We have said before at this newspaper that the coming of the COVID-19 virus absolutely shredded our long-standing business model in terms of income and profitability.

We have adjusted and adapted over the past 22 months to the degree that we are now able to continue printing and distributing two newspapers a week, and have a fighting chance to be profitable.

Many daily and twice-weekly newspapers across the nation, (and several in this state) have transitioned to once a week publications over the past year, and many others have transitioned to become digital publications only. Several in Oklahoma have done that as well. We have no plans to do so.

It’s been a challenge to our industry. We didn’t see it coming and it caught us completely unprepared. We hope and pray the green nuts who seem to be in charge of the Democratic party don’t find a way to outlaw newsprint and ink.

However, moving forward, there are two adjustments we must make:

#1. Effective December 1, we will raise our subscription prices to $48 per year. We have absorbed postal increase after postal increase over the past several years without raising our subscription rates. We will still lose money on subscriptions, but we will lose less at the $48 annual rate.

However, through the Month of December we are bringing back our 2 for 1 Subscription Offer, in which subscribers may renew their subscriptions for half-price if they also purchase a subscription for a non-subscribing household. It’s a great Christmas gift opportunity that many have taken advantage of in the past.

We didn’t offer it last year, but we are bringing it back beginning December 1 of this year.

#2. We have discovered that we can indeed publish two newspapers a week by closing on Wednesdays. Salaried employees continue to work Wednesdays from home, or wherever they may be. But the overhead expense of opening our doors on Wednesdays allows us the savings to have a better chance of remaining profitable without affecting the newspaper product our readers receive twice a week. So,through 2022, we will continue to have our front door open from 9 to 5, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, and closed on Wednesday.

We have done our best to adapt to the economic realities of this Covid-19 world that we find ourselves in. We wish it wasn’t so, but wishing does not keep us in business.

We feel certain that our automotive dealership friends wish that micro-processing chips were in supply to the degree that they had anything close to their new vehicle inventories of pre-Covid-19 times.

But their reality is a tremendous backorder of new vehicle orders still waiting to come their way.

I personally wish that our office supply warehouses across the nation, that we once confidently depended on for zippy next-day shipment through our network of independent dealers, were not all nearly empty currently.

Meanwhile, dozens of ships are still floating off the California coast, waiting their turn to be unloaded, because that state’s crazy leadership tells its workers that they don’t have to go to work, and can draw inflated unemployment wages and simply stay home.

Kingfisher Office Supply remains open, but we have had to make changes in our operation, because the business model we went by was also shredded by the problems that the COVID-19 virus brought our way.

It’s not just us: all of us in the brick and mortar retail businesses of small-town America have found ourselves in new and unchartered waters, and are searching for new ways to operate so that we may continue to stay in business.

It’s certainly not only affecting us at this newspaper. We fully plan to continue our tradition of being Oklahoma’s oldest continuously published newspaper.

We are all to some degree feeling the hurt that this Chinese virus brought to our shores.

We thank you all for your patronage and support, and our promise is to do everything within our abilities to keep doing what we do.

On the bright side, we will have to wait a while, but we are told that the worldwide shortage situation (regarding just about everything) should be better by 2023, for those of us who are still in operation.

But if another variant of the virus comes our way, which is certainly not out of the realm of possibility, all bets are off.

It seems every day that the powers that be, both worldwide and in Washington D.C., are implementing new jaw-dropping plans to limit our freedom to do business through common sense methods. They also seem to be doing their best to make it more and more difficult to turn a profit in the world of small business.

Hard for me to believe this entire COVID-19 mess “just happened” and was not conceived and unleashed on our world through plan and implementation.

I hope that’s not so, but common sense tells us there is probably much more to this “Great Reset” story than we are currently being told.

Who knows? Maybe one of these days the complete story will be disclosed.