MagWest Newsstands thrives in downtowns

Thanks to the Duffey team, the old-fashioned, friendly downtown newsstand still flourishes in Northern Colorado and Wyoming.The Duffey team is John and Mary Ann Duffey. In 1970, when they needed a retail outlet for the periodicals they distributed through Mountain States News Distributors, a company John Duffey took over from his father, the Duffey team decided to open its first newsstand in downtown Cheyenne.
This decision and the “old-fashioned” concept they developed of a downtown newsstand have managed to parlay their retail company, MagWest Newsstands, into a $5 million enterprise which today operates 13 newsstands – all with downtown addresses – in Colorado, Wyoming and Arizona.
In 1995, the Duffeys sold the wholesale distributorship principally handled by John Duffey, but retained the retail end of the business, MagWest. John turned his attention to other business interests, while Mary Ann continued to run the newsstand enterprise.
“I think we truly are filling a niche in the market that wasn’t there,” Duffey said, because “the supermarkets and discount stores just simply do not carry the large display of magazines that are available.”
Duffey’s newsstands do. Like a library of periodicals, they regularly carry some 3,000 different titles, adding more every day.
As expected, general-interest publications stock the shelves, but Duffey believes these publications “just don’t matter to anybody any more.”
That, plus the trend of general publications to readily discount subscription rates and their availability at every discount and supermarket checkout, makes them “no longer a meaningful newsstand item, she said.
News magazines aren’t Duffey’s strong sellers, either.
“No matter how hard they work to be timely, they aren’t timely enough,” she said, pointing out that people are turning more to the Internet and newspapers for current news.
It’s the special-interest publications that are Duffey’s biggest sellers, those “narrow-focused magazines which are the growing thing in the magazine business,” she said.
They cover everything from automobiles to the zodiac, but “variety is necessary,” Duffy said, because “we don’t sell a thousand of anything; we sell twos and threes of a thousand things.”
Ninety percent of the same magazines are standard at all Duffey newsstands, as well as a variety of topo maps and tobacco products.
Also standard are local newspapers and out-of-state papers in steady demand, such as The New York Times. But transportation logistics largely determine which nonlocal papers are on hand.
“We actually make a special trip on Sundays to pick up The Times. These kinds of newspapers we lose money on,” Duffey said, “but they are a customer service.”
So what’s different about MagWest that has made it successful in the newsstand niche for the last 26 years?
Duffey believes it’s been the decision to remain “old-fashioned,” to always locate in downtown areas, to keep the stores individualized to the wants and needs of each town’s customers and to practice a style of management that may seem outdated to some.
“We believe strongly in the downtown areas of a town,” she said, admitting that not all the towns they are in have a strong downtown area.
Despite some standardization, Duffey manages to make each store an individual expression of the community it serves, “rather than stamping out little cookie-cutter stores,” she said.
Some carry books, both hardback and paperback. Some mingle the aroma of paper and print with that of fresh, hot popcorn. Others carry sidelines such as pipes, music selections and greeting cards.
One of Duffey’s management concepts is to hire hometown people to manage each local store and train them to respond to the store’s locale. Eventually, the managers are given the autonomy to do their own buying, hire and train employees, select the local publications the store will carry and research sources for oft-requested magazines.
A second concept is to develop a sense of continuity for the customers, many of whom Duffey described as “regulars, people who come in year after year.” With most managers remaining for 10 or 15 years and with little turnover among employees, a “friendship” develops between customers and employees, Duffey said.
Like when the manager of the Cheyenne store retired.
“People in town felt like they were losing their best friend because they had seen her for so many years,” Duffey said.
Keeping abreast of trends is important, too.
“For example, now a lot of bookstores are putting in coffee bars. That’s a concept we are exploring in a couple of our stores,” Duffey said.
A current product trend is quality-brand cigars, which the newsstands have added to their inventory.
In the area of expansion, Duffey says, “Bigger isn’t always better.
“We don’t try to go into a town where there is currently a newsstand,” Duffey said. As has been the case with many of their stores, “we wait til (a store) is for sale, or we don’t go into that town,” she said.
Duffey has considered other areas outside of downtown, but she said that is “not who we are or what we do.
“We don’t want to stretch out nationally or get so big we lose our ability to run individual stores,” she said.
To Duffey, that would mean having too many policies and procedures, “the cookie-cutter effect,” a situation Duffey wants to avoid.
MagWest’s outlets in Cheyenne and Loveland are called “City News.” Al’s Newsstand in Fort Collins and Woody’s in Greeley retained their names when MagWest bought them, a common practice for the company.
Other MagWest stores include three in Wyoming, two in Arizona and four in Colorado.
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