 75% of more of our magazine space. The question is whether we would back that we are a destination location for these special interest titles. The other question for many would be – what to do with the freed space.
I have looked at a range of magazine display formats here in the US in the last week in advance of creating a magazine department in a new newsagency I am involved in back in Australia. Having a blank canvas with which to play, I am planning on taking a different approach … but not like this one metre wide store in New York.
Due to space constraints and the sheer number of titles (hello, Beachcomber puzzle mags!), we have to display perhaps 10-15% of our magazines in this staggered manner.
The drawback is that my biggest pet peeve, that of browsers not replacing the title where they found it, is exacerbated by this display method. The magazine usually goes back “in the right place” but now at the front of the rack, hiding the “staggered” title.
Yes, it’s a full-time job tidying up after customers ! I happen to love it, which helps greatly. It tells me where the browsers have been and what they are interested in, so I have a chance to rethink the area. I have heaps of overlapping titles. I also have heaps of putaways for magazines no-one else in the area bothers with, and too many titles according to some newsagents.
But I only have one each of the new Beachcomber puzzle mags on show at one time, the rest have gone back early !
Hopefully that means in the fullness of time they will only send one or two copies my way according to my sales. They are not needed in my puzzle range at the moment.
We make a practice of trying to stock only local puzzle magazines unless sales make foreign ones impossible to ignore. This does not appear to harm sales for this category (they are still growing) and even stocking in this manner there is not enough room to keep many titles on the shelves for more than 2-3 weeks.