Stores that sell the Chronicle have been told that the paper’s Monday-Saturday price will go from 75 cents to $1 effective July 27. The new wholesale rate will be 88 cents a copy, an improvement of 2 cents for each daily Chronicle sold.
The Sunday cover price and wholesale rates will remain unchanged.
A letter to retailers by Chron single-copy sales manager Ken Kim notes that the Chronicle is now being printed on state-of-the-art presses. “These new presses will improve the quality and color capacity of The Chronicle. That significant capital investment is not only geared toward enhancing the customer experience, but also to increase retail traffic,” Kim wrote.
The Chron raised its retail price last July from 50 to 75 cents. Last year the Chron also raised its Sunday price from 50 cents to $2. In mid-January, the Chron raised its subscription price from $300/year to $400/year for seven-day delivery.
In February, Editor Ward Bushee hinted that readers would be paying more for the paper in the future. “The Chronicle is losing large sums of money each week and has been for some time. The primary reason for this is a decline in advertising revenue, which once supplemented the cost of producing a newspaper. Few readers realize that it costs more than $10 to produce and deliver each copy of the Sunday Chronicle. In better times, advertising offset those costs, but that has changed.”