Ahh, the old days. In the old days, my siblings and I had a paper route. We’d fold the papers into newsprint-stained canvas bags and deliver them by bike. We did it before 6 am Sunday mornings and after school the other days. We passed the route down to other kids we knew when we were old enough to get fast food jobs.
Kids on bikes don’t deliver my newspaper any more, and haven’t for some years. Adults in cars with very loud radios do it very early in the morning.
Is this because most papers are morning papers now and kids don’t have enough time before school? Do kids shun paper routes nowadays? Was it too hard for the publishers to coordinate an army of urchins? Is it too dangerous? Someone who works in the newspaper distribution world must know the answer to this one. Thanks.
I think it has to do mainly with adults realizing there was money to be made doing it. Same thing that happened to baseball cards. They used to be a thing kids collected, now it is big business and priced out of a kids allowance range. Plus some of the stuff BlinkingDuck said.
In my town the paper went from an afternoon delivery (when I used to do it) to a morning delivery which is a bit too early for most kids with school to go to.
Aaaah, Buffalo, New York … a living, breathing anachronism museum. Think of it as Williamsburg, only it portrays the 1970s.
Anyhow, children still deliver the newspaper in Buffalo – in an icon of Buffalo that to locals is as well known as the chicken wing, beef on weck, a black 97 Rock t-shirt, automotive rust, lake effect flurries, Irv Weinstein, an unemployment check or a 16 ounce bottle of Genny Cream – the blue Buffalo News wagon. It helps that the News is an evening paper – kids can run home from school, head over to a nearby house where bundles of broadsheet are dropped off, load up the wagon, and go. Newspaper delivery is unreliable as hell, but the locals won’t have it any other way.
As I recall, there was a minor spate of kidnapped/missing paper boys back in the early 80s – two from the Des Moines Register alone. Strangely, I don’t recall any paper girls being abducted.
Combine this with the child molestation/abduction hysteria of the 80s, as well as the American propensity to overreact to just about any perceived threat, it’s not too hard to imagine parents across the country pulling their kids off paper routes, fearing for their safety.
Also, as crc pointed out, many papers now use morning delivery; having kids out roaming the streets in the pre-dawn hours (many morning papers strive for delivery before 6AM) doubtlessly scared off lots of kids & parents.
FWIW-I did a story on this a few years back and the primary reason was predictably “money”.
Correctly done with enough subscribers, a newspaper route can be reasonably profitable. One of the people I interviewed actually delivered three different papers at the same time-A large daily, and two area papers. She said that it also allowed her to hold down other jobs thus bringing in more money.
From the newspapers’ standpoints they don’t care who delivers it as long as the paper gets out to the people with as few complaints as possible. The circulation managers of papers will tell you that for the most part there are fewer complaints about adults who deliver papers than about youths. Not that the young people are untrustworthy, but that they have many distraction.
Most small towns will employ youths to deliver their papers, but much of that is because young people will work cheaper. But many publishers will also say that kids carrying papers is good advertising for a paper - symbolizing investment in the community and so forth.
I delivered a morning paper from 6th grade - 12th grade. So did the kid across the street (different paper). Due to the geography of the area, bikes weren’t an option, so we walked the route, and still managed to be in school for 7:20 classes. So, it can technically be done by “children,” but it isn’t really practical. I know that shortly after I went to school, the paper I delivered (I didn’t work for them, but was an independent contractor. It was a lovely business arrangement for them) phased out most of the kids and phased in adults tossing them out of trucks.
Along with delivering the paper (every single morning no matter what) once a month, the paper would send me a bill for the papers that magically appeared on my doorstep each morning. In return, I had to go and visit each of the houses I delivered to, hope they were in, hope that their dogs wouldn’t attack me, and hope that someone inside felt like paying me that month. I got to keep the difference between what I collected and the bill (way less than minumum wage for the amount of work that took). The people who were never at home (or at home at hours later or earlier than any reasonable parent would let their teenage daughter knock on strange doors at night) ended up paying a bit sporadically. The number of people who seemed to have no control over how to spend $8 of the household money each month is absolutely amazing.
My “boss” told me that due to the level of work it took, turnover was incredibly high. Most kids didn’t last more than 3-6 months. Every time someone quit, they’d have to take time rehiring and retraining (which increased the cost to the newspaper, as adults tended to charge at least minimum wage). Also, most of the short term carriers tended to get huge amounts of customer complaints, which didn’t help the newspaper’s image. Shortly after I got away to college, the newspaper began switching over to the truck system, and bill paying by mail. I know that one truck covered at least 4 or 5 delivery areas. The newspapers could ensure that people were paying, and I’m guessing they had more control over consistent newspaper delivery.
