As the manager of a busy students' union shop there are a lot of things you need to juggle in a day. There's the routine stuff like making sure you've got staff in when you require them, placing the regular orders and making sure everything is in its place and presentable.

Then there are the things that are slightly out of the ordinary: the meetings, reps dropping by, a coffee machine that has recently discovered it likes to flood itself and drive me crazy.

Somewhere in between the routine and the out of the ordinary lies magazines.

My shop dedicates around 30 metres of shelf space to newspapers and magazines with 94 regular magazine titles appearing alongside the daily newspapers and the not-so-regular magazines. If you include all the extras, our standing order with the suppliers reaches 183 titles. Deciding on what to stock and then deciding on how best to display them all can prove to be problematic. Having said that, we're able to order from a selection of 3,000 titles so 183 is nothing!

Too many titles for the space and the area looks cluttered, titles get hidden behind others leading to customers missing out on their favourite mag either because it's hidden or they just give up looking and us losing out on credit if we miss hidden copies and don't return them to the wholesalers in time.

Too few titles for the space and you lose sales where customers can't find the magazine they want and the shelves look bare.

Last month our magazine supplier changed the computer software they use to manage our order. As a result we get clearer information on what we're getting (the previous system - a legacy of a supplier that went in to administration last year - provided paperwork that was hard to understand and as such we tended to ignore), how much we pay and what gets added or removed from our magazine order. We can even manage the majority of our account online.

It's through their online service and in conjuction with our sales data that I was able to adjust our standing order, deleting many titles that sales figures show just don't sell with us and adding others that we feel would be of interest to our customers.

You can therefore imagine my frustration when I see messages like this appearing on the system:

ADDED TO RANGE We have added the following title(s) to your range as your sales of similar titles indicate these have an opportunity to sell at your outlet:
Description	Prev. Qty.	Curr. Qty.
SAILING TODAY , MAY	0	1

Why won't they listen to me? I know my customers, I know my sales. I know that Sailing Today doesn't sell - that's why I deleted it from my order in the first place.

The Racing Post is another title that likes to rear its ugly head every now and then too. Not just any issue, though, only the Friday edition. I delete it, it gets re-added. We send the single copy they send us back, delete it again and the circle starts again. It's frustrating yet amusing game we like to play. *cough*