Magazine Sales in the Overseas Military

Here is one piece of magazine news that has gone a bit viral: the U.S. military has decided to stop its magazine program in its overseas commissaries. If you are interested in distribution and sales on the overseas military bases, you probably noticed it over the past couple of weeks popping up in various newsletters and updates.

The U.S. military overseas is actually one of the big sources of distribution for magazines with foreign sales. That makes sense of course—the audience is English speaking and interested in American content. And since families are often involved, there is an audience for many different categories of publication.

I spoke to a distributor that sends magazines into the military bases throughout the world. The commissaries, this distributor explained, account for a bit less than 3% of all the sales on the military bases. The commissaries are the grocery stores on the post; in these food stores there are several dozen publications that have had placement at the checkouts. Located a few yards from the commissaries are the Post Exchanges, a department style store servicing the base. Here the vast majority of all magazines are sold. It seems likely that those outlets will pick up the sales lost in the commissaries.

An executive at a major national distributor, whom I contacted for her take on this, explained to me that a bigger problem might exist from the perspective of magazine sales: the closing of military bases and the reduction of troop levels worldwide. Distribution and sales of magazines in the military waxes and wanes with the numbers of troops on base. It’s one of the exporters’ challenges to keep abreast of those movements and adjust magazine orders accordingly. The expansion of U.S. military presence leads to robust sales of American magazines throughout the world. Clearly the reverse is also true.

So while this bit of news from our military commissaries isn’t going to make a big difference in to the overseas sales of most publications, publishers might still want to keep any expected changes in the military in mind when forecasting their foreign sales.