The Shmoo Diaries: Part 3.5 - The Calculation I Didn't See Coming

When You're Inside the Pattern, You Can't See the Shape

This is a very Personal story. 

It was written after the announcement that one of the last remaining magazine wholesalers in the United States would be closing its doors, the same company that acquired my business and where I worked during my final year in distribution. It's another way of looking at abundance and the Morgan calculation.

Hi, how’s your week been? 

Mine’s been a little slower than usual. Snow’s piled up outside the house, and I’ve spent my time shoveling, doing some thinking in between client calls, and trying not to track white footprints across the floors.

Being stuck indoors like this makes you notice patterns you usually miss. It reminded me of my last year in magazine distribution, when the system I had spent decades building started quietly falling apart. 

Decisions that seemed reasonable at the time turned out to be dismantling the infrastructure that kept us alive. That’s what this week’s Shmoo Diaries is about: seeing the pattern only after it’s too late.

In the last few newsletters, I told you about Tesla and Morgan. About wireless energy that couldn't be metered and the calculation that killed it.

That story has the advantage of distance. Clean lines. Clear villain. Tidy moral.

Now let me tell you what the Morgan calculation looks like when you're the one living through it.

When it's not history. When it's Tuesday.

When you're making reasonable decisions that sound smart in the moment, and only later realize you were dismantling the system that kept you alive.

Thirty-Three Years Is Long Enough to Know Better

I spent thirty-three years owning and operating a magazine distribution company, from 1977 to 2010.

Long enough to see it at its best. Long enough to watch it die slowly. Long enough to carry both gratitude and scars in equal measure.

I founded Total Circulation Services in the NY Tri-State area and Periodical Marketing Services as a national distributor. Those names meant nothing to readers, and they were never supposed to. We were infrastructure. The machinery that made ideas physical. 

We moved culture from printers to racks to hands.

I still have ink in my veins. And scar tissue where the business used to be.

How the System Actually Worked

At its height, magazine distribution was a living system. Imperfect. Often brutal. But functional.

There were 700 magazine wholesalers nationwide when I started. Each had exclusive distribution rights in its territory. Boundaries were respected. Rules were clear. Monopolies, yes. But accountable ones.

TV Guide anchored everything. Its volume enforced discipline. It subsidized complexity. It kept distributors from encroaching on one another's turf.

When TV Guide began to decline, most people outside the business didn't notice. But the cracks started to appear.

The system didn't collapse overnight. It just stopped being able to repair itself.

What We Actually Moved

One of the great privileges and successes of my career was importing magazines from all over the world.

French press. British fashion. Art and culture titles from across Europe and Asia. Voices and aesthetics that didn't originate here but mattered deeply to the people who found them.

These magazines weren't just content. They were passports. A physical artifact of another way of thinking.

We moved culture in boxes and pallets, not files and links.

For most of our run, we handled special interest magazines. That's where the soul of the business lived.

Titles that didn't rely on scale, but on meaning. Readers didn't skim them. They lived with them.

It was hard work. Daily demand. Weekly pressure. No room for excuses.

But there was pride in making it work.

I didn't know at the time that I was watching abundance in print form. Ideas that used to require access to libraries or universities were delivered to newsstands in towns that had never seen these works of art.

And I definitely didn't see that we were about to kill it ourselves.

The Convenient Half-Truth

The easy story is that the internet killed magazines.

It's only half true.

The internet was the coroner, not the murderer.

The real unraveling began when distributors started breaking agreed-upon territorial boundaries and publishers chose not to stop them.

That was the moment the ending was written. We just didn't know it yet.

When "Reasonable" Becomes Fatal

Supermarkets were the pressure point.

They decided they wanted one distributor instead of many. From an operational standpoint, it sounded reasonable. Fewer invoices. Simpler logistics. Cleaner paperwork.

From a systemic standpoint, it was a death sentence.

Instead of saying no, publishers allowed wholesalers to take accounts from other wholesalers. The boundaries that had held for decades vanished in a matter of weeks.

Discipline evaporated. Trust collapsed.

Retailers saw the weakness immediately and pressed harder.

More discounts. Better terms. Less risk on their side. Faster concessions.

Distributors chased margin. Publishers chased placement. National players chased scale.

