I’d just sent out ANOTHER round of bills to errant payers in the hope that some of them might just realise that having a newspaper delivery actually costs money and isn’t a free service at the behest of yours truly. This is the conversation I had on the telephone with one female customer who had just received her third bill:
Customer: I just got this bill. It’s over £50. I can’t understand why it is so high?
Shopkeeper: Have you been into the shop and paid your bill recently? Maybe it was a mistake on our part?
Customer: No, I haven’t paid anything.
Shopkeeper: Well that’s probably why your bill is high. Let me check it on the computer. Yes, you have an evening newspaper six days a week, at a weekly cost of £3.06. We’ve been here for about seventeen weeks now so that brings your bill to £52.02.
Customer: But why is it so high?
Shopkeeper: Because you haven’t paid anything since we took over the shop in September?
Customer: It’s too much. I’ll have to cancel my papers.
Shopkeeper: OK. Will you be settling your bill? We can do it in instalments if you can’t afford it.
Customer: I’ll come into the shop, but cancel the papers immediately.
Shopkeeper: OK
And so you have an example of extreme idiocy in action. Action and consequence has no place in this woman’s world, neither does the satisfying slap of an evening newspaper hitting her mat signal the fact that she owes me money with every delivered issue. It needn’t have been like that if she’d had the wherewithal to actually pay her bill in a timely fashion instead of ignoring the bills I sent out.
Experience of being a shopkeeper has taught me a lot about people. It is a social science, if you will. The majority of folks are honest, decent and timely bill-payers, but there seems to be this small percentage that thinks it can run up a bill without any consequence. One guy was having two newspapers saved for him daily on account. He was a regular who did pay in those first few months, but then I noticed his bill spiralling upwards. I sent a bill, I sent another – both ignored. Eventually The Missus decided to give him a call about his bill and was told flatly that he had no money and couldn’t pay us. So why let the bill run up. Oh well, today he got a threatening letter and a demand giving him 14 days to give us some cash before I set my solicitor on his ass.
Am I hard and unfeeling? No, I just need the money to survive. The margins in the newspaper business are small and I face weekly newspaper bills of up to £2500 – all the while, at any one time, there can be up to £5300 being owed on the home news delivery rounds. So there you go.
Remember folks, if these defaulters tried the same thing on with the gas or electricity company, they’d end up cold and in the dark. With me, they just have no newspaper. This is why we are always at the bottom of the list.

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