Fairfax announced yesterday a 10% cover price increase for The Australian Financial Review and Weekend Financial Review effective from March 11 and March 16 respectively. These moves are good news.
As a retail newsagent however, a sub agent in the eyes of Fairfax, I’d like to see a better margin. The AFR is loss making in shopping centre newsagencies with high occupancy costs. This is true for all daily newspapers with a volume of 15 copies a day or less.
So, while I am thrilled at the direction of the move, it’s time we saw a fundamental shift for an equitable return for the retailer. The return determines how we treat the product as my post yesterday showed.
As long as Coles’Woolies are pushing the lie that their prices are going down, any price increases in our businesses are seen as us being expensive. Since the new yr we have seen increases in a lot of so called core areas like papers, lotto, cigs and it is feeding into the customer perception that we are dear and the majors are cheap even though as has been posted here this is a lie.
I understand that suppliers need to increase their bottom line but it just makes us look bad to customers, no matter how much we try and tell people we can beat the big boys on price, all they see is that our prices keep rising.
Hmm a 10% increase for Fairfax and a 3.33% to 4% increase for Newsagents. I suppose Fairfax has to get more to help repel Gina.
It’s a 10% increase in the cover price, but to Fairfax it is more than 10% increase, because they rip off newagents of their 10% increase by decreasing the percentage of “fee” paid.
Previously sold 7-10 during the week and 10 on the weekend.
Stopped selling it 12months ago, because as Mark said, it needs to pay for the space it occupies.
Did the same with the Australian, which simply resulted in those buyers moving to the Sydney morning Herald. Now get the same sales out of one newspaper as we previously got from 3, but which only takes one footprint.
Ebo you are right perhaps I should have said Hmmmmmm
Fairfax increase the price of the Fin Review by 30c per copy and pass on 2c per copy. I’ve been thinking of deleting them since IPS took the International Express.
Why do we continue to take this crap from companies who have taken margin out of our channel, ie telco’s.
Where is the ANF’s response?
Time to go from my newsagency Fairfax