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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Wal-Mart Rack-Trim Motivated by Sales…And Discipline
According to John Harrington, editor of The New Single Copy, a weekly trade newsletter on magazine distribution, Wal-Mart’s total impact on retail magazine sales is at 15-17%, rather than the 20% initially reported. For some magazines, Wal-Mart may represent as much as 25% of newsstand profit, but, for most, the mega-store represents far less. And, the 1,400 magazines that were taken off the shelves only made up 2-3% of total magazine retail sales for the store. That means that the estimated 1,100 magazines left on the Wal-Mart rack accounted for 97-98% of all magazine sales revenues in Wal-Mart; the mags that were cut weren’t selling. But sales weren’t the only motivation. In the case of Meredith’s Better Homes & Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal, the removal of mags from the shelves may have been punitive. We had heard that Wal-Mart was unhappy with the company after it discovered that BH&G and LHJ overrun copies were being distributed at a store called Dollar Daze for the sub-newsstand price of $1, sometimes at the same time as the same issue was being sold at Wal-Mart for full-freight. Sources that we contacted at the company did not have comment about the Dollar Daze situation. “We are having ongoing conversations with Wal-Mart, and we have a good marketing relationship with them,” a spokesperson for Meredith told minonline. We will keep you updated on this angle as news comes in. Aside from cutting the dead weight from its magazine distribution rolls (and from possibly punishing Meredith), part of the motivation for this move was for Wal-Mart to reduce substantially the amount of magazines on its shelves with poor sell-through rates. Wal-Mart is currently running a company-wide sustainability program. Since magazines that aren’t sold on the stand are often shredded, magazines with poor sell-through rates represent more waste for the industry than those that sell well. Industry sources estimate that Wal-Mart is reducing the amount of magazines that it sends to the shredder by 5-8% with this move. For the original article by Keith Kelly, click here. To find out more about this issues, please contact John Harrington at The New Single Copy. Related Stories: Major Consumer Magazines May Not Hit Wal-Mart Shelves (and other major retailers) Next Week Negotiations Between Anderson News and Publishers/Distributors Get “Intense” as Consumer Magazine Distribution Crisis Settles to a Simmer If you have any breaking news please contact Amy Novak at anovak@accessintel.com |
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