Street Sense Media went back to its biweekly schedule last month and I hate it! Because I and several other vendors were generating a weekly income.
Some vendors claim they weren’t generating extra money from the weekly paper. That’s hard for me to believe when a lot of people were going to workshops for an hour to get the 10 free incentive papers throughout the week. And some folks didn’t have trade-ins during the weekly paper sales.*
The main reason that I liked the weekly paper is the information in the paper was fresh and it happened like two or three days ago. However, with a biweekly paper, the news is old and the information it contains is about stuff that happened two to four weeks before.
Street Sense has 16 pages and the editor now has to really make a decision on what’s important and what’s not important to fill up the pages.
My customers have told me that they don’t really want to read past page 14 because they do a lot of reading at their jobs. I can sympathize with their thinking. I’m very happy my customers and others support our paper whether or not they read it.
The bottom line is: I need the income from selling the paper. And having the weekly paper was awesome because I was generating money on a weekly basis. My customers loved the weekly paper because that meant they didn’t buy the same paper two times during the biweekly cycle. That’s a turn off for some customers. Some vendors won’t tell or ask a customer if they might have already bought the paper knowing the new edition is about to come out within a day or two.
It’s not like our vendors are being deceitful but Street Sense Media trains new vendors every Tuesday and Thursday to sell the paper. And it takes time for a new vendor to learn how to do things better in our organization.
I really hope we can get back to weekly papers one day. But it’s certainly not going to happen today or maybe even this year.
All things said, there is a bright side for vendors having a biweekly paper. It’s that we get two for one sales back before the new edition comes out.*
I also want to give a shoutout to all our customers that support Street Sense Media and to my colleagues and vendors who’ve stuck with me through our up and down endeavors.
Thank you DMV for the awesome support!
Editor’s note: A “trade-in” refers to an exchange of the previous week’s edition for the current one. During a “two for one” sale, vendors are able to purchase two papers for the price of one wholesale paper.
