Knicks mania is in the air, but how does that affect local businesses beyond the obvious cases, like bars packed out on random weeknights? Beer is a constant, but what about print media? To find out, I stopped by Casa Magazines, a well-loved corner store in the West Village where you can procure pretty much anything printed, from the daily tabloids to esoteric small-batch fare. I spoke to content strategist Tammy David and staffer Mirza Ayan Baig about how the New York Knicks’ Finals run has changed business at the store.
The Knicks had also been in the postseason the previous three years, but it wasn’t until they earned a Finals berth that buyer behavior began to drastically change. Customers walked in not seeking out a particular publication, but the team in general.
“Sometimes they were like, ‘Do you have any New York Knicks?’ ‘No.’ It’s like looking for gum or vape—they move on to the next,” David said. The Knicks covers of the New York Post and New York Daily News, with their classically brash headlines, were selling out within an hour of the store’s 8 a.m. opening, sometimes even within 15 minutes. They were so sought after that ahead of Game 4, David put on social media an instructional video for customers to grasp where in the (very small) store the tabloids are stocked, minimizing confusion. But as popular as the tabloids are, Casa’s biggest explosion in sales was a weekly magazine. The cover of the New Yorker‘s June 1 issue is a Mark Ulriksen illustration of Jalen Brunson, flexing over a lineup of storied Knicks. That was the one.
Baig said his colleague, who has worked at the store for 26 years, said they’d never sold that many copies of a magazine in a single day. Though they didn’t want to go on the record about the sales figures, here are some numbers they did provide: Within three days after the magazine’s release, Baig got over 6,000 phone calls from people hoping to purchase the magazine, and between 300 to 400 emails. They’ve had to emphatically note on social media that they are sold out of the issue. They even put up a sign in the store with this information, though they couldn’t find the sign when I visited, which led David to wonder aloud if someone had even stolen the sign, too.
Despite these efforts, the store continues to get calls about the issue 10 days later; one even came in during the course of our interview, and because Baig already knew what it was going to be about, he put it on speaker phone for my sake. David scrolled down her phone through a long list of people whose information they have in case of a restock, which doesn’t appear to be forthcoming.
The team’s success is bringing in foot traffic from all over the world. Tourists from Germany and Sri Lanka have stopped by to try and score the New Yorker Brunson cover. At times, Casa has had lines of 50 to 60 people wrapped around the corner. Baig knows his regulars, and said he estimated that the Knicks hype is made up of about 85 to 90 percent total newcomers to the store.
“I have seen the people, they didn’t even buy any magazine in their lifetime, they are just here to buy the New Yorker with the New York Knicks. And trust me, they are not even going to read it. They just wanted to frame it to collect it as a souvenir, right?” Baig said. “It’s a big thing, you know, after 26, 27 years.” He cited the election of Zohran Mamdani, 9/11, and the death of Princess Diana as other reference points. In terms of print sales for the store, he claimed, this Knicks run beats all of them.
Some customers have walked into Casa and tried to negotiate with Baig to exceed the two-copies-per-customer limit. Some experienced sticker shock after realizing that an issue of the New Yorker sells for $10.99 now; unseasoned readers accused them in social media comments of jacking up the prices, which was false. For other desperate customers, Casa was just one stop on the journey after failed visits to the Port Authority’s newsstands and Barnes & Noble. If the Knicks actually finish the job, this corner store’s phone line may resemble a kind of DDoS attack.
What’s clear is that no one who works at Casa Magazines has seen a sports fixation like this, neither here nor in their countries of origin. “What’s so funny was, I used to [attend] Manny Pacquiao watch parties in the Philippines. And it was a lot of fun in communities where you know it’s people with no televisions, and it’s in a really dirty, dangerous, sweaty coliseum, because that’s where most of the fans are, and it was pure joy, collective joy,” David said. “Wow, those Pacquiao watch parties in Tondo did not prepare me for the New York Knicks. People here are crazy. Manila is crazy, but here—believe it or not, I’m indoors.”
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