News Limited who print the Daily Telegraph and the Australian have been phoning around our area for many, many weeks offering various discount deals. This can be annoying if you are not interested.
From our point of view, it is extremely unfair to us as newsagents.
The discount offer to you means that we receive NO MONEY for delivery of your subscription for the first 10 weeks. If you renew, we get half of the miserable rate for delivery for the next 26 weeks.
If you sign up for their Saturday and Sunday only offer, we are paid NIL for all of those deliveries.
This argument revolves around the giant corporations (with the aid of the government and the ACCC) forcing small family businesses into a major loss situation. The unfair contracts were a "take it or leave it offer" and with over 40 years of work invested in this business, there was no viable alternative for us. (Show us how newsagencies are "protected"). This allows huge corporations to vary the agreement at our cost and commence these crazy delivery offers.
What is really hard to take is that the third party employed by News Limited to make the phonecalls is not telling the truth all the time. Many customers have reported that they finally decided to take the offer because they were encouraged to "support their local newsagent" on the phone. Individuals are casual employees as far as we can establish and are paid a bounty for each customer they sign up for a deal. Sometimes we have found people who definitely declined the offer have been listed for us to start delivery.
Probably unknown to you is the fact that home deliveries can be counted as more than one paper by these companies in auditing readership. This allows them to "pad out" the number of readers claimed for a publication.
The end result is that although we deliver a lot more papers for the company, we make a bigger loss on the deal than before. In many cases we get no money to pay for extra time, wages, administration or fuel on such terribly unfair deals.
Maxine and Peter
