The decisions of good newsagents reflect of their community – in terms or customer service, range and visual merchandising. It is visual merchandising which has been on my mind this weekend.
Comments I have published here about not pushing some titles because of concerns for my customers have led to a couple of calls telling me that it is a privilege to sell certain products and that I must honour this by promoting the titles as I am told.
I can’t do every display how and where I am told for to do this would upset my customers.
My customers come first.
This means no feature display if the title being promoted relies on breasts on the cover to attract interest. I’ll display it somewhere, just not where every customer sees the display.
Publishers and visual merchandising representatives need to understand that our customers come first. This commitment is good for us and our suppliers.
If we do as told, and promote titles which may not speak to our customers, we risk turning people away and no one benefits from that.
I wish newsagents were served by more suppliers who trusted us to make good business decisions for our businesses and the businesses of our suppliers. Treating us like robots is disrespectful of us and our customers. Thankfully, not all suppliers do this.
For us, the boob mags raise a bit of a problem. When we first took it on, they were right in front of the counter, and sold consistently, most of the time. Unfortunately, they were also displayed next to comics and kids’ mags!!
Moving the comics and modifying the adult display didn’t really work for the kids, however, so it was back to the drawing board.
Now we have the adult mags sharing a rack with the fishing/sports stuff at the other end of the mag wall, and have returned the kids’ stuff in front of the counter, after rebuilding the display, which was pretty ordinary.
Kids’ mags are doing much better here, and I’m not too concerned about the adult stuff languishing – impulse placement in this building means at counter, and kids go for surfing mags and comic stuff, so they come first. The regulars know where their mags live, anyway. It’s a very yukky feeling seeing little boys moving from their comics to try to look at the adult stuff. A few had even tried to buy them.
Ugh! What were Mr & Mrs “I’ve been in retail all my life”, thinking???