Coverage of The Boston Globe's ongoing newspaper delivery crisis has elicited a strong response from our audience.
Below, our readers, viewers, and listeners respond to pieces by Jim Braude, Dan Kennedy and Emily Rooney.
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How The Globe’s Home-Delivery Woes Morphed From An Annoyance Into A Crisis
by Dan Kennedy
• SAKnews :
• Early_Riser :
publications such as the Boston Herald, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other smaller publications. They didn't lose all of their delivery force, only those they could no longer keep due to a lack of routes due to the reduced workload. These are the people with delivery experience. That assumption probably extends to the field manager level as well. If you don't have people who know what they are doing there to organize everything and teach others, you are in major trouble. Reporters running out and delivering on Sunday won't solve that. Press releases won't solve that. If ACI can't field an effective field staff, they have no hope. Globe should reverse course now, for whatever the cost of breaking the contract is, the cost in business, reputation, integrity, and most of all, importance is going to kill them. Show someone they can do without something they pay for and eventually they will stop paying for it.
for their patience. If you think everyone is going to wait 4-6 months for reliable delivery, you are wrong. We are voting with our wallets. Shame on you for tarnishing the reputation of one of the world's greatest newspapers.
• Lou Alexander :
I think it applies to the mess at the Boston Globe. The senior managers of the newspaper knew how much their distribution operations costs them and thought they could save some of those dollars by making what seemed like a straightforward change from one distribution company to another.
What they did not understand was the value of hundreds of people who worked in the middle of the night for wages that were the equivalent of a very small multiple of the minimum wage. These people knew their city and their routes. For these people efficient handling of the newspapers they contracted to deliver was essential. Many of them have “day jobs” which they go to once their newspapers are delivered.
They do not live on the money they make from the Herald but that income is essential to their lives.
In the days before the Internet the barriers to starting a daily newspaper to compete with a paper like the Boston Globe were substantial, mostly having to do with costs. But the single biggest was the need to establish a reliable delivery force. Lots of people tried but there are almost no examples of anyone succeeding. It is just too complicated
There is one other issue that I have hardly seen mentioned in any of the commentary about this debacle. That is the damage this is being doing to the relationship between the Boston Globe and its major advertisers. A large
grocery store in a market like this generates a million dollars a week in sales, a major department store location does tens of millions in sales a week.
Roll up the sales of all the drug stores, home improvement centers, electronics and other advertisers in a market and the numbers are staggering.
Many of these sales are driven by weekly advertising both in-paper and in inserts. If the Globe has so far managed to retain these customers (especially their inserts) missed deliveries, even for a week or two, will force these customers to consider alternatives like the U. S. Mail.
The loss of paid subscribers because of undelivered papers is a serious issue. The loss of million dollar a year advertisers is a more serious issue by many magnitudes.
• Tim :
What I don't get is how the business side was so willy nilly as it appears they were with this decision. One look at the ledger would tell anyone what Dan has shared: The print edition is still the Golden Goose. How does one take such an extraordinary risk, given the financial state of this and other newspapers? My only guess is that there is no one on the business side who actually knows the business of delivering a newspaper. What other explanation is there?
• twosidedpancake :
• Me Meoh :
100% fact that the new distributor told the paper there is going to be a very painful transition because a lot of the old carriers will just quit.
I've been delivering for 20+ years and let me remind you.
Carriers do not get benefits. They don't get time off, they work 365 days a year. No insurance, no vacation pay, no sick time, no 401k...etc etc.
They have to deliver 300+ papers just to get somewhere near minimum wage.
Best they hope for is a good Christmas where 40% of the people TIP them for the year. Most however do not. Even those whom do, normally tip less then 25 cents a week. 15 dollars. decent tip starts at 30 bucks for the whole year which is around 50 cents a week.
Carriers typically get 11-19 cents per paper per day depending on the complexity of the route, but more so for the distance from the distributor to the start of their route. Some people drive 30 minutes to just start their route. Distributors usally get 20-30 cents a paper, they have to pay carriers, and warehouse workers as well as other business cost.
Also carriers have to, 5 days a week, put papers together. Inserts, coupons, magazines, part 1 into part 2 into part 3. They are not paid for this service which could easily be done at the printing company. Some days, like thanksgiving there are FIVE parts to put together by the carrier.
