The new Coles retail formats which I first wrote about around two years are delivering the retail giant double digit growth according to a report in The Australian Financial Review on Monday (page 56).
This is an excellent result for a major format change.
There was a time when newsagents implementing a new shop fit could expect similar growth. The numbers are not so strong today because our shop fits are not delivering change equal in scope to that currently being implemented across Coles.
Now before newsagency shopfitters get angry, I think that the problem with our shop-fit changes is that we newsagents are not being bold enough in our direction to designers.
The change in revenue we achieve is a measure of the change we deliver in the design.
With shopping centre rents increasing at least 5% a year, a major re-fit needs to deliver at least 10% to justify the investment.
If you have not seen one of the new format Coles store I urge you to do so.
We are doing a shop fit. We are quite new to the business. We have many new ideas. We had to be very definite with the shopfitter about the way way he was interpreting our brief. After several exchanges of draft plans we discovered the real problem was the draftsman. He was just so stuck in his ways he had stopped usiing any imagination. So the lesson is you need to be deeply involved in the planning and talk to everyone who lays their hand on it.
By the way can you say where some of the new Coles are ?