> The LA times peak circulation was in 1990 when they delivered 1,225,189 papers daily.
Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then.
I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon.
I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized product and how much abuse a newspaper can take, but still wonder if any papers took a stab at delivering other print products before the internet era.
A local press publisher in Croatia (Tisak) did just that: leveraged their distribution network for overnight package delivery.
The system works better for packages than post, since you send and pick up the parcel at their newsstands (there's always one nearby) at your leisure, avoiding the annoying "delivery failed, pick up at the post office" notices you'd get from the postman attempting delivery while you are at work.
It was also helped by the fact that the national postal service here is notoriously slow and not exactly reliable.
Interesting thought. Although perhaps the network you build to deliver a million identical papers just looks too different to what you'd need to deliver individual items?
The other major distribution network already visited every addressable location and took packages of varying sizes: the postal service.
Newspaper delivery was closer to 'real-time' - it was printed this morning, and arrived for consumption during morning coffee. Many children took paper routes for some cash and delivered on their bikes. You slow down paper delivery when you start sending along multiple shipments, weighing more, for various customers.
I never thought of this angle before, but imagine if a SV startup started a distribution model in 2019 depending on young teens riding their bikes around neighborhoods early in the morning before school. There'd be endless articles shaming them for child labor and for foisting their costs on to vulnerable workers.
Really not sure what to make of that. Other than maybe our outrage triggers have been honed to a razor's edge
Outrage about child labor in the bicycle delivery business is well over a century old, and for good reason [0].
Newspaper delivery, on the other hand, was a short before-school/after-school job (back when evening papers were a thing) that didn't particularly interfere with schoolwork, and had already been displaced by adults in cars in the 90s after our society ceded street space as automobile death zones instead of treating it as public space that children could be expected to ride bikes along safely[1].
And the thing about child paper routes is that they were considered a form of contractor. The newspaper would provide you the papers on credit, at the end of the month you would collect the amount of the bill from the customer, then pay the newspaper the amount you were billed. The billed amount may have been 50% or so, I don't recall the exact amount.
The outrage machine has damaged our civilization, and must be pushed back harshly, by the liberty machine.
I find it handy to evaluate the source of the outrage by this metric:
If they, personally, would not lay down their own lives in defense of whomever they are “protecting”, especially if they disagree with what that person is doing — they are somebody’s shills, and should be harshly disagreed with.
That's true, but I also feel like the "real-time" aspect is what made it so remarkable. Sure Amazon was useful when it just used standard mail for books, but it really became addictive when 2-day prime shipping became available.
Thinking about it though, I do think there's another big difference in that the stealing newspapers and reselling them isn't very profitable to potential criminals. Also, missing a paper delivery due to delivery error isn't the end of the world either.
So it seems like for Newspapers to really make any use of this network, they'd have to stick to delivering stuff that didn't majorly change their format or value, preferably that they could print on-demand themselves.
I guess the Sunday coupon print-outs could be considered an example of branching out a bit then?
I do recall that The Sunday Paper came with a [figurative] metric !@#$ ton of coupons inserted. I'd guess 'branching out' was really just selling slightly different advertising/marketing on Sundays.
When I lived in Solna in northern Stockholm, the same municipality that houses most of Karolinska Institutet one of the worlds top non english-speaking medical schools, I noticed the hospital using the nightly newspaper distributor to deliver letters about appointments and blood tests.
It was pretty sweet getting them at night, leaving the test in the morning and having results in 24 hours from the doctor ordering the tests.
My wife and her brother made pretty decent money as 11-14 year olds delivering papers in their neighborhood. About 80% of houses got at least the Sunday edition.
When I was 11-13, I did the same. I made about $15/hr in 1990, which was pretty baller for a 6th grader. Hell, there are people who wish they were making that today. I eventually took a pay cut to hire my older brother so I could sleep in on weekends. I blew most of my money on gadgets in the radio shack catalog and I don't regret a minute of it.
Wow, I had no idea that city papers had such robust delivery networks back then.
I can almost imagine an alternate timeline where papers might have survived by leveraging that network to deliver books or other items from a catalog before Amazon.
I suppose their scale was in part only possible due to their consistently sized product and how much abuse a newspaper can take, but still wonder if any papers took a stab at delivering other print products before the internet era.