On Thanksgiving morning, I went to the corner to get the Duluth News Tribune and the Star Tribune. Instead of copies of the DNT, there was a sign that the DNT was available only at convenience stores. Well, this is not convenient to me because the nearest convenience stores are about a mile away.
So, we reversed our normal order of newspaper reading and read a large part of the Star Tribune first.
We were going to our cabin and planned to buy a few things at the supermarket, and so we would get the DNT there. Surprise, they had none. I asked the head cashier about this, and she said they had a call in but it hadn't been returned.
I needed gas anyway and stopped at a gas station/convenience store. I put fifty bucks of gas in the tank and pulled out $51 to pay for the gas and the newspaper. Inside I picked up a DNT thicker than the normal Sunday paper. The clerk warned me that was only the ads and the real newspaper was in a different stack. I picked up a normal size paper and left the want ads behind; we would only put them directly in the recycle stack at home. I went to the register to pay for the gas and the paper, and the clerk told me I needed to pay another dollar. The Thanksgiving Day paper was two dollars!!!
Can't Forum Communications, the publisher of the DNT, live within its means? Shouldn't the advertisers be paying for all the extra paper and printing? Is Forum Communications being efficient by having all the ads left behind for the clerks to clean up?
How loud would the complaints be if any government agency suddenly doubled a fee or a tax? How loud would the cries of government waste be if an office threw out such a huge percentage of paper?
I bet we won't see any letters to the editor about this Thanksgiving waste, but we will continue to see letters about government living within its means. A while ago I asked Chuck Frederick, the opinion page editor, if he had gotten any letters about the 33-1/3% increase of the DNT (75 cents to one dollar). He replied, "Haven't gotten any letters about our price increase. Shh!" I read his reply with a smile. What else can he say? He probably has very little input into pricing decisions.
It is amazing what companies can get by with in price increases but governments are heavily criticized for the same or even smaller increases. People are complaining vociferously about property taxes going up about $100/year, but there are no published complaints about the cost of a newspaper going up $104/year.
Another wasteful practice of Forum Communications, that may or may not continue, is providing two copies of the weekly Budgeteer News to some of its customers. For as long as we've lived in Duluth, a free copy of the Budgeteer News has been thrown on our porch on every Saturday. A few weeks ago Forum Communications started putting it in the DNT delivered to the boxes. What need do I have for two copies of the same paper, of which I throw out two-thirds without even looking at?
I don't know if the doubling up will continue or not. There was no Budgeteer on our porch Saturday, and the Saturday DNT didn't contain it. However, there were some stories posted on the Budgeteer web site on Friday. Were there not enough articles to publish this week? We'll probably never know; corporations don't have to have the transparency that we demand from government (and often don't get).
Update: 2011-11-27 16:00 - Sometime after eight o'clock this morning, the Duluth Budgeteer was thrown on our porch. I just noticed a few minutes ago. I'll see next Saturday if the DNT resumes the double publication of the Budgeteer.
Update: 2011-11-27 18:03 - Paragraph about $100/year for tax/price increase added.
