The NFRN writes: News wholesalers were this week urged to come clean and admit that carriage charges are now their major source of income and not the small contribution towards supplying small and remote retailers that they were once claimed to be.
Challenging the wholesale companies to look again at the carriage charges they apply, the NFRN’s News Operations Chairman Colin Fletcher said: “Why should newsagents have to pay separately for their newspapers and magazines to be delivered to their shops when every other product that he or she receives comes at a delivered price?
“Not only is this a glaring abuse by wholesalers, it comes with the blessing and sanction of the publishers. To make matters worse, these carriage charges are no longer the “small contribution from retailers towards the cost of serving retailers in remote and rural areas that would otherwise be uneconomic to supply” but are the main, if not only, source of profit for wholesalers and a major drain on the viability of small retailers.”
NFRN National President Alan Smith agreed, adding: “Publishers just love carriage charges as their very existence means they can pay wholesalers a pittance. In return for exclusive territories, wholesalers make up for their uneconomic contracts by imposing carriage charges on captive retailers. Combined with the fact that publishers also control cover prices, it beggars belief that the Office of Fair Trading allows this thoroughly corrupt system to continue, and it is about time that the Competition Authorities woke up and put a stop to this abusive practice.”
