It has been a very eventful start to 2025. Most of these events haven’t been fun. We’ve had some issues with our press, and recently, we suffered damage to both of our delivery trucks. Part of these issues is that we have attempted to keep up with home delivery for the entire city. At this point, each issue takes two people almost 30 hours to print, sort, and deliver, three times a week.
This has not been sustainable, all other facets of our business have suffered. Necessary maintenance simply hasn’t been kept up, billing is far behind where it should be, and sales have been nearly non-existent. Even some of the writing has declined due to a lack of time for 2/3rds of our staff. We had hoped by developing the routes, we could get more delivery people. Those actions have not borne fruit yet, but we’re optimistic that we can get more drivers and thus open more routes, however for now, we need to face the fact that we have seriously overextended.
What this all means is that we will be scaling back home delivery temporarily. We have not given up on home delivery we are very proud of it, however, until we can serve all areas reliably, we will be moving some subscribers to mail delivery temporarily, at no cost to those readers.
At this time, we’ll be scaling back to servicing the delivery routes east of the river. While both sides of the river are similar in size for readers (east being slightly larger) the deciding factor was the number of miles we have to travel. The west side of town has almost three times as many miles to travel. We will add delivery drivers as quickly as possible and reactivate the routes one by one. The main objective is to ensure that in re-expanding, we only add what we can reliably service in those areas.
Again, these measures are temporary and aimed at improving service and ensuring that the paper can grow and be a good resource for Great Falls.
Author: Andy Anderson
Andy is publisher of Foxys Publishing Co, as well as pressman, ad sales, distribution and sometime janitor. He occasionally makes a wild attempt at writing but quite often is seen running around our offices trying to "Get 39 million things done today..."
