In early 1974, supermarket shoppers may have noticed a new magazine, People, peering out at them as they waited at the checkout. With $2 million worth of TV advertising behind it, the new Time Inc. weekly was hard to miss. Critics recoiled at People's blend of news and gossip. The publishers they worked for, however, were more impressed. For them, People – designed for single-copy sales – was something of a guinea pig and its fate would help answer a question many had long pondered: how much did the magazine business really need the mail?
For decades, publishers had experimented with private delivery networks. The rate hikes triggered by the U.S. Post Office's transformation into the Postal Service in 1970 gave these experiments a new urgency. Mandated to operate more like a business, USPS slashed the subsidies magazine publishers had enjoyed for over a century. By then, publishers were more dependent on mail delivery than ever thanks to the mass migration of middle-class whites –always their core readership – to newly-built subdivisions devoid of the newsstands that dotted the urban communities they left behind. But as Time and others recognized, there was another way to reach this decentralized readership: supermarkets.
Working from the recently opened Time Inc. archives, this paper explores how supermarkets – built to move mass volumes of packaged foods – became important distribution networks for media and how broader ideas about the supermarket as a suburban, feminized space conditioned critical reaction to the media productions designed to sell there. In so doing, the paper offers insight into the role of large-scale spatial transformations in the forging and fracturing of business relationships. Moreover, it shines a light on how collaborations are themselves something to be interpreted by the consuming public.