The most common reason newsagents give me for not wanting to be called newsagents is the weakest members of our channel – the stores that have half the lights off, empty shelves, people serving wearing dirty clothes or where the floor is cluttered with junk.
Other indications of weakness are the business practices used. While using an approved computer system to manage magazines has been a requirement for more than ten years, that we still have newsagents labelling magazines manually suggests we have businesses not embracing even basic management requirements.
These weak businesses allow some suppliers and others to exploit our channel.
I remember the first few weeks in business using a price gun to label mags and writing the return date on them , it would take forever . well that only lasted a few weeks then came Tower …
Bottom line vision, bottom line direction.