The New York Review of Magazines

Loiterers, Thieves & Lots of Coffee

Dispatches from a day in a neighborhood newsstand
By Jay Pfeifer

6:38a.m.

DRESSED in a pair of neatly pressed green trousers and a blue buttondown shirt, Essam Moussa has two things on his mind: get the store open and get the coffee brewing. Moussa, a middle-aged Egyptian immigrant with olive skin and thinning black hair, ambles up to Global Ink, his storefront newsstand on Broadway and 112th Street, and unlocks the door.

Inside, the tiny store epitomizes the ingenuity of New York shopkeepers who must maximize their minimal space. Some 6,000 magazines sheath the walls, covering every vertical surface with a multi-color patchwork. Global Ink carries virtually every available magazine, from the scifi conjecture of Atlantis Rising to the literary content of Zyzzyva. On the walls, the magazine racks stretch from the baseboard to a couple of feet overhead. Even the unreachable-by-human-hands space over the cellar staircase in the back of the store is covered with racks of oversized fashion magazines. (This is by design—they are the most expensive magazines in the store and are protected by their inconvenient location.)

The checkout counter, a ten-foot island to the left of the entrance, is the only exception to the all-magazines décor. The cash register is at the end nearest the door. At the other end is a refrigerated pastry case holding an array of too-perfect muffins, scones and danishes. Behind the sweets, against the left wall, is a pair of refrigerators filled with bottles of fruit juice and water, a coffee machine and three vacuum carafes.

For the first bleary hours of the day, Moussa and four other employees will serve most of their customers two things: coffee and the morning newspapers. They will need the caffeine as much as their customers do.

7:44a.m.

ONE of the first customers, a gray-haired man, is obviously a regular— he carries his Global Ink insulated mug, emblazoned with the store’s logo. A dozen more of the mugs collect dust on a shelf above the coffee machine. “In the beginning, five years ago, we sold a lot of them,” Moussa says. “We had a good deal. Instead of $1.25, you paid 75 cents for a refill if you had the mug. But some people moved. That’s what happens. People come to the neighborhood for three, four, five years, then they move. New people take a while.”

As he waits for Moussa to refill the mug, the customer asks, “How are the kids?” nodding toward the pictures of Moussa’s two young daughters hanging on a refrigerator next to a couple of World Trade Center postcards. Before leaving, the man grabs a New York Times and pays for the coffee and the paper—a small-bills transaction that typifies the morning routine at Global Ink.

8:36a.m.

A PROBLEM. Next to the register, Moussa keeps a hand-written list of fourteen customers for whom he reserves a set of newspapers every day. Today, he’s short two copies of the Financial Times. They didn’t get enough copies from the distributor. Worse still, one of the expected customers is notoriously cranky. A year or two ago, Moussa recalls, “We didn’t have his newspaper. Somebody sold the copy we were holding for him. I don’t know what happened, but it was a nightmare for me.” Now Moussa has to buy the papers from one of the street-corner newsstands down the street to cover today’s shortage.

He resents the inconvenience more than the notion of giving a couple of bucks to his “competition.” The corner newsstands aren’t really his competition—“They only carry, what? Time and Newsweek? We carry design, architecture, German magazines; they don’t carry those,” he says. “I don’t consider myself a newsstand.” What would he call his store? He doesn’t have an answer. A magazine shop? A bookstore? “ I just think of myself as Global Ink,” he says.

9:54a.m.

WHILE customers stream in and out, Moussa and his employees— there are generally two or three of them there at any given time—patrol the store’s single aisle, pausing to straighten askew magazines and restock popular ones. The most popular magazines and, hence, those most in need of restocking, sit right next to the front door. These are the general-interest publications; The Nation, Harper’s and The Atlantic are his best sellers—a byproduct of his proximity to Columbia University. Moussa’s other biggest sellers—Vogue, Elle and the other fashion books—sit under the racks in boxy containers on the floor. The ad-heavy magazines are too fat for the space available in the vertical racks—and too much trouble for the workers responsible for keeping them on display. “We put those on the floor so they can stock more. If we didn’t put them there, we would have to go back every five minutes to restock.”

10:30a.m.

A YOUNG mother wheels her sport-trike and three kids into Global Ink. The toddlers descend on the comic books (conveniently at low eye level) while the mother scans the shelter magazines. This makes Moussa happy—attracting families is important to him.

“We try to get every magazine our distributors have—except for the adult magazines. We don’t carry pornography. They sell a lot, but I want parents to take their kids in here without worrying. It’s bad enough that we have those in here,” he says, nodding dismissively toward the flesh-colored stacks of FHM and Stuff on the floor.

11:07a.m.

AS HE walks out the door, a middle-aged man grabs a copy of Loot New York, a classified-ads paper, from under the Times rack. Moussa’s employee behind the register sees it and calls out, “Excuse me, sir! Excuse me, sir!” The customer freezes as he is halfway out the door. The man has not paid for the paper—and as he turns around, he laughs nervously. Did they just nab a shoplifter? The customer comes back in, and the Global Ink employee points to the top of the paper in the man’s hand. Loot has a large banner across the top of the front page that says “Sell Household Items Free!” Just under the word “Free,” in much smaller type, of course, is the price: $2. The man pays for the paper, smiles sheepishly and, this time, makes it out the door without incident.

Shoplifting is the greatest threat to Global Ink. Moussa is courteous to everyone who enters the store, but in each potential customer he also sees a potential thief. “Old, young, man, woman, black, white—it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to generalize, but it happens a lot. Everybody who has a chance will do it.”

