The other day, I complained about finding some places near here selling the Washington Post for fifty cents, instead of thirty-five cents. I’m sure that if I checked — if I could have figured out who was responsible, and asked them — they would have said something about gasoline prices.
Gas around here is back down to $2 a gallon now. I haven’t bothered to check whether the price of the Post has also dropped, because the machine I usually buy my paper from never raised its price.
Maybe it should, though. I don’t try to buy a paper every day, but on the days when I do try to buy one, more than half the time lately I have been finding the machine entirely sold out before 9 a.m.:
It’s been like this three days in a row now; the next time I’m passing, I will probably not bother to try to buy a paper. Burger King maintains house copies of both the Post and the appalling Northern Virginia Daily, and the demographics of Front Royal are such that I am usually the first person to pluck the Post from their rack. I save $0.35 (or $0.50), and the back seat of the Tinomobile doesn’t fill up with old newspapers.
But it’s not really the customer service failure that I’m interested in; it’s the corporate idiocy angle. If you do a search for Washington Post circulation on Google, you will not find words like ‘booming’ or ‘growing’ or even ‘holding steady’.
The media navel-gazers have a lot of explanations for this, but I have never seen them even mention the one thing that is within newspapers’ control. They can’t abolish the web, and they can’t get rid of TV, or reader apathy. But it is fully within their power to make it easier to buy the newspaper.
There’s precisely one place that I’m aware of on my end of Front Royal where I can buy the Post without having to wait in line or traipse all over a grocery store, or both. Is this machine outside a restaurant that serves breakfast? No. Is it outside a place that is open at all in the morning? No. Is it reliably stocked? No. In short, it’s placed and stocked for the convenience of the newspaper route guy, not would-be readers.
The newspapers are so focused on their external enemies, and their low opinion of their readers (a lot of big newspapers now produce a free daily tabloid full of celebrity ‘news’ and short, easy-to-read articles because they think that the public is too dull to understand the regular news), that they cannot see the most obvious and easily-correctable problems.
