Things Placed In Front of The Magazine Rack: The Thanksgiving Turkey Edition

It's the weekend before Thanksgiving. One of the busiest weeks in the supermarket world. In the magazine business, it's the run up to the very busy Christmas season. Customers are in and out of the stores picking up all of the goodies they need for their Thanksgiving meals. Store traffic is way up.

We're hosting Thanksgiving this year and the cashier and I had a good laugh when I announced that I'd probably be seeing her at least six more times this week (I'll most likely break that promise by a few extra visits).

On the one hand, I can understand why stores will place additional displays in the check lanes. They're temporary, the manufacturer probably paid a lot for the displays, and it's hard to say no to ready cash when you're in such a thin margin business like the grocery business.

Of course, we publishers and our wholesalers also operate on a very thin margin and it costs a lot of up front money to be in the check out so...

Magazines, chocolates and pretzels all go together. Just not this way.

This does make it a little difficult to promote the expansion of check out pockets.

You certainly wouldn't want to catch a cold while you're bringing your new magazines home.

Higher end chocolates and an empty pocket FTW.

It's easy to say this is  a long standing problem (It is), and there's no easy solution (Certainly seems that way), but it also doesn't say a lot for how the retailers view our line of product. How do we change that?