The frequency of theft has Moussa exasperated.

“When I opened the store five years ago, I never even considered it,” he says. “I put mirrors up three years ago. And now I have cameras everywhere.”

The bane of Moussa’s battle to stop shoplifting? “Bags, bags, bags,” he says. His magazines disappear in students’ backpacks and customers’ purses, but “I can’t search everybody’s bag.”

On one occasion, the Sunday edition of the Times, a big seller for Moussa, became a Trojan horse used to conceal contraband.

“One guy slipped magazines in the Sunday Times and tried to pay for it that way.”

11:30a.m.

MOUSSA ducks out to run a couple of errands and leaves his employees in charge. Shortly after he leaves, a deliveryman from one of his seven major distributors arrives, pushing a dolly of boxes to a small desk in the back of the store. As he unloads shrink-wrapped bundles of The Economist and People, an employee checks off each allotment on an order form. Shortly after the deliveryman leaves, however, it becomes clear that they did not get enough copies of two magazines. Unfortunately, they have missed their chance to correct the shortfall. Once the deliveryman is gone, Global Ink has no recourse. When Moussa returns, he is clearly agitated. “This is a nightmare. I told them to make the driver sign the invoice if they are short, but they did not do it.”

Moussa is convinced that the missing magazines are not a logistical oversight on the distributor’s part. “The driver steals. You have to watch him.” He can’t be sure, but he suspects that the deliveryman takes magazines from his shipments and sells them at other newsstands, pocketing the cash. But without a signed invoice, Moussa cannot prove that the magazines never arrived; they simply have to take the loss. Worse still, this driver works for one of the largest magazine distributors, and Moussa knows that the company will not help him remedy the problem. “If I call them, they don’t care.”

1:15 p .m.

FOR most of the day, customers move through the store in waves, but at this lunch hour, the place is almost completely empty. The three employees—one at the counter, one standing in the middle of the store and one at the back—all stare expectantly at the front door.

1:20p.m.

ONLY five minutes later, however, seven people are browsing and the store feels full. Moussa estimates that almost 1,000 customers pass through the store on an average day, and about half of them will buy something. He used to claim almost 2,000 visitors in the early days of the store. But, back then, he opened earlier and stayed open later— from 5 a.m. until 1 a.m. Now, because of declining business and his busy life at home, he has scaled back to 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.

2:22p.m.

ALL day long, customers stand rooted to the floor and read Global Ink’s magazines without any intention of buying them. Despite the heavy traffic, a large number of readers show no desire to move at all. A man with long, graying dreadlocks stands in front of the computer section for an hour and a half, reading and intermittently chatting on his cell phone. He starts to bring T3, a British technology magazine, to the cashier but only gets as far as the pastry counter before turning on his heels. He sticks it back on the rack, buys a couple of newspapers and heads out.

This behavior does not seem to bother Moussa. His philosophy: Customers are welcome to read anytime, but they’d better leave the magazines as they found them. “It bothers me when somebody tears out pages or steals CDs,” he says, not unreasonably.

3:45p.m.

A YOUNG man walks in, hands Moussa a videotape and heads right back out the door. Adding it to a short stack of videotapes on the floor behind the counter, Moussa explains that he has a deal with a video store on 105th Street. Customers can drop off their rentals at Global Ink and Moussa holds onto them for the video store. Moussa estimates that approximately 30 to 40 percent of video returners will buy something. “It’s good for him and it’s good for me. You know, if they stop in, they buy coffee, a newspaper or a magazine.”

The videotapes are not the only anomalies behind the desk. In addition to stacks of domestic and foreign cigarettes, Moussa stocks a collection of cello, violin and bass strings. He even has a couple of trombone cleaners hanging back there. Moussa explains proudly: “We’re the only supplier for the Manhattan School of Music in the neighborhood.”

4:05p.m.

MOUSSA can count on the big-name magazines to sell, but what about the other 5,500 magazines? How well can magazines like MakeUp Artist (sci-fi section, middle of the right wall) or Mini Truckin’ (auto section, back-left corner) sell? Moussa insists, “Every magazine here sells.”

He clarifies that by saying just because every magazine may sell, it doesn’t mean they sell consistently. “We had this issue of Topic magazine that never sold. But next issue, people were coming in and asking about it because it was featured on the radio. In this business, you can’t predict anything.”

Unsold magazines don’t necessarily mean that Moussa loses money. When he started Global Ink five years ago, he had to give his seven magazine distributors a large deposit, somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 to $25,000 each. With his account started, he receives a full order of magazines on consignment. When new issues come in, the unsold copies they replace get shipped back to the distributor and are subtracted from his bill. Even though unsold magazines don’t cost him anything, they can shrink his margin. His profits depend on volume, and when magazines don’t sell, it hurts. Moussa sums it up: “This business is really tough. You play on a very small margin.”

9:34p.m.

MOUSSA and his staff are busy sweeping the store’s pale hardwood floors in preparation for closing at 10 p.m. As he scans the racks, Moussa repeatedly stoops to pick up the stray subscriber cards that litter the floor. “If I don’t do it, who else will?” He focuses, however, on replenishing the bottled drinks behind the counter and getting the coffee machine ready for the next morning. “It’s like the restaurant business,” he says. “As soon as you’re done with lunch, you get ready for dinner. We have to get ready for tomorrow.”