With Globe and Mail senior columnist Margaret Wente penning a 1,500-word gushing endorsement of Costco and Vancouver Sun opinion page editor Fazil Mihlar seriously nominating WalMart for the Nobel Peace Prize, all on the same weekend, long time vendor of these newspapers, Magpie on Commercial Drive, hardly needs an excuse to banish them forever from its shelves. But consumers of these corporate products—and they are corporate products every bit as much as the Big Mac sliding down the throat of the drive-through masticator—ought to know the depths to which these once-proud integrity-driven newspaper companies have stooped in their long-running and losing battle to staunch the loss of readers and once-mighty profits. It is their corporate behavior more than their anti-social content that has finally earned them a dishonourable discharge to the Magpie scrap heap.

The Globe and Mail, owned by the Thompsons, Canada’s richest elite family, runs its own distribution company, Globe Distribution. After conducting business for decades with its thousands of small independent business partners according to traditional terms, Globe Distribution managers last fall unilaterally imposed onerous new terms on its small business customers.

It may look on the face of it a small detail, but its effects are staggering: unsold copies would no longer by refunded on the current statement but instead credit would be delayed until the next statement. Ultimately, the same costs of supplies would be charged to the vendors. But the delay in crediting returns to the small businesses, coupled with Globe Distribution’s demands for payment up front on the total value of deliveries, means, in the case of Magpie, eight months of gross profits on the account handed over to Globe Distribution up-front. Multiplied by the thousands of vendors Globe Distribution deals with, it means the Globe’s head office comptroller gains from its small business vendors millions of free dollars to invest in short-term investment vehicles for a good profit, dollars forcefully borrowed from small businesses at no interest.

Globe Distribution is an unabashed monopolistic company. In addition to the Globe and Mail, it also has the contract-protected distribution license for The New York Times and the Guardian Weekly. Those papers cannot be purchased by any vendor from any other distributor, or even from the publisher without risk of lawsuits from Globe Distribution which jealously guards its monopoly racket. Here’s how the company exploits its monopoly: Just when the Canadian dollar rose dramatically to par with the American dollar, rather than adjust the cover price of The New York Times downward, Globe Distribution raised the price 20% to $3 per copy. The newspaper is sold in the US for $1 per copy. Globe Distribution acquires each copy presumably for .60¢. Vendors like Magpie pay Globe Distribution $2.40 per copy and keep .60¢ of the selling price. Subtracting their cost, Globe pockets $1.80 per sold copy, 50% more than both the publisher and the retailer combined.

Globe Distribution relies on the fact that retailers don’t want to disappoint customers they see everyday and leave it to them to somehow explain why the price went up 20% when the purchasing power of the dollar for US-produced goods already went up 30%. This retailer had enough.

The case involving CanWest, publisher of The Vancouver Sun, Province, and The National Post, is different, but it has resulted in the same banishment from the shelves of Magpie.

For at least six months, CanWest has been dumping every day stacks of their papers for free at cafés and other places of high traffic, including at a café directly next door to Magpie, which has been a vendor of CanWest products for the last 14 years. Sales declined only a little as most customers chose to show loyalty to the small business, or simply never knew it was free literally an arm’s length away.

The practice is akin to foreign producers of goods dumping products at below cost on neighbouring markets, or US agri-businesses dumping surplus product on third-world ports under the guise of charity but effectively destroying the market for local farmers and putting them out of business.

Why does CanWest dump their products for free even at the risk of destroying sales and relationships with long-time vendors? It’s no secret that corporate daily papers are suffering unstoppable declines in their circulation rates. But newspapers are an usual dual business: they sell copies to readers, but they also re-sell those readers’ eyeballs to advertisers. A decline in readership may cause some lost revenue in newspaper sales, but causes much more lost revenue in lower advertising rates. By slowing the decline in circulation numbers by moving stacks of papers out of the warehouse and surreptitiously dumping them all over the city, the company forestalls even greater losses due to declining ad rates.

The practice borders on the fraudulent, a charge this newspaper stops short of making outright in the new climate of litigenousness created by CanWest with active lawsuits now launched against a local small printer over the matter of an innocuous spoof of the Vancouver Sun that appeared in the city last year, and against The Tyee, an independent online newspaper over an equally innocuous error in a column by Rafe Mair. The company may be printing the same number of copies, but by stacking them in piles for free at cafés instead of selling them through vendors, no one has any clue anymore how many copies are really being read and how many are simply being thrown out by café staff unread, the expensive ads never seen.

It is against the law for businesses to throw newsprint out with the usual garbage, and it’s unethical besides with local landfills filing up too fast. CanWest picks up unsold copies from vendors for proper disposal through recycling firms, but the larger stacks dumped at cafés are left for the café owners to dispose of. Cafés do not normally have contracts with recycling companies and would, naturally enough, just throw in the garbage all the uninvited papers dumped on them by CanWest. Most copies so dumped by CanWest all over the city are undoubtedly entering the city’s landfills. It is unconscionable, especially with the very same newsprint carrying stories about how people need to recycle more.

The combination of these big corporate newspapers exploiting small businesses through unfair terms, dumping, waste generation and inflated ad rates, with major editorial opinion pieces extolling the glorious virtues of WalMart (Mihlar also called for beatification of WalMart by the Pope), and the transcendent bliss of Costco, amounts to an unmistakable attack on the community-enhancing, social fabric-weaving role of small independent businesses in our society. It is not just irresponsible behavior, it borders on a concerted, coordinated editorial and big business assault on an important pillar of healthy society.

There are to be sure meritorious elements in these papers, The Globe and Mail more so than The Province, and The Province more so than The Vancouver Sun and National Post. But there is also meritorious elements to cigarette companies (which employ workers after all) and companies like Haliburton. An assessment of their overall value to society comes down to a balance between their benefits and their costs to society, and perceptions of where the balance is going. In Magpie’s opinion, the costs to society of these newspapers now outweighs their benefits. Those costs are the direct product of the increasingly cold corporate culture of strictly free-market values and beliefs increasingly infecting these newspaper companies. As their benefits to society in terms of useful news and relevant opinion (praising Costco and WalMart??) continues to decline in lock step with their costs to society rising, it’s clear which direction these companies and their products are going in. As corrosive to society as they already are, they promise to become only more so with each passing day.

For these reasons, Magpie has banished these corporate newspapers from its shelves as a good pharmacy might banish a poison. From Magpie’s point of view, the corporate daily paper is dead. And quite frankly, good riddance to them. You’d do better spending the half hour you’d normally take to read these papers taking the opportunity instead for some quiet sitting and thinking.