I had a discussion recently with one of the analysist in GG on oversupply.
What is not commonly realised is that magazine companies are not working to try to reduce your returns to zero. What they consider a perfect score is that you return one of each magazine issued. That shows them that you sold as many as you could. This philosophy causes problems to delivery newsagents who supply retail newsagents because to be able to do this, the delivery newsagents needs to be able to do is return one magazine from each subagent.
However, still I decided to play around with our latest software today with some AD HOC reporting to see what a magazine analysis from a distributor would think of the supply to a typical newsagent. So I took one newsagents database over a 12 month period and created the following table. The ideal figure is sold plus one for each delivery.
Sup.............Received......Sold.........Ideal
GG...............33484........16060........24140
NDC..............32892........17626........21387
RDS...............2416.........1099.........1678
----------------------------------------------------
Grand............68792........34785........47205
As you can see they are currently oversupplying about (68792/34785-1) x 100% = 97.8%
What ideally the magazine distributors would be aiming for an oversupply of (47205/34785-1) x 100% = 35.7%.
Based on this, we have plenty room for improvement.
