This is why newspapers keep going out of business

At the end of our street there is a San Francisco Chronicle vending machine. Its location seems pretty random; it’s not like the intersection is a busy one or anything. Our neighborhood is strictly residential and there’s not much foot traffic. I guess they figure the bus stop is a good place to put it. In any case, it’s there.

Every morning around 6:45, the Chronicle truck pulls up and the paper guy emerges to fill it up. Well, he doesn’t really fill it up. He just sticks 4-6 papers in the rack and one in the window. I guess even they recognize it’s not a high-volume sales location.

Then, if my bus is running late,¹Which it almost always is. I get to witness an old man come up several minutes later, insert his four quarters,² The weekday paper is $1.00, which is just ridiculous. and then pull out all the copies of the newspaper. Sometimes he takes the window copy too, but most days he doesn’t. I guess he doesn’t want to be that guy.

I have to wonder what he’s doing with six copies of the newspaper every day. He doesn’t look like the extreme couponing type. Maybe he does the crossword in pen and needs the extra copies in case he screws up. Maybe he’s making a 50-foot paper mache statue of Elvis. Maybe someone at the Chronicle angered him decades ago and this is his daily way to sticking it to them.

Whatever his motivation is, he’s stealing five papers every day. That’s a 500% loss on every paper sold. Over $1,500 a year at just one stand. They’ve got to have hundreds of those machines across the city. They’re losing millions of dollars every year due to sticky fingered elderly misanthropes. No industry could withstand such a trend.

Okay, not really

Okay, okay, I know physical copy sales have almost nothing to do with the bottom line at any newspaper. In fact, I’m not even sure why newspapers bother with rack sales anymore. It’s got to cost them more to buy the machines and keep them filled than they could ever possibly make back in sales.³I suspect the continued proliferation of newsracks is due to the fact that they’re a sunk cost. In the coming years, publishers won’t replace newsracks as they’re retired in all but the highest traffic locations, gradually eliminating them through attrition. Maybe they were profitable in the 1940s, but America’s halcyon days of carefree impulse newspaper purchasing ended quite a while ago.

Mostly I just wanted to point out that old people are sneaky evil. They’re stealing newspapers and ruling society through the ballot box. Who knows what else they’re up to when we’re not looking?

So now you know: Old people. Keep an eye on them.

• 1
  Which it almost always is.
• 2
  The weekday paper is $1.00, which is just ridiculous.
• 3
  I suspect the continued proliferation of newsracks is due to the fact that they’re a sunk cost. In the coming years, publishers won’t replace newsracks as they’re retired in all but the highest traffic locations, gradually eliminating them through attrition.