Mag mark-up

Sophia Purcell from Rathmines describes herself as an ardent magazine reader who spends large amounts of cash on glossies every month. She is wearily accustomed to the dubious prices charged here for British magazines and has read “the many excuses offered on your page and have accepted them to a degree”. But a recent savage hike in the price of OK magazine has prompted her to get in touch.

“I have been buying it nearly every week for the last three years and the price (depending of course on where you get the magazine and how close to the city centre!) has always been roughly €3.67.” A couple of weeks back, however, she was dismayed to see it suddenly climb in price to €4.52. “I was shocked to see in a space of one week a magazine go up a euro with no explanation,” she writes. “I double-checked in other shops to make sure and then discovered that on the front of the magazine, the recommended retail price (RRP) is given as the above said price.” She asked if we could find out why a magazine would increase its price by almost a euro.

Well we did a quick search on the web and found a press release from the National Federation of Retail Newsagents in Britain which said that OK had decided to increase its price by such a hefty sum for a single week at the beginning of this month because it contained some class of exclusive feature that OK felt certain people wouldn’t mind paying extra for (some pictures of Charlotte Church and Gavin Hastings with their new baby and the news that she had gone into labour in B&Q, as it turns out).

Then we visited a number of Dublin newsagents and saw that the price was still at the higher level.

So we contacted the wholesalers, Eason, who told us that it had been informed by the publishers ahead of the Charlotte Church issue that the cover price was temporarily increasing from £2 to £2.50 although no indication was given when - or indeed if - the price would revert. According to the missive from OK , it wants to “invest heavily in making OK the best value in the market”. How, you might ask, can it claim to be providing better value by raising its prices so significantly? OK, the magazine has included two “free” supplements, Hot Stars and US OK , in recent issues, but readers may also wonder how something that has a sterling cover price of £2.50 (€3.58) could end up costing €4.52 in the Republic. We’ve covered this before and apparently the wholesalers use a ready reckoner which is updated every quarter to determine the sterling-euro conversion rate. Higher distribution costs, overheads and VAT rates are also blamed for the Irish and British prices being so out of line.