A shortage of selling space for magazines?

I aim next week to visit the Monocle shop, which is said to be very small and sells mainly back issues of the Monocle magazine.

Looking up the address on its website I flicked over to the listing of what's in the current issue. A few of the headlines caught my attention and I made a note to buy the December/January issue before it was off sale. I also made a note not to buy it from WHSmith, which is easy as it has outlets at Paddington and Reading stations, which are two parts of my commute. Instead I got off my bus early with the intention of visiting the newsagent at Angel.

As I approached, I could see the shutters were up. I had been an infrequent visitor to this shop. While it had a big magazine range, its service was poor. Nothing really made you want to journey two minutes off route to visit.

No problem, I thought, I will go to the shop that we buy our newspapers from. It is tiny and used to be stuffed full of magazines. Now it is tiny and stuffed full of snack products. Its magazine range is the usual suspects. It has two and a half shelves of magazines, not fully stocked, where it used to have seven crammed full.

I turned around and walked back to the kiosk outside Angel tube station, where the issue was available. But it is a shock to find as a consumer that the easy access to magazines that you take for granted can disappear, almost overnight.

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