Kind of sad, I did most of my essay writing while wandering the streets at 5&6 am. I got to see the weather change (which admittedly sucked in november in Seattle - but was glorious around May), and spy into my neighbors homes, and get a great deal of exercise, and see more sunrises… Oh well.
I never had a route of my own, but I filled in for some buddies when they had something to do or were sick. Two things had to happen for adults to start delivering the way that they do today. One amarinth mentioned, which was the paying of the bills by mail. I delivered for a friend for a year on Saturdays. He had one customer that he couldn’t get during the week and I always had to collect the money at that house. The other big change was that our customers expected the paper on the porch. This was in the 50’s and we didn’t have plastic bags, so if it looked like rain the paper was to be put behind the screen door. Sometimes you would forget a house, but the biggest complaint was about us going across the lawn. One customer that was very hard to deliver to, would lay in wait for us and coming running out yelling if we didn’t leave by the walkway. Today if they hit your driveway that is all that counts, enabling adults in cars to deliver the paper. Oh, this was in a suburb of Atlanta.
The main two reasons locally were to provide daily morning delivery and to simplify management. Locally, most kids’ routes might have had 100-125 papers. For a while before daily morning delivery was implemented, the paper started consolidating subscribers into 500-600 papers per route. This resulted in reducing the numbers of cariers (making management easier) but was too large for a kid to do an a bike, and the paper wanted to go to morning delivery anyway (which isn’t exactly practical for a kid to to), so it was the combination of both these reasons.
Also now many papers attach an investment to operating a paper route: locally, for a residential route, you have to pay the person who currently “owns” the paper route what it would make in a year (up front), and when you get rid of it you get to “sell” it for what it makes in a year, --the next person has to pay you. If you give lousy service you end up losing customers, and losing money when you eventually sell the route. This discourages people who aren’t committed to the task from bothering at all, epecially since under certain circumstances the newspaper can revoke the route from you and not return your purchase price at all. If you buy a small route that grows large, you do make a few bucks on the sale, but usually not all that much. The newspaper company can split a route or join adjacent routes if they get too far from 500-600 papers each, and then can also switch you to a smaller route if they pay you the purchase difference (the amount you paid vs. the smaller route’s income). This paper does let you own more than one route, but you have to have your own help delvering because you can’t deliver so many papers within the couple hours time limit you have (you get them about 3 AM and normally all papers have to be delivered by 6 AM).
Rural routes get paid based on number of customers but there’s also an allowance for milage. Normal residential route carriers prefer to do their own billing, but some high-crime areas are direct-bill only to the newspaper through the mail, and the newspaper pays you for delivering.
~ For commercial routes (van/truck routes that deliver whole bundles to stores or vending machines) you have to pay your first week’s bill in advance, and this can be as much as $15,000 to $20,000 up front. Once again, they pay you an extra week after you sell the route (so you don’t really “lose” money, except to route contraction/loss of customers), but it discourages slackers from applying. - MC
Here in my area of the UK kids still deliver papers, both morning and evening. Instead of working for the newpapers, they work for the local new agents (small local shops that sell magazines, papers, snacks, etc). There are lots of news agents, so each kid’s route isn’t huge. Plus you can get different papers delivered by the same kid at the same time. We can also still get milk delivered to the door.
I too had a paper route in a small town when I was 11-13. I was aggressive in recruiting and managed to get my route from 58 papers to 260 something though one of them was absorbing another route where a kid quit in the middle of winter. When I quit they divided it into three but didn’t want to do it till I quit because they didn’t want to ‘punish me’ for getting more subscriptions.
The manager said he got more calls concerning me than any other paperboy he had. I would tend to do things like pick a few houses and deliver papers there for about 2-3 weeks hoping that when I quit doing it they would miss the paper and subscribe. They would call the manager and sometimes be quite upset and firm about not paying. He ordered me to stop at first but I refused and he laid off when he say that it worked with about a 10% success rate. Cool.
There was one really, really weird thing I remember about delivering. I would start on a long block and start delivering. I would then ‘zone out’ and come out of it at the end of the long block - about 75 houses delivered or so.
I mean the zoning out was so complete I wouldn’t remember delivering the papers! At first I would actually go back and check the homes to see if a paper was there and it always was. So weird and I worried if it was mentally healthy.
Thanks to everyone for the responses. Hey TV time, can you link to the article you referred to?
MC–you have to buy a route now? How does it work that you pay the person you buy it from, but the newspaper can cancel your delivery contract–would the newspaper have to reimburse you for the purchase price if they decided they didn’t like the way you did the job? And could you please tell them to turn down their radios?
You’re not exactly buying it, but putting up a bond. You pay the paper in either case, but they pass that money on to the last person who had the route. Under certain circumstances explained in advance, they can revoke it without returning your bond.
~ This is the St Louis MO-US area, others might be different. - MC