Screwed by the Tribune
It sure sounded like progress. And sensitively achieved, at that. The Tribune noted that the ten-year renewable contracts signed by most distributors permitted such a change with as little as 30 days’ warning. But “to allow for an orderly transition of business,” five months’ notice was being given.
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Hardly a typical distributor, Engle is a former Sun-Times circulation chief. He said in court that Howard Hay, the Tribune’s vice president for circulation, personally urged him to get into the distribution business. Yet when Engle closed the deal 13 months ago, Hay already knew the Tribune was making plans to stick it to its distributors.
Last October 27, Hay mailed all the distributors a form letter with the bad news. One at a time, they were summoned to the Tower and given terms: take what we offer for your subscription list and come on board as agents. Or, you can let an arbitrator fix the price. But if that’s the way you go, someone else will deliver the Tribune. They offered Engle $350,000 for his list, less than half what he’d paid for his business, even though selling Tribunes gave him three-quarters of his income.
But no longer. As of April 11 he’s got only the 200 Sun-Timeses to deliver, and the $500 income is down to zero. “I had to fire one kid,” he told us the other day at breakfast (all he had was coffee), “and lay off the office helper who did the billing. It’s me and three kids now. They deliver on bikes and I deliver in the truck.”
“Nothing. Blank stare.”
We called Daniel Gallivan. We asked him how he could have watched Guzik sink everything he had into a distributorship knowing what the Tribune was about to do to it.
