The GNS Market Fairs start this weekend with the Perth Market Fair on Sunday at Challenge Stadium in Mt Claremont. These trade shows provide an excellent opportunity for newsagents to engage with suppliers who support the channel.
You can see the suppliers supporting the GNS Market Fairs if you turn to the back page of the latest GNS Group News newsletter – the July 2011 issue. There, on the back page, are the logos of newsagent suppliers supporting the GNS Market Fairs and through this GNS and the newsagency channel more widely.
Newsagents can reasonably question the support of stationery, marketing group and software companies not supporting newsagents by supporting the GNS Market Fairs.
GNS is owned by newsagents. This is our company. It depends on newsagent and supplier support. This is why it is important for newsagents to know which suppliers support GNS and through this support the millions of dollars of newsagent funds invested in GNS.
Newsagents who want a strong newsagent owned stationery wholesaler should question dealing with stationery suppliers, marketing groups and software companies which do not support GNS. You can’t have one without the other. GNS relies not only on newsagent purchases but supplier support in other ways – such as at the GNS Market Fairs.
So, check out the back page of the GNS Group News newsletter and note the suppliers supporting the Australian newsagent channel through the GNS Market Fairs. Better still, come along to the Fair in your state.
For the record, I own newsagent software Tower Systems which currently serves 1,752 newsagents and half of newsXpress which serves more than 170 newsagents. Both companies are thrilled to be participating in all GNS Market Fairs this year.
So, yes, I am conflicted in writing about this. However, every supplier has had an opportunity to support GNS and newsagents more broadly.
Newsagents want to be treated as a channel. They (we) want to leverage the strength of numbers. A great rallying place for this is GNS. This is why supplier support for GNS and the Market Fairs is a fair point of judgment for stationery suppliers, marketing groups and marketing groups.
Can you please explain how newsagents own GNS. I dont understand the connection.
Wally newsagents own the majority of shares in the business.
Newsagents who don’t alreasdy own shares in GNS are welcome to purchase them – another way of showing support.
Thank you for your strong support for the GNS Market Fair’s. This is a perfect example of our industry working together during tough times when unity is essential.
Perhaps if GNS did not have the monopoly on stationary, Newsagents would be able to compete with officeworks and others in terms of price. At this point in time many are wearing the recent price increases, rather than passing these on to customers, in order to stay competitive.
George, Staples are offering QuikStik labels as “On Special” at $5.25 normally $5.95. This is dearer than my normal price with my standard mark up on stationery. We do compete very favourably with Office Works and the other warehouse stationery retailers and normally better thier prices without discounted and barsardizing our products.
GNS gives us the means to not only buy at very competetive prices but to promote the ourselves through their catalogues.
How is this a bad thing and what is your agenda in promoting a disjointed structure for the industry???
You could apply Brendan’s example to a whole range of products from Officeworks, Staples etc and find that you could still compete very effectively with these and other stationery suppliers. In fact go into either of these two stores and have a real good look at their prices and you will find that with the exception of loss leading specials they generally don’t compete. My mission in my Newsagency is to make my customers aware of this and to change the old fashioned mind set that Newsagencies are the last place for stationery and are usually the dearest.
I have and continue to find GNS a great resource for Newsagents and I would challenge any Newsagent to find an alternative that provides such access to the broad range of suppliers, provides the marketing support and deals that GNS already provides and has Newsagents interests as their primary focus.
Sure you can pick out items where the big guys have better prices – from time to time. Overall we’re competitive and our customers agree. We’re about 80kms from GNS warehouse. It pays us to to visit once per week, pay cash, and do our own picking and carrying. The discount more than pays our journey cost including time. We can also collect specific customer orders (which is a growing volume). We pass part of this saving onto ABN customers and hey presto we have a (rapidly) growing department. By the way we have 2 Officeworks stores within 10kms of us, and a 3rd one rumoured to be going in 1km distant.
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
we have sold our newsagency at last. Feels sooooooooo good to be getting out of this decaying industry
Disappointing comment Terese. I know of many newsagencies which are not decaying.