What ever happened to the neighborhood paperboy? | Hacker News Reader

What ever happened to the neighborhood paperboy?

smithsonianmag.com

32 pointsBrajeshwar60 comments

I was a paperboy in the early '90s. The routes me and my friends were delivering were slowly gobbled up by a couple adults using a car instead.

Yeah, that's the thing. People still get papers delivered.

It's cheaper for everyone involved in the distribution channel if you divvy up that work among a dozen cars with large cargo space instead of a hundred or a thousand kids with bike baskets. And that's before you get into intricacies and complexities like labor regulation and the ever-growing disdain for child labor in all forms.

Next stop, self driving cars with AI paper delivery auto-cannons on the roof.

Personally I like to visualize a Cyber Truck that looks like a Gausshog from Halo driving down the street shooting papers onto porches.

I'm curious what the efficiency gain actually is, especially because the main thing I noticed when our local switched was that delivery quality got noticeably worse (always dropped in the street vs. porch, usually late – especially in bad weather).

I would guess that this is probably more about the fact that there are fewer kids available (similar to afterschool jobs, if it doesn't look good on collage applications it's not a priority) and those kids having better-paying options available if they are working.

Not sure how true this is for everywhere, but I know of newspapers that are now sent to the pressing machines much later than before, since they need to have the absolutely latest news included (otherwise people will go online if all paper news is a day old).

So don't have as much time during the morning to be inefficient compared to earlier times.

I'm curious how this also works as a function of sprawl & industry decline: paperboys can deliver in parallel but the longer the distance between subscribers the more the higher car speeds will dominate.

Yep. I was a small town paperboy until '89 and I'm not sure if my immediate successor was an adult in a car but it definitely went that way pretty quickly. It's not like it paid a lot, but then again I only worked for an hour a day - if you covered a larger area it was probably a reasonable low-paying job.

My uncle took a paper route in the mid-90s, which he completed in a car. He ended up with half of his face paralyzed due to the asymmetric cold wind from having his window down at 4 in the morning.

Similar for me. I delivered in about 1972. Paid $2.15 per week.

One day, one of my customers asked me to cut his lawn for $5. I had just learned how to divide and calculated the hourly wage for delivering ($0.37) vs. yard work ($2.50) and immediately resigned the paper route.

Today, it's a guy in a VW Passat cruising around the neighborhood. I wave to him as I walk the dog each morning.

It was actually sad to see the newspaper shrink year after year, starting in the mid 2000s. Then, the paper company started engaging in dark patterns that had them increasing the subscription cost without any notice and I finally dropped them. Media has been in a death spiral since then, with no emerging source to take the place of providing relevant and reliable information about what's going on that matters. It's deeply troubling.

I was just curious about how these rates scale with inflation, seems like 1972 to now is a factor of 7.13, so $2.15 would be $15.33, and $5 would be $35.65

This meshes with what I've seen. The guy who delivers my 94 year old neighbour's paper is a scruffy, 40 something in a 2000s Camry and blasting that stereo.

I shared a weekly route with a friend one summer on my bike in the '80s. We basically were covering for a couple that delivered by car at the time.

I look back on it now kindof fondly but honestly it was brutal as we lived a couple miles away from downtown and had single speed dirt bikes. Wrapping up papers and huffing two big bags of papers isn't exactly a dream job.

The couple asked us the next year if we wanted to do it again... we said no. :D (I do remember one family would tip us 20 dollars though! They specifically wanted their paper delivered in a wicker basket they hung on their door and you bet we always put it in there)

There are other jobs like this; I think of the fast food industry. I think this trend was amplified in the 2008 financial crisis as many would-be retirees had to take entry level jobs.

Classified ads, the bulwark upon which the newspaper business was built, was ultimately killed by craigslist, which turned all the papers into tabloids, because they now had to compete for views/attention instead of the news being a side business carried on the shoulders of classified ads.

Once the classified ad business went online, no one cared about subscribing to the physical newspaper anymore.

