It was quite flattering to discover that one of our readers had been to nine different stores in the Staffordshire, Cheshire, and Birmingham areas of England to try and get hold of a copy of the April issue of Wargames Illustrated magazine. On the flip side, it wasn’t so good that he had to go to nine different stores to find a magazine! Wi412 on the shelf in Tesco. After said reader got in touch with us - understandably disgruntled that he had had to go to so much effort to get hold of a copy of Wi - we got in touch with our distributor feeling equally disgruntled about the situation. Our well-travelled customer had provided us with the names and addresses of the nine stores visited, so we were able to contact them to find out why they didn’t have a copy of the magazine. It should be noted that these were not random stores - we were not contacting Pets at Home and asking why they didn’t have copies of Wargames Illustrated - these were/are stores that should be stocking the magazine, should because we pay them to do so! It will probably come as a surprise to anyone outside of the publishing industry to learn that if you want your magazine on the shelves of newsagents and supermarkets around the globe you have to pay for the privilege. Our bill for being stocked in WHSmith, for example, is well over £10,000 a year. So, you can see why I get quite chagrined when stores that we pay to be in are greeting customers who ask for Wi with comments like “We don’t stock it” or “Never heard of it” or (to paraphrase Sigmund Freud's kettle-story) “We’ve never stocked it and we won’t be stocking it again”. We rang all nine of the stores that Reader X visited and got a full gamut of responses, ranging from “We’ve never received our stock” to “We’ve sold out”. WHSmith seems to be particularly unreliable not just with ensuring they get stock on the shelf from the beginning of the month but also with helping customers out with their inquiries. They are still our number one seller, though, and they do offer a ‘Just Ask’ scheme whereby they will reserve a copy of the/any magazine if customers ‘just ask’ for it to be reserved. So that's worth doing if you do have trouble getting hold of Wi. Orcs Nest in central London - stocking Wi for over 25 years. Our presence in the larger supermarkets: Tesco Extra, ‘big’ Sainsbury's, etc. is growing, and they seem to be more reliable at getting magazines on the shelf on time and making them
