Newsagents currently have three magazines on our shelves with sachets of Uncle Tobys oats stuck inside. The free pack of oats makes each magazine fatter than usual, requiring more shelf and or storage space and taking up more time to manage.
This is why newsagents should be paid extra – to cover the extra space and time involved.
Just as General Mills will be paying the publisher of each magazine – including Bauer for Australian Women’s Weekly – a premium for the thick ‘ad’, newsagents should be paid a premium. It’s only fair.
The challenge is we don’t have a relationship with General Mills. We rely on publishers and distributors. However, when it comes to thicker than usual magazines I’m not aware of them thinking about us and the extra services they expect us to provide.
This issue is something newsagent associations could usefully spend time on, negotiating fees for extra services such as thick magazines, heavy magazines and magazines that do not meet minimum performance criteria such as a 50% sell through.
The current approach of taking extra space and time from us without compensation is unfair. It disadvantages us over most of our competitors on the magazine retail space.
While I’ve left the oats sachets in the magazines in my newsagencies I know of some others who have removed them. I can understand that, especially for titles they would usually try and flat stack. You can’t do that with the current issue of AWW.
Yes it has been a pain to display but at least my wife has something to eat for breakfast.
Product samples are like inserts in newspapers, especially Sunday newspapers. We regard inserts as “non-paying passengers” getting free ride in home delivery. While newspaper publishers are paid handsomely to insert brochures in their newspapers, they forget to share the “fare” with the newsagents who actually deliver the papers. We routinely remove non-paying free-riders from our home delivery, “no ticket.”
This is really starting to be a big issue with smaller newsagents. Today we received the Precious Rocks, Maths collection and even the Marie Clare with its free umbrella along with the Barbie collection we received on Monday, these 4 products take up 10 pockets that were used for other titles, no wonder our supp returns are increasing.
I remove these things as they waste MY and i am not paid for it.