So while I was at work on Sunday just after we'd opened up and I'd spent the last hour filling all the Sunday papers with all their magazines (that's right, if you buy a Sunday paper with a shed load of magazines then some poor sod has had to fill each and everyone of them...in this case me) and left them looking very presentable I was slightly perplexed and annoyed when customer came and messed up my display. This may seem petty to you and it probably is but this was 8am on a Sunday morning so I was still in sleep/grumpy mode but I was getting quite annoyed at the apparent disregard for all my hard work. It wasn't the fact they were buying the papers, I mean that's what they're there for, it's why I spend so much time filling them; so they can be bought. No the thing that was really grating on me was the way in which they were being ruined. I make sure that when I put the papers out I put the crumpled copy (there's generally always one misfit in the bunch) towards the back of the pile so you only get that one if you're late in the day or more often than not so it doesn't get bought at all. Basically so if you're an early riser and you come for your morning paper there's a nice uncrumpled copy for you to choose from so I don't expect customers to rifle through the papers and pull out one from the middle of the pile or five back. Or if you are going to do that then I definitely don't expect you to leave them looking shoddy. I mean what is wrong with the top copy...why do so many people choose to ignore that top copy, it's not going to bite them, it's exactly the same as the half crushed one they are so adamant to have. Someone hasn't come along and urinated all over the first copy of every paper, it's exactly the same. Surely common sense suggests it's easier and less effort to just take the top copy? Surely? I can understand it to an extent if you were buying something like milk and you wanted the longest date possible, fine there I will accept if you're going to get the milk right at the back (unless someone has failed to rotate the stock properly in which case the joke is on those riflers who will go to all that effort for the lesser date) but this isn't milk, these are newspapers we are talking about. Something that is exactly the same no matter where and when during the day you buy it...apart of course from that one copy I found that had a different back page to the others. It was the Sunday morning after the David Hay/Dereck Chisora fight and every page back of this particular paper was covering that apart from the last copy which ran with a story about the Newcastle captain Fabricio Coloccini which was obviously the back up story in case the fight the night before was either a damp squib or ran too late into the night for the presses to run with it. As it happened I took that paper home with me because I was far more interested in the football story than the fight but anyway in normal circumstances every paper will be the same as the last one. So I go back to my original point; what on earth is wrong with the top copy? I was even tempted to leave a note in the top copy for that brave soul who took one for the team and took that dreaded top copy...but by this point I had woken up a bit and my sleep/grumpy attitude had been shrugged off slightly and doing that seemed far too much effort for something so trivial.
This is an issue that I'm sure will have puzzled newspaper retailers for years and may be one of those unanswerable questions (primarily because nobody actually cares) and I am happy for those people to take which ever paper they wish...as long as they leave my display looking nice and tidy...otherwise they will get a glare and maybe...just maybe even a tut. You have been warned!
Just as a side note, the publishing of this blog was delayed slightly due to the phone ringing and it being another bloody cold call causing the internet to be lost momentarily.
