The Retail Challenges of Being Seen on the Magazine Rack

It’s been happening since forever but something feels different today.

By Linda Ruth 05/02/2012 -02:10 PM

A big box store sells 115 copies of a single issue of a single publication. For the next release from the same publisher, you might think the wholesaler would provide this store with a nice allotment—perhaps 150 copies or so, to cover the upside.  You might think, but you would be wrong. For the subsequent release this store is sent 11 copies.

 

What does that store do with those 11 copies? They premature nine of them, meaning that they send nine of the 11 copies back without putting them out. Why do they do that? It’s impossible to know.  Maybe the delivery came when the store’s racks were already full? Maybe it seemed like too much product? Maybe the copies were dropped, rained on, ruined—in some way made unsuitable for display?  Maybe the magazine manager was away, on vacation, out to lunch? Whatever the reason, only two copies made it to the magazine rack in this store—two copies of a magazine with a potential to sell more than a hundred.

 

The publisher of those two copies had paid upwards of $10,000 for a “New and Notable” promotion in that very store. Store visits revealed only one problem: no one in the store—from the book manager, to the magazine manager, to the store manager—had ever heard of the publication or the promotions program.

On what planet, in what universe, could that possibly make sense? Just the bizarre-o-world of newsstand sales, where newsstand professionals face these challenges daily.

Joe Berger, who started this whole thing with his (more or less) tongue in cheek “Things Placed in Front of the Magazine Rack,” points out that “having all kinds of junk dumped in front of checkout…Is nothing new.”

It’s been happening since forever. But, he says, something feels different today.

I would argue that in many ways the problem is worse than it has been in the past. Retailers used to be locally managed by a territorially-restricted wholesaler.  Today, due to massive consolidation, the retail buying is managed by a chain buyer who may be located thousands of miles from the retail store; distribution is managed by a wholesale agency that may not even be located in the same geographic region.

The wholesalers are still doing their best to merchandise, explained a marketing representative from a large national distributor.  In fact, that might be part of the problem.  Since the wholesaler is doing all the merchandising, no one at store level takes ownership for the product. It’s as if it belongs wholly to someone else.  So a “Kyle” or “Kurt” might feel connection with their whiffle bat display—after all, they’re the ones who decided where it should be placed—but none with the magazines they obscure.

Meanwhile, wholesalers are struggling to break even. Where once their merchandisers might have been agency employees, now they are as likely to be part-time contract workers. These workers often don’t last more than a year. Who can blame them, with the reception they receive from the “Kyles” and “Kurts” at the supermarket level? So they are continually in training and frequently discouraged by the contempt with which they are greeted.

The result? Dismal merchandising, which leads to dismal displays; dismal displays, which lead to dismal sales.

The strange thing might not be that magazine sales are down. The miracle appears to be that we’re still selling anything at all.

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