We didn’t have any spare room for Renovate which arrived in-store yesterday.  With no spare space at all and the bagged package quite thick I made the decision to early return all stock.   Despite what publishers say, shoppers I speak with prefer magazines they can browse.  So, bagged titles are given priority when I am considering whether to early return due to lack of available shelf space.  Yes we will miss some sales – it’s a choice I had to make taking into account the titles which would have had to come down to make room for the weighty Renovate.

Ralph magazine closed in June.  I thought that was the end of it.  This morning we received Girls of Ralph. My hunch is that it will not sell – partly because they are leveraging a title which shoppers were not supporting and partly because we are saturated with girls of repurposed content.  I hope that I am wrong and that I do make money out of this new title – I’m not holding my breath.

This title is a perfect example of why we need publishers to take on more of the risk of distributing titles to us.  If did not achieve at least a 50% sell through, we should be paid for space and labour.  An alternative model is that we pay based on scanned based sales – that is, after we have made a sale.  There are other alternatives too where publishers take on a fairer responsibility for the stock they send us.

Newsagents may want to the quantity of Scooby Doo stock received yesterday.  In our case supply was increased without justification.  Yes, yes, we can early return.  We should not have to do this.

I was discussing this with a newsagent late yesterday and they are at their wits end about magazine supply with the cheques they regularly write for the magazine companies equal to or more than the value of sales in the month.  And that is without even factoring in the cost of real estate and labour.

Newsagents have complained about the supply model for many years both formally and informally.  Millions of dollars have been invested by newsagents to provide magazine distributors with more timely and accurate data with a fairer supply model as one of the promises.

While newsagents can and do early return to manage stock levels and cash flow, there is a limit as to what can be achieved.  Plus there is a labour and freight cost with this.

Negative cash flow for magazines is worse today in 2010 than I have seen it in years.  It is the extra one and two copies of a title, like Scooby Doo, which is causing real damage as it is under the radar.

I can see a time when newsagents en masse refuse to pay magazine distributors on time and through this exert cash flow pressure of their own.

The better alternative would be for distributors to agree to a fair supply model with penalties for failures on their part – like sending extra copies of Scooby Doo without justification in the sales data. They need to hold themselves as accountable to us as they hold us accountable to them when it comes time to pay the bills and put up displays.