Late newspaper deliveries into wholesale depots improved by 4% in November compared to the month before, accord­ing to analysis by Better Retailing.

Despite several days of storms, snow and floods, average late deliveries by publishers per week fell from 317 in October to 305 in November, likely resulting in smoother delivery times into stores.

The trend was driven by improvements in lorries from Daily Mail and News UK’s joint printers.

The data, pulled from National Distribution Monitor, measures in­stances in which depots reported publishers turn­ing up at least 15 minutes after their scheduled arrival times.

Depot with most late deliveries revealed

In an effort to improve transparency and track publisher performance, Better Retailing is hoping to publish this analysis monthly. This includes which titles were most commonly late, and a leaderboard of the depots suffering from the most delays caused by tardy publisher arrivals.

In this first instalment, Smiths News’ Worcester depot received more late deliveries from publishers than any other depot dur­ing November.

Chaz Chahal’s Simply­Fresh – The Forge shop in Inkberrow, Worcester­shire, is served by this depot. Asked about Better Retailing’s findings, he said he’d “never received on-time arrivals regularly”, adding he previously had no way of knowing if his experi­ence was better or worse than that of stores in other parts of the UK.

He said: “Seeing this data will only be helpful if something comes of it. You want results from naming and shaming. I wouldn’t usually notice if an individual title was late, I’d just know I’d had late newspapers.”

Better Retailing’s analysis explained

The top table shows how many of that title’s deliveries to wholesale depots were late in the average week each month, as well as the percentage change. The bottom table shows the 10 UK depots that received the most late deliveries from publishers. These figures are taken from data gathered by National Distribution Monitor. The figures do not take into account cut-off extensions – where publishers
agree among themselves that their arrival times can be later without counting as late.

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