A General Store Stopped Selling The Times. A Young Entrepreneur Stepped In.
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Version 0 of 1. Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together. In rural Barnard, Vt., the local general store was the only place you could get a copy of The New York Times or The Boston Globe. That was until the day last year that Barnard General Store announced that it would stop selling copies of out-of-town newspapers. On the local listserv, a sort of online forum, residents of the town shared every opinion they had on the decision. They criticized the general store for cutting off the community from print news. Some waxed poetic about the important differences between reading the news online and in print. A few even said that people who read The Times were snobs. The cries were heard, eventually making their way to Oliver Szott, a budding entrepreneur who had previously sold craft sodas at the farmers market, as well as his own electronic music online. After some suggestions and assistance from his mother and neighbor, Oliver, 14, opened up shop as the town’s newest, and only, purveyor of out-of-town newspapers. “I’ve read and flipped through a bunch of papers over time,” Oliver said. “Because of how my dad would read the paper, that kind of made me have an appreciation for print newspapers.” Print circulation for American newspapers is in decline. In 2018, weekday circulation dropped 12 percent from the previous year, while digital circulation rose by 6 percent during the same period, according to the Pew Research Center. The figures for Sunday circulation were similar. Some publications have slashed the number of days they produce and deliver print papers, and retailers like Starbucks have stopped selling newspapers altogether. In February 2018, the Barnard General Store announced that it would no longer carry copies of The Times or any other out-of-town publications because of a price increase by the store’s out-of-town newspapers distributor, White Mountain News. Under the new pricing, the general store would have had to pay the full retail cost of the papers to White Mountain News, in addition to the delivery fee. By August, Oliver had drawn up a plan for filling the demand by paying White Mountain News the full retail cost for the papers plus delivery, then selling them for retail plus a dollar surcharge. This would save passionate readers a drive of over 15 minutes to a neighboring town to pick up a copy of The Times. “This is what happens in remote America, where entrepreneurs take hold,” Mark Weitzel, the vice president of circulation operations at The Times, said about Oliver’s business. Oliver admitted that his foray into print news wasn’t driven by any romantic sentiments of newspapers or personal connections to the industry. Rather, he figured he could at least learn through this experiment how to better communicate with customers and suppliers, as well as how to notify potential customers about a product’s availability, as was the case with The 1619 Project, a Times initiative that examines slavery’s legacy in America. “When people heard about the special edition,” Oliver said, “some people who were not my regular customers showed up because they knew I was the newspaper guy.” In the beginning, Oliver sold copies of The Times, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal six days a week at a local church, pulling in a couple of regular weekday clients, and 14 regular customers plus walk-ins on Sunday. Later that fall, he relocated his business to his family’s home. But by April this year, weekday sales were slumping. So Oliver, too, cut back. He now sells the Sunday paper from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m., with only The Times and The Globe for sale. “A lot more people were upset about the discontinuance of the service at the general store than read the paper,” Ted Williamson, a longtime customer, said. Every weekend now, after assembling the dropped-off papers and their inserts, Oliver leaves stacks of the Sunday papers on the end of his family’s small, white-fenced porch. Although he monitors pickups through the windows while eating breakfast or doing homework, there’s a box for people to drop off $7 for a paper using the honor system. He sells around six copies of The Times and one of The Globe each week, which translates to $2 or $3 profit a week on average. Plus, Oliver’s mother, Pamela Fraser, said: “Every once in a while, he’ll get a tip.” Follow the @ReaderCenter on Twitter for more coverage highlighting your perspectives and experiences and for insight into how we work. |