Screwed by the Sun-Times, Part 2
In April, having faced down the distributors in court, the Tribune did the deed. It switched from these independent wholesalers to “agents” who were paid flat fees to service retailers and subscribers. Yet in mid-May, the Sun-Times sent the distributors another upbeat letter encouraging them to continue carrying the paper. “We are . . . offering you new programs of promotional and competitive allowances to help you compete . . .” exclaimed Don Piazza, executive vice-president of the Chicago Sun-Times Inc. “We are very excited because for the first time we are able to offer substantial incentives for increases in our circulation.”
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When the daily Sun-Times was 25 cents, the distributors had been buying it at a wholesale price of 14.3 cents a copy. Now the Sun-Times was upping its newsstand price to 35 cents. In the past, whenever a daily paper raised its newsstand price, the wholesale price went up half that amount. If these were normal times, the distributors could have expected to begin paying about 19 cents a copy (which is what a couple dozen independent distributors still handling the Tribune are now paying).
But the Sun-Times gave the distributors a way out.
Six distributors went to court, alleging vertical price fixing, and asking for a temporary restraining order to halt this new pricing structure. Judge George Marovich refused to grant it (as before him another federal judge had refused to block the Tribune’s shift from distributors to agents). Some distributors then came to terms. “The people who hoped to survive signed it,” a large suburban distributor told us. “But a lot of dealers said the hell with it. I think the wide majority did not sign.”
“I’ll tell you another thing they’re doing that really stinks,” said one distributor whose life has been made a nightmare by both papers. “I’ve been getting along fine with those people for years and now they’re forcing me out and when my customers are calling down there looking for the paper, they’re bad-mouthing me–this guy was no good anyway, he was charging too much. . . . The Tribune at least came in and offered money on a more or less businesslike basis, but the Sun-Times is just skunks. Absolute skunks.”
Oh, I could tell you who I am. That would be the easy thing. But a man who takes advice is a man who’s in someone’s debt. And when you’re in someone’s debt, you can’t help but hate them and want to destroy them. And a president can’t go around destroying everyone he hates because–well, it just doesn’t work out, that’s why. So let me identify myself merely as America’s foremost elder statesman and let it go at that.