I long entertained an alternate reality where I was Craig Newmark and I invested in smaller local and regional newspapers, creating close synergies between their online operations and those of Craiglist. The plan would be to expect the collapse of print and to maintain strong local reporting operations buttressed by the power of the very tool that was killing their newspapers.

Would it have stood up against Facebook Marketplace? Probably would not have gone completely according to plan at all. But the death of local reporting is something that people do not worry enough about and I remember Craig talking about.

The real local reporting we now enjoy in the Bay Area (e.g. Cityside) is so much better than anything we got to read during the heyday of the Chronicle. I doubt that Newmark regrets killing the metastatic disease that was legacy newspapers.

Cityside resembles my dreamy goal, except mine would be built around a revenue stream and could therefore (potentially) exist in middle America, where relying on donors wouldn't cut it for long. Thanks for the mention, I had never heard of them.

You miss the point of Craigslist. Sure, being online, persistent and searchable makes it superior to newspaper classifieds. But the real killer was that it was free. This meant it was easier to set up the 2 sided market. Folks were posting because there was no reason not to.

This is what progress looks like, for better or worse. Someone takes an existing process/product/service and does it better and or cheaper. This opens up new economic opportunities because it lowers the barriers for entry into the market for sellers.

They replace the incumbents but they don’t have the same revenue as the incumbents because they’re doing it for cheaper.

Craigslist revenue was barely a fraction of what local papers were making.

Craigslist had both free and paid categories, and I believe at its peak revenues would have supported the investments I'm imagining - especially in second and third tier markets.

By the time these ideas came to me, most of these papers were on their knees, and already making hard cuts.

That’s an extraordinary claim. Perhaps you’d back that up with some numbers?

In 2008 Craigslist was worth $5 billion with revenues around $80 million.

I worked for newspapers with losses on $1-5 million revenues.

There were tons of investment opportunities and the publishers were up against a wall. Again not saying this was necessarily smart business but this is a fantasy remember?

A few newspapers making a few million in losses?

Well, America has lost almost 1,800 papers since 2004, including more than 60 dailies and 1,700 weeklies. (Source: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/expanding-news-desert/...)

So if each newspaper needed just $500k to stay afloat, we’re talking almost a billion dollars. Craigslist was making a tenth of that in revenue, according to you. Their profit was a fraction of that.

I’m not criticising your dream. I’m criticising the people who advocate for this position in real life. “Tax/regulate tech! That’ll solve everything!”

I work for a company where this happened, the only one I'm aware of in the United States. What happened here, in Northern Utah, is that a local TV station created a classifieds product and put it online. The engineer's with the idea fought to provide it as a free service to the community and the TV station eventually agreed.

It's no longer owned by the TV station but that business continues to thrive in spite of Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and all the other entrants into the market. I hope we can continue to keep it alive well into the future.

I'd say the second sentence misses the mark.

There were roughly no people who subscribed to newspapers only for classifieds. Buy one, sure, not everyone would have a subscription so they'd pick one up if job hunting or looking for a used couch.

The problem was those people didn't want to pay the price a newspaper would have to charge, after losing their lucrative classified customers to a free alternative.

The part where the Internet took over the role of the rest of the newspaper came after, as a feedback loop.

I was a paperboy from when I was 12 till I was 17. I had one route early in the morning and another in the evening. 20 years later if I am in my old town I can still remember which houses received a paper and the acrobatics I need to get to there front door without getting off my bike. In the Netherlands we don't do the thing I see in American movies where you just throw the paper on people lawn (is that really a thing? seems kinda cool).

I actually remember it fondly. Listening to my favorite music with a huge disc-man in my trouser pockets. Also remember it payed quite well. I ended up with about a thousand euros a month, which for a teenager without any obligations is a huge sum.

Lawn was a miss--we always tried to land it on the door step, or maybe hit the weather door. IIRC they always gave 1-2 extra papers in case you totally missed (gutter?)

It was one of the only ways I as a middleschooler had to make money (which I needed, so I could get a passable computer). (What a slow way to make money though.)

Few memories endure like sitting on the sofa by the window, still mostly asleep. I'd crack a window to breath the crisp outdoor air, & sit there for 3 minutes, before venturing out into the dark chill early morning. Sometimes I'd nibble at a bagel with butter, wrapped in a paper-towel for the trip.

