Wal-Mart purge of 1,400 titles represented only 2-3% of sales

There's almost always background to a breaking news story, whether about magazines or not. The recent story about Wal-Mart cutting 1,400 titles from its newsstands sounded cataclysmic, but according to a story in Media Industry Newsletter (min), that's not the case.

According to John Harrington, editor of The New Single Copy, a weekly trade newsletter on magazine distribution, Wal-Mart’s total impact on retail magazine sales is at 15-17%, rather than the 20% initially reported. For some magazines, Wal-Mart may represent as much as 25% of newsstand profit, but, for most, the mega-store represents far less. And, the 1,400 magazines that were taken off the shelves only made up 2-3% of total magazine retail sales for the store. That means that the estimated 1,100 magazines left on the Wal-Mart rack accounted for 97-98% of all magazine sales revenues in Wal-Mart; the mags that were cut weren’t selling. But sales weren’t the only motivation.

In the case of Meredith’s Better Homes & Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal, the removal of mags from the shelves may have been punitive. We had heard that Wal-Mart was unhappy with the company after it discovered that BH&G and LHJ overrun copies were being distributed at a store called Dollar Daze for the sub-newsstand price of $1, sometimes at the same time as the same issue was being sold at Wal-Mart for full-freight.