One of my clients emailed me asking me about newsagencies in Europe and how they compare with Australian newsagencies. If you search this blog you will find some discussions by me on this topic in some of my earlier trips.
Basically Dutch newsagents sell a range of products, including marijuana. German newsagencies are mixed business of tobacco, alcohol and newspapers. They are often referred to this by name. Swiss are very similar to the German, although often they are more modern shops and have lotto as well.
The French newsagencies are extremely similar to Australia. I have a study that we did when we looked into exporting our software to France. When I get from holidays, I will publish some details.
One big difference with all European newsagencies is magazines. These countries tend to have larger populations than Australia, so they often have excellent mass market magazines, but because they lack the numbers of the English speaking world which is according to the Wikipedia between 500 million–1.8 billion, they have a smaller range. As a result European newsagents do not need the space Australian newsagents do for magazines.
Another difference is the retail price seems to be to be cheaper on an equivalent product making it easier to sell but the newsagents gets from the European publishers smaller margins than Australian publishers give to their newsagents.
