Paper routes no longer kids' stuff.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: ON SMALL BIZ

DWIGHT EISENHOWER AND JOHN WAYNE WERE PAPERBOYS. So were Jackie Robinson, Norman Vincent Peale, Ross Perot, Harry Truman and Martin Luther King Jr.

Along with their fame, these former paperboys share one trait: They're all very old, or dead.

And that pretty much parallels what's become of kids' paper routes in Denver and most cities. In fact, you have to be 18 now to even apply for a job delivering The Denver Post or Rocky Mountain News.

This is kind of sad from a nostalgic standpoint for someone like me who grew up delivering the Rocky in the morning and the Post in the afternoon as a junior high schooler in the mid '70s.

But there are no villains to point to for the demise of this kids' industry.

"Families are smaller than they used to be," explained Vern Mallinen, circulation/marketing director for the Denver Newspaper Agency. "With schools starting earlier, and with longer commutes for parents, and parents at home less, the resource of paperboys--and girls--was just a decreasing resource, frankly."

Adding to the decline, Mallinen said, was the Post's switch to mornings in 1982, leaving Denver without a daily in the more attractive afternoon delivery time slot.

Mallinen, who has worked with one or the other Denver dailies since 1979, says the change from kid carriers to adults was gradual at first, then snowballed. As four or five youth routes consisting of 40 or 50 papers were vacated, they would be condensed into one adult route of 200 to 250 subscribers.

"And then," he says, "it got to a point of critical mass."

Soon it made more sense to have adult carriers meet at one big distribution center where they could stuff their papers with ad inserts on the spot instead of district managers driving all over town to drop paper bundles on kids' driveways.

Also, a single Denver carrier these days delivers not only the local Post and News, but USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and The New York Times--too big a load for any kid on a bike.

Few adults make a living delivering papers, but the pay range of $600 to $900 a month is a significant supplement. According to Mallinen, the adult takeover caused little lasting resentment from parents or kids. "People were coming to the same conclusions about it being more difficult to collect, about safety issues. All those sorts of things were coming into play," he says. "Society was changing."

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Nationally, newspaper-carrier demographics tilted irreversibly to adults in...