It came down to the wire.
The million-dollar machines that once clutched PennySavers and shuffled in coupon fliers were nearly reduced to molten metal, destined to be recycled — at least that’s how employees remember it.
Earlier this year, former PennySaver employee Elaine Buckley got a call that a handful of Irvine investors who work in finance wanted to bring back the coupon magazine. Unfamiliar with publishing, they asked for her help.
Since then, Buckley and other former PennySaver employees have pieced together the magazine that faithfully arrived in Southern California mailboxes each Wednesday. She and Michael Whisner, a former colleague, found others who worked at the PennySaver and could provide needed services to get the mailer up and running.
“We’re not only using the employees, we’re using PennySaver vendors,” said Buckley, who is chief executive of the reimagined magazine. “It’s a blessing for the reader, the advertiser and the employees who lost their jobs.”
In three short months Buckley and her crew licensed the rights to the PennySaver name, logo and the PennySaverUSA.com web domain. They bought back the inserting machines used at the old Brea plant.
Both the name and machines were bought by other parties at the PennySaver’s bankruptcy auction; the machines set to be scrapped for their metal. The custom machines that insert fliers and once cost $1 million each, cost a fraction of that to save from scrapping.
It’s first edition will be in mailboxes on May 18, the same week that the PennySaver closed last year. It will be distributed in the Inland Empire, initially reaching 300,000 businesses and homes in communities including Temecula Valley, Rancho Cucamonga, Rialto and Colton. The flier will expand to the North Orange County communities of Brea and Fullerton by 2017 and hopes to have a circulation of 1.6 million by that time, Buckley said.
“We started where we know we had the highest readership,” Buckley said.
The mailer began as an outlet for small businesses in 1962. Started in Huntington Beach by Bob DeMarco, the PennySaver moved to Brea in 1981. Its pages hosted garage sale announcements, oil change coupons, pets for sale, affordable handymen and potential love interests.
On May 22, 2015, nearly 700 employees at the PennySaver were told to pack up their belongings. The coupon magazine was shuttering with no notice to employees who received final paychecks that bounced. Buckley was among the managers given bad checks to hand out to employees. After the PennySaver shutdown a slew of lawsuits would be filed and within days the company filed for bankruptcy protection.
The closure hit business owners like Armen Manougian hard. Since he opened his repair shop Allstar Auto Center in 2001, he advertised in the PennySaver, regularly taking out full page ads that drew in a significant portion of his business. When the magazine abruptly closed, he felt it instantly.
“My sales dropped 30 percent even though I continued to use more expensive advertising,” said the Inland Empire business owner.
When the investors approached Buckley in January she was initially reluctant to invest her time in another mailer because she and other employees worked at a similar venture, the Shopper Saver that promised to mail to homes across the southland. That coupon magazine was underfunded and it wouldn’t distribute to the planned coverage areas. When the Shopper Saver foundered employees were again left jobless.
This time, Buckley is reassembling the PennySaver team, hiring and contracting out services to former PennySaver employees. So far she’s assembled a team of 15, made up of graphic artists, ad sales people, an administrator and chief executive.
Among the employees joining the new incarnation of the PennySaver is LuAnn Benton, who Buckley first hired in 1981 at the California Shopper before it merged with the PennySaver. Leaving the magazine after it closed was a painful experience for Benton because of the relationships she built with colleagues. She hopes this PennySaver will have that same family atmosphere.
“When I started there I was really young. I hadn’t graduated from college. I met my husband there. My whole life surrounded around the PennySaver,” she said. “When people worked there they treated you really well and you didn’t leave because it was such a good job. That’s what we want. We want to create a really good culture.”
Employees like Scott Hirschbein found work elsewhere. After working at the PennySaver for 25 years, most recently as its senior national account executive, Hirschbein found work at Quad/Graphics. Because of that, Buckley and her team are partnering with Quad/Graphics to print the new magazine, which will be the same size as the old magazine with intermittent color on designated pages and use a heavier stock paper.
Lourdes Castillo, who worked on the inserting machines for 25 years in the PennySaver’s Mira Loma facility, will again work on the custom machines that are now in rented space in a Santa Ana printing facility.
“It feels exciting,” Castillo said. “I have faith that this will work.”
And Manougian, whose car repair business took a hit when the PennySaver closed, plans to be an early advertiser.
“I’m begging for it,” he said. “When it went under, I was helpless. For the cost effectiveness of the advertisement, it’s awesome. … It pays for itself.”