I don't know how we found the job. Ayup, there was a local guy who'd drive around in a car & deliver to a huge area, back in the mid 90's. I think we'd gone to him for the job. It was him dropping off the thigh-high stack of papers every morning. It seemed absurd then & now, having this small route for a paperboy. It felt like a preservation of an old ritual, done not because it made sense, but because otherwise we'd forget.

Whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paperboy, the evening tv?

That was the old linear life, wasn't it.

Glad I wasn't the only one that had this start playing in my head when I read the headline.

I was hoping to get away with just typing

“The milkman, the paperboy, the evening tv?“

But thought it was too subtle

I prefer to err on the side of subtlety - it reduces your audience but delights them more :)

A secret club is always more fun

Everywhere you look, everywhere you go There's a heart, there's a heart A hand to hold onto

The entire delivery process was moved to adults with cars. I had a route at 12-13yo and used a wagon to hand deliver to 50-60 houses.

I’d add that there was a job crunch in the 80’s where adults would absorb 4 to 6 “routes” equaling 200-300 houses. I made about $30/week. The newspaper companies made it into a full-time job for minimum wage, with benefits. This destroyed 12-15yo paper route jobs.

Before the internet killed classified ads, it was getting more difficult for kids to deliver newspapers with their bikes due to large lots sizes and declining prevalence of sidewalks.

The streetcar suburbs actually had larger lots than the modern suburbs. Sure there are large lots in a few suburbs, but lots in general have been going down. (we are only talk about a maybe 200 square feet though, so nothing significant).

The large lot suburbs get a lot of attention because that is where the rich live, but there are a lot more around that don't have those massive lots.

I'd like to see stats on that.

Keep in mind as well:

- Streetcar suburbs were the exception. Most people either lived in the country --- in farmland --- or in cities.

- Household sizes were considerably larger, perhaps by a factor of 2--6: many more children, possibly grandparent(s), grown children, and live-in household staff. Where a typical present household is 3--4 members, you might find 8--12 within a "streetcar suburb".

The average size across all US households is about 2.54 presently, and was 4.11 in 1940. Again, wealthier residents of suburban regions could quite possibly have been considerably above this.

Look up houses for sale on Zillow in various neighborhoods. I can only speak for the ones I've looked up of course, which isn't enough for a PhD paper.

My first job at age 14 was being a paperboy. I was really happy that I could legally earn some money at that age. Got paid 50-60 euro's per month, but around Christmas / new year's eve I could go my round and collect tips of around ~100eu. My round was 200-300 houses from what I can remember.

My former self would be very jealous of the jobs that are available now for young people. Especially bike delivery jobs. Being a paperboy was pretty heavy work since I had to deliver papers _and_ ad magazines, which had to be folded into the paper and took hours of preparation. Once my bike flipped on it's back because of the weight and I couldn't get it back on it's wheels. I don't miss the heavy bags and ink stains on my hands, but I saved up enough money for a green iPod Mini! Jailbroken, it actually ran Doom in black and white :)

Printing was the largest industry in the world for decades, second only to the automotive industry in the US. Desktop publishing simplified layout and advertising in the mid-80's thru 90's, the advertising got sucked up by the web, subscriptions fell, newspapers conglomerated, million dollar presses have been sitting idle for 3rd shifts for 2 decades when once they ran non-stop. Not enough newspapers to deliver to locations near enough to each other that could reasonably be delivered by a paperboy. Also, paperboy wages were always in violation US Department of Labor wage and child labor guidelines, well below minimum wage just for starters, and no doubt at least a few 12 and 13 year olds slipping past human resources.

my conjecture, having been a paperboy for a couple weeks max, really young 45ish years ago, is it's a ripoff.

for at least 2 decades, any kid could sleep till rested, wander to a nearby Starbucks, make something like 3x the salary per hour, and get benefits.

I was a paperboy for a year or so in the mid-90s, for today's equivalent of about $4/day I'd get up at 5:30am to get to the newspaper shop by 6am and deliver for maybe 30-45 mins.

