Feeling frustrated
Hi guys
Hope you are well.
I’ve been buying Scootering since the very first mag. Whether it be sporadically out of various shops or having them delivered by yourselves. In the last couple of years I have been buying them through supermarkets. I know it costs less to order direct but I have found that in the last four months Scootering has not been available in any of the supermarkets I go to; Tesco, Sainsbury’s, both superstores in the Whitstable, Herne Bay, Ramsgate and Ashford areas. Can you shed some light on this please?
Matt Honour
Hi Matt,
Firstly, thanks for being so loyal, it’s genuinely appreciated. I’ve allocated quite a bit of space to your question as it’s something I get asked a lot. I hope that being up front will help explain things.
There’s a very long answer to this but I’ll try to keep it simple, as it took me a long time to get my head around it. The bottom line is that people’s buying habits have been changing for quite some time and those trends were accelerated by Covid. (I know, it gets the blame for everything!) The way that people buy magazines, and how the wholesale and retail sectors deal with supplying them, are now completely different from just a few years ago.
The upshot of these changes is that it can cost a lot of money for a publisher to get their magazine on to a shelf; unless both the retailer and publisher can be sure of ‘x’ copies being sold, sometimes that cost is too much to make it worthwhile. This isn’t just a challenge for Scootering, it’s the entire trade; just look how the major chains of newsagents have evolved in recent years and how much space they now allocate to magazines. It’s a simple fact that sandwiches and coffees give them a higher return, so shelf space gets ‘squeezed’ for the likes of us. One thing I can be certain of is that locating a copy of any magazine ‘off the shelf’ won’t get any easier. Even when a shop does stock them they may only take two or three copies of a title each month, so once they’re gone, they are gone.
It’s as frustrating for us as it is for you, but should explain why we can offer significant discounts to subscribers, as that method is by far the most costeffective way for us to distribute the magazine. In addition to saving money, and being assured that you’ll be able to get hold of a copy on or before the same date as it gets into the shops, subscribing to the title offers other benefits such as access to the digital archive, and I know we are planning to increase the benefits to subscribers too…
Our current offers can be found on the website or have a look at page 48 of this latest issue.
I hope that answers your question and that we can keep entertaining and informing you for years to come.
Kind regards Stan