There was no collective thinking. No stewardship. No long view.

Only short-term decisions and abdicated responsibility.

Once retailers learned that pressure worked, it never stopped.

This is what the Morgan calculation looks like in practice. Not a single dramatic decision. Just a series of reasonable-sounding choices, each one making the next one inevitable.

The Thing About Erosion

The collapse tiptoed quietly from distributor to distributor to publisher.

People were laid off. Drivers who had run the same routes for decades disappeared.

Retailers reduced display sizes. Stores closed as rents climbed and margins vanished.

Secondary magazines folded because they couldn't survive on shrinking rack space. What looked like optimization from the outside was cannibalization on the inside. The system that had once allowed niche voices to exist began to eat itself.

And I was still in it, trying to adapt, convinced I could outlast the chaos.

The Moment I Knew

In 2008, I knew the industry wasn't coming back.

I tried anyway. I expanded into mass market magazines to stabilize the business. It bought time, but not a future.

The underlying economics were already broken. I just didn't want to admit it.

Staying longer cost me everything.

Financially, I lost it all. Psychologically, it took years to recover.

That's not hyperbole. When your identity is tied to a system that dissolves around you, the damage doesn't end when the business does.

I kept working in a dead industry because I couldn't see the pattern while I was inside it.

That's the thing about the Morgan calculation. When you're the one making the decisions, they all sound rational.

How Systems Die

The magazine industry didn't collapse because readers disappeared.

It collapsed because the people running it traded discipline for access. Territory for scale. Stability for margin. Sounds like capitalism, right? IT WAS GREED! Why would you fool with a monopoly?

We broke an eighty-year-old system in pursuit of short-term gain.

Once that line was crossed, the unraveling was inevitable.

Retailers didn't destroy the industry. They exploited what the industry handed them.

The real failure was upstream. In boardrooms. In publisher meetings. In distribution agreements that prioritized convenience over coherence.

No villain. No conspiracy. Just a series of decisions where no one felt responsible for preserving the whole.

T.S. Eliot was right. The world doesn't end with a bang. It ends with a whimper and with an operational efficiency memo.

What I Didn't See Then

I didn't see that we were experiencing abundance.

Hundreds of titles. Thousands of voices. Ideas flowing across borders. Distributed power that kept the system resilient.

I didn't see that the pressure to consolidate was the same pressure Tesla faced when Morgan asked how wireless energy could be metered.

I didn't see that "operational efficiency" was just another way of saying "we need a gate we can control."

I didn't see that once the boundaries fell, the system couldn't sustain itself.

I realized all of that later. Just in time to recognize the pattern when it showed up again.

Why This Matters Now

We are living through another abundance moment.

AI is collapsing effort in the same way the internet collapsed distribution. Cognitive labor that used to require years of training now takes minutes. Tools that were once restricted to specialists are now widely accessible.

And the response is eerily familiar.

Calls for regulation and control. More money buys better access. Concerns about quality control. Pressure to introduce gates, credentials, and approved pathways.

All of it sounds reasonable.

The Morgan calculation doesn't change. It just updates its language.

What I Should Have Done

I should have seen it coming.

I should have recognized that when a system starts breaking its own rules in the name of efficiency, the system is already dying.

I should have left earlier. Adapted faster. Protected what I had instead of chasing what was already gone.

But I didn't. Because I was inside the pattern. And when you're inside, everything looks like a problem you can solve instead of a system that's already finished.

That's the cost of not seeing clearly. Not just lost businesses. Lost years. Lost belief that the work you did mattered.

What Comes Next

The magazine industry is gone. That story is finished.

But the pattern isn't.

It's playing out again right now, with different technology and a different language, but the same underlying calculation.

If you can't own it, starve it. If you can't meter it, constrain it.

If you can't control it, redefine legitimacy until you can.

I didn't see it clearly the first time. I see it now.

And I'm watching people make the same reasonable, sounding decisions I made, convinced they're solving problems when they're really dismantling systems.

That's why I'm writing this.

Not because I have all the answers. Not because I avoided the mistakes.

But because I lived through the Morgan calculation once, and I know what it costs when you don't see it coming.

Next: How control operates through infrastructure, not ideology, and why the decisions being made today will determine what's possible tomorrow.

Warmly,

Jan

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