This week I am looking five cores of today’s newsagency. I have selected five that relate to every retail newsagency, or should at least. Each core is important because of traffic and that mastering it defines our business in the eyes of these we serve.
Core #1: newspapers
Sure we don’t make a fair margin from them and reasonable supply is a challenge and their promotions can be frustrating – but newspapers are important to retail newsagents.
- Newspapers provide good traffic. What else we leverage that traffic into is up to us.
- The most important newspapers for us to sell are foreign language titles and local papers if we are in regional and rural locations.
- Newspapers can be space friendly. Placing them in less expensive space tends to not hurt sales. Placing them without the full cover on show tends to not hurt sales. So, we can reduce our costs.
- We can use the traffic generated by newspapers to promote other products. Key magazines do well when placed next to them – such as Better Homes and Gardens.
- We can place products so that people purchasing a paper are pitched other items on the way to the counter and then as they leave the shop.
- We can ensure every newspaper sold is sold with a flyer or offer to attract the shopper back into the business.
- So while we can be frustrated with newspapers, they do present opportunities for us which we can leverage into other sales.
The purpose of this series is to remind newsagents what sits at the core of today’s newsagency business. And I am talking about today. Tomorrow may be different. Hat we need to do right now is manage for today to achieve the best we can with today’s traffic.
I am not including tobacco and lotteries in this list as not every newsagency has these.