Despite the thriving presence of Chapters/Indigo, large grocery outlets and convenience stores remain a staple market for book and magazine sellers in Edmonton. Groceries and gas are necessities, so what better place to stock paperbacks and magazines? The two biggest North American wholesale distribution companies, Metro News and TNG, know this well. Metro covers most of eastern Canada while TNG handles most of the West, including almost all of Edmonton.
TNG is a wholesale distribution company, which means that it doesn’t deal directly with publishers. Instead, wholesale distributors deal with national distributors (such as Time Warner, which puts out People and Style Watch) that do the invoicing for the publishers they represent. So, by the time a national distributor contacts TNG, that distributor has already made an agreement to represent certain publishers. The buyer (such as Save On Foods or Sobeys) sees the products through TNG, which acts as a main wholesaler. The regional manager of TNG compares and sorts titles for the buyer, makes sure transactions are fulfilled, and sends the trucks to bring the products to the buyer.
Whether it’s a Mac’s, 7Eleven, Safeway, Walmart, or Save On Foods, TNG has close to 300 distinct retailers in Edmonton that see weekly and biweekly shipments via truck deliveries. They handle almost everything you see out there: children’s books, pocket books, hardcovers, paperbacks, and the celebrity-based weeklies and monthlies such as Cosmopolitan, InStyle, Fashion, which always do well for them. But the industry is dependent on the flux of popular culture. They often don't know ahead of time what they’ll be working on.
The biggest challenge for TNG is social media because the company is entirely print-based. Apps get the message out much faster than they do. But their dominance in the North American distribution market helps them secure reliable partnerships for future endeavors. For example, The Jim Pattison Group, Canada’s 2nd largest private company as of 2015, owns TNG, as well as many of buyers TNG ships to, such as Save On Foods.