On top of this they are required to have less then 3-6 complaints per 1000 papers (depending on contract). that a 99.996% accuracy rate. AND everything counts as a charged complaint. If you exceed 4, then you get charged 2-5 dollars a complaint. They even charge you for late delivery, when their printing is late.....that requirement is only a few steps away from Six Sigma standards which people are paid 6-8 figures to get to,
Back to the new distributor. It takes at least 3 weeks on a well maintained, sticker-ed marked route to learn the route. If the previous carrier did not mark mailboxes with colored stickers it could easily take a month or longer to learn a route to an acceptable level to actually meet the complaint ratio and finish on time. Based on the stories you did not have old carriers teaching the new ones, so this would compound the problem even more.
i have seen this time and time again. Carriers used to be unionized. They used to get benefits and good pay. They used to get millage. They used to actually get tips from MOST of their customers.
But i guess this is what happens when the execs at the newspaper think because it sounds like an easy job....they should have no problem finding people to work for nothing. Every time someone quits you easily go through 4-8 people before you get someone who can handle 7 days a week in mid winter.
Good luck this is going to continue to be a problem for at least another 2+ months
• Peter Holscher :
• Bill Weber :
The problem for the Globe now is, as readers (way more than 10% of circulation, I am sure) seek their news from other sources they will adapt their long-held habits and move on. The Herald, the Metro, local news radio and TV, the local print weeklies all will benefit as the Globe digs out of this disaster. Readers/listeners will find new avenues for their news fix, and advertisers will find new sources that can reliably deliver their ads.
A secondary effect of this mess is that readers will come to realize that the Globe apparently does value it's online operation more than print. With an increasing number of stories breaking online a day or more ahead of appearing in print, what message are readers to infer but that the paper comes second. At a moment like this, that's a bad message to be sending, to readers and to print advertisers.
• Paul Levy :
Imagine how quickly John Henry would have acted if the truckloads of Red Sox equipment had been delivered late to Spring training if they had hired a new delivery firm; or if the players arrived late to an away game because they hired a new travel agent. Heads would be rolling, and he would have personally appeared to the players and the fans to explain and apologize. When it matters to the business and to his sense of community obligation, he is forthright and visible.
Although you say that the money is still in print, there has been a clear strategy to divert funds to online and new "verticals" like Stat, while slowly degrading the print side's capabilities. All the industry observers have been noting those steps.
Although it is highly unlikely that this disruption is part of a disinvestment strategy in the print side of the business, it certainly is a step in that direction.
BTW, did you see any Stat staffers pitching in to help their print colleagues make deliveries? Any senior management on the business side?
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Globe CEO Mike Sheehan Sees Delivery Improvement This Week, 'Normalcy' Within 45 Days
by Greater Boston
• AWalk :
• Jack Callahan :
• MJDenaro :
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The Globe's Delivery 'Fiasco': 10 Points Of Outrage
by Emily Rooney
• Peter Holscher :
• Me Meoh :
the new carriers will be independent and have NO BENEFITS....no sick time, no vacations, no insurance...etc etc etc. Most carriers have to clear 500 papers just to be able to get to minimum wage after expenses on their cars.
People think its so easy to deliver, they don't understand this is not your paperboy route from the 70's anymore when they used to deliver a hundred papers over a few blocks
this is 300-600 papers per carrier over a 25-50+ mile stretch, where homeowners don't help in giving clear markings on their house numbers.
I've been doing this in CT for over 20 years and trust me, it takes well over a 3 weeks before a carrier knows his route good enough to meet the standards of service. Lets not even include all the "special location request" that customers want. A bad route that has not been managed by previous carriers, by marking mailboxes with stickers will take even longer.
All this for minimum wage if lucky.
Oh and remember to TIP your carrier, maybe they will stay around longer
• bpresto08 :
Poster Jack Goldman, a word of caution: I already subscribe to the NY Times, but that paper, too, has been delivered only a couple of times since 12/28. NY Times does have customer service that picks up; however, its last two promises of "redelivery" (weird term for something that never came in the first place) haven't been honored. Though the two papers use a different distributor, the same person had delivered both papers for years, and he was evidently let go in The Big Purge of Reliable Carriers. So evidently the Globe's dragged NYT delivery into the mud with it.
I have BBB complaints against both Globe and NYT pending. I urge others to complain to BBB as well, as consumers' negative BBB ratings last for many years.
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Jack Goldman
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