One of the criticisms we occasionally hear about our stores is that we don’t hold magazines for our customers. In fact, this is only partly true. We don’t hold magazines for customers in Australia, but in New Zealand we’re absolutely happy to do so.

Why the differing approach?

Well, for the first year of our existence on this side of the Tasman, we did happily hold mags. Pretty quickly, though, it became apparent that only a mere 10% of customers would actually come to pick up the magazines that they so desperately wanted.

Different footy codes and mastery of vowel sounds notwithstanding, we’d always figured that Aussie and Kiwis are pretty much alike. Not so, in this case, however: customers in our Auckland stores will pick up their holds 99.999% of the time and for that reason, we’re happy to continue to do them.

Aussie mag lovers, believe us, the situation pains us as much as it pains you.

In most cases, we’re happy to say that you’ll very rarely miss out on the magazine you want.

Barring the odd freak first issue where demand hugely outstrips our supply, we’re pretty good at ordering the right amount of each magazine to each store to match demand (and our suppliers, despite inexplicably sending us hundreds of copies of Overage Nasty Housewives from time to time, actually have really sophisticated algorithms to predict demand and automatically adjust order levels accordingly).

And if you really, really, really want that mag?

Just pay for it over the phone using a credit card and we’ll put it aside for you.