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Sunday newsagency management tip: understand the value of pens

In many newsagencies I see, pen sales account for around 30% of all stationery sales not including ink and toner yet pens usually take up less than 10% of the floor space and reflect around 10% of the investment in stock.

These numbers make pens valuable, probably more valuable than newsagents consider.

With such a valuable return on investment and return on floor space, how do you treat them? Do you treat them as the most valuable and important category in your stationery department? Do you consider carefully what you situate either side of pens, in front of pens and in display to shoppers as they leave the pen area?

We know from newsagent sales benchmark data that pens are valuable not only for the revenue they generate but also for the value we derive from the traffic they indirectly generate.

My sense is that we could leverage the pen opportunity more by better staff training, more attentive management, watching product adjacencies and, maybe, tweaking margin.

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Management tip

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