Following up my post a few days ago about inefficient foreign language newspaper sales, I spent a couple of hours yesterday observing the behavior of newspaper customer generally. I wanted to measure the number of browsers and the conversion rate of browsers to purchasers.
In the two hour period we had five browsers of regular newspapers (not including those who walked in and picked up the paper to purchase without browsing) and each converted to a sale. In the same period we had eight browsers of foreign language newspapers and one converted to a sale.
While this is unscientific research, it is interesting when considered with the hard evidence of the inefficiency of foreign language newspaper customers. It throws down a challenge to me and other retailers on these products to change what we do to boost sales and improve the broader business return from the foot traffic and the floorspace/labour investment.