I’ve seen homeless people in Chicago selling newspapers (real ones like the trib or suntimes, not streetwise) on the street.
Dollars to doughnuts they didn’t even pay for the first one, ie they stand there until somebody buys one and then catch the door before it closes.
Sometimes they sell the free papers in those - er, not sell - you just don’t have to pay, you open the door and get a paper. Keeps the paper protected from the elements, I guess, better than a rack - unless, as Bitegeist mentions above, there’s a hard rain and no overhang.
There’s something online somewhere on how paper boxes breed at corners - there’ll be one, for the local newspaper or whatever, and next year there’ll be six - Free Times, the local apartment rental thing, three things you’ve never heard of and would never read, etc.
First, another movie reference: in Clerks, Dante puts coins in a newspaper box, takes the entire stack, and puts them out for sale in his shop.
There was once a Berkeley periodical that accepted a lot of very explicit ads and nude photos – sold in newspaper boxes for rather a lot ($3 or so, I think).
Most newspapers get the vast majority of their income from adverts, and they don’t have to worry that much about vending machines. Those, and home delivery, are just cream off the top. Notice the free weeklies in many large cities.
Let’s not forget the most important feature of the box:
If I run into the store, I have to spend .54 for my .50 newspaper. From the box I can get it for a mere $.50!
Since we are doing movie/TV reference, there is the Simpson’s epsisode where Homer leaves Maggie in the box when getting his paper and panics when he realizes he doesn’t have any more change.
I saw many of these as well, but upon closer inspection ( 
) they were all for the free escort advertisements that are handed out in between casinos on the strip. (Strippers Direct to your Hotel Room!)
It’s not on the “Maryland” editions anyway, which are the ones I read. They might still say that on the DC editions, where that sort of shenanigans is more likely.
There was a beer commercial a while back that showed beer being sold in these same newspaper vending machines, and men paying for one beer, and then taking all the beer in the machine. The tag line for the commercial was something like: “That’s why we don’t sell them like that.”
Yes, outside my local subway station there’s a row of about twenty: four daily newspapers, two weekly alternative newspapers, two free commuter dailies, two multi-compartment free-advertising-magazine boxes (one for apartment rentals and condos, the other for various types of vehicles), one box for the local neighbourhood weekly, one for the Learning Annex, and I don’t remember what else.
Oddly, this almost never seems to occur. As others have mentioned, it’s probably because mose people don’t really want more than one newspaper. The only place I have encountered it was when I worked at GM in Oshawa: when heading into the plant in the morning, people would frequently hold the Toronto Sun boxes open and others would grab what they could.
I believe that a much higher percentage of a newspaper’s bottom line is from ads than from actual sale of the paper (although of course the higher the circulation the higher the ad rate) so this likely explains why this particular commodity can be sold in this fsahion.
When I worked 3rd shift in an auto parts plant, the paper boxes got filled about 1:30 am. One of the first customers was always a guy from the tool room. He’d pump in a fistful of coins, then reach in and take 10 papers for the toolmakers.
As the editor of a small daily in rural Colorado, we have those types of racks and for the most part we don’t have many stolen.
Occasionally we will have somebody grab a handful, apparently, but seldom does it continue for more than a day or two. I think they realize that they can only read one at a time.
And really, little of our bottom line comes from paper sales. One of the big trends in newspapers today is free papers.
In some German cities (the ones I know of are Munich and Nuremberg) there are dispensers without any locks on the door. You can freely open the box and take out your paper, and you’re supposed to drop the price. I guess dishonesty losses are slight, for the reasons already named.