It's pretty miserable work in the winter, and probably a net-negative for a teenager to be missing that much sleep, but my parents believed it "built character".

I found the whole thing to be an excellent preparation for grad school.

Benefits at Starbucks?

Starbucks offers very competitive benefits to part time employees who work at least roughly ~20 hours per week (520hours/182 days*7days per week). Of course, the obligation is not comparable to delivering newspapers for an hour during the morning before school.

https://www.starbucksbenefits.com/en-us/home/

https://www.starbucksbenefits.com/en-us/home/resources/eligi...

>You establish initial benefits eligibility the first day of the second month after receiving at least 240 total hours over three full, consecutive months. Your total hours include both Benefits hours (BEN) to account for your paid hours and Leave of Absence hours (LOA) to account for time while on approved, eligible leave.

>To continue eligibility, you must have at least 520 total hours on paychecks received between the first and last days in each six-month measurement period, for semi-annual audits on January 6 and July 6.

>Occasionally, there may be fewer pay periods than usual in an audit measurement period. When this occurs, we will adjust your required total hours needed—it will still be 20 hours per week. Your total hours include both Benefits hours (BEN) to account for your paid hours and Leave of Absence hours (LOA) to account for time while on approved, eligible leave.

https://starbucks.asu.edu

Relative is finishing in December, zero debt. Said they have >1000 graduates each year.

Starbucks hires 12 year olds??? I mean, I know the US has lax labour laws but still... In the UK at least when I was growing up if you had a paper round you were probably 12-15 max. (This is the early 90s) After that age there were lots of better paid jobs. Working on the market, labouring, glass collecting in pubs, dealing, a little light b&e etc.

good point : around here seems papers are delivered by people in cars, but yeah i was a little little guy with a bike.

Children can't be permanently enslaved into paper delivery, but poor people driving their own beater cars are quite easy to make dependent.

Wait a second... people actually buy newspapers still? (kinda sarcasm kinda not)

I wish I could get a good local newspaper. I need someone to keep me up to date on the local news. If something happens in my state I'll find out about it, so I don't need someone to tell me. Even more so for national or international news. I don't have a good way to finding out what the local school board does. More than once I didn't find out about a local event I would have gone to until after it was over. Nobody tells me about what laws city hall is proposing... These are things I need to know, but I can't follow them all myself. These are also things that nobody reading this comment needs to know (you instead need the same type of thing except for your community).

Instead it is easy to get national newspapers, but the local ones are dead.

As I child of the 80's, I can still feel the theme for Full House reverberating through my bones:

    Whatever happened to predictability?
    The milkman, the paperboy, the evening tv?
    How did I get delivered here? Somebody tell me please
    Cause this old world is just really confusing me

That kind of sentiment was all the rage in sitcoms before the hip, cynical 90's attitude got into gear with Seinfeld and "Must See TV".

I delivered papers from age 9 to 17. Moved to different places and got a new route with each move. Taught me punctuality and the value of a dollar. It is not a popular opinion, but that so many jobs that used to be handled by teenagers are now handled by immigrants isn't doing our kids any favors. They'll learn more from working that delaying adulthood even more with largely worthless degrees that saddle them with debt.

This sounds like an out of date and out of touch “get off my lawn” rant. In their defense, today’s teenagers are still working jobs. It’s just that the jobs have changed. The paper boy job has evolved into a food delivery, taxi hybrid gig work.

Craigslist ate the paperboy.

This is a story about the author of this article failing to find the answer. Which leaves me wondering.., why write the article?

It is funny that the author didn’t see any connections between the paperboy and today’s gig workers even though they also have their roots with the milkman.

> why write the article?

My guess: for the money.

If we're left wondering why the author didn't answer the question, we presumably didn't notice that it was an ad for an Amazon show. Clever, eh?

Sometimes the investigation itself is interesting? I read an article once where the author was trying to figure out what plant was the source of street snacks he saw sold everywhere in his city. He couldn't get a definite answer from anyone, including from scientists he sent samples to. It was a really interesting article.

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