By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
July 13, 2000
SuperStand wants to be to magazines what Blockbuster is to videos.
To that end, the Texas-based chain of “America’s Magazine Superstore”–which has five stores in Houston and four in Dallas–has expanded to launch its first out-of-state stores right here in the Chicago area.
The first opens today in Old Town. Four other SuperStands will make their debuts in the next few weeks: the Schaumburg store on Saturday, the Arlington Heights store on July 17, Highland Park on Aug. 8 and Deerfield on Aug. 15.
The stores, which average 3,000 square feet in size, are set to carry more than 3,500 magazines. Which means that folks jonesing for their fix of All About Beer, Watch Time for Women and Bonzai Today can find these bizarre titles pronto. And unlike bookstores where magazines might play a secondary role, periodicals and a selection of local, national and international newspapers–from the Sun-Times to the Boston Globe to France’s Le Monde–get the star treatment at SuperStand.
The three-year-old chain no longer has a monopoly on the magazine stand market. In 1998, Barnes & Noble followed suit by opening Ink Newsstand–the bookstore’s stand-alone magazine shop–in Meridien, Conn.; Austin, Texas; Cary, N.C.; and San Diego, Calif. And a chain of Joe Muggs newsstands have popped up in the South, from Mississippi to Georgia.
In Chicago, City Newsstand’s 1,100-square-foot store is crammed with 6,000 different national and international publications, including obscure titles such as Toy Farmer, Varmint Masters and International Wrist Watch. Its two Chicago stores are so popular that another branch will open this fall at the site of the old Chicago-Main Newsstand in Evanston.
And to compete with stores such as SuperStand, some bookstore conglomerates have beefed up their magazine sections to carry up to 1,000 titles, according to Samir Husni, head of the magazine program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
These cavernous stores are a far cry from the small, mom-and-pop operated stands that used to dot the streets of Chicago during their 1940s heyday. The popularity of newsstands as we knew them began to decline in the 1950s with the advent of television, according to the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA). Fewer folks went to kiosks to pick up the evening paper, opting instead to watch the evening news.
“Until a few years ago, the only city where you saw a lot of newsstands was New York City, and that’s because the foot traffic here is so high,” says Michael Pashby, the MPA’s executive vice president of consumer marketing. “One of the reasons why stores like SuperStand are popping up is that there has been a growth in the urban [populations where they are opening].”
Some 65,000 retail outlets in the United States sell periodicals, but only about 10 percent of those stores are focused exclusively on magazines. According to the MPA, there are 4,800 magazines published annually in the United States. The University of Mississippi’s Husni says the number is closer to 5,200, and should escalate to 5,900 by the end of the year.
“Magazines are marvelous traffic generators,” says Husni. “One of the reasons that stores are devoting more space to them is because they know that people who frequent newsstands are habitual buyers.”
A small drugstore may stock a few dozen titles. A larger discount store might carry between 400 to 800 magazine titles.
“Does the public want to read 3,500 different magazines?” says Pashby. “Probably not. But the promise of what these stores can offer customers is their unique selling point.”
Sure, you’ll find Glamour, Time and Sports Illustrated at SuperStand. But the store also carries some more unusual titles, such as:
Alien
All About Beer
Animal Fair
Aroma Therapy Quarterly
Bonzai Today
Code
Famous Monsters of Film
Fangoria
Gadfly
Inside Kung Fu
Shuz
Tear Sheet
Watch Time for Women
SuperStand’s Top 10 sellers:
1. Maxim
2. In Style
3. O: The Oprah Magazine
4. Marie Claire
5. People
6. Town and Country
7. GQ
8. Shape
9. Playboy
10. Teen People
