Newsagents in shopping centres need to fully embrace the centre hours and opportunities. I mention this because I’ve heard from a couple of people this week who have visited shopping centres for late night Christmas trading and have found the newsagency in each centre closed. This was early in the evening.
A dark newsagency in a busy centre with all other retailers around open sends a bad message not just about the business but the channel more widely.
I can understanding closing an hour early if the shop and centre are completely dead, but three or four hours early is not good.
I appreciate that there is a cost with being open such long hours. But we know this when we go into chopping centres.
Except for Monday (our staff Christmas dinner) we have traded late for about a week an a half culminating in last night closing well after 10. Most of the last hour was spent preparing for today but we had sales as well.
Very dissapointed at the number of stores that closed by 8 pm as they did themselves no favours and let the whole centre down.
As a side note we are often the last shop closing apart from the Supermarket and First Choice and even when traffic is slow we have some high value and easy sales while we use this time to do other work on thweshop floor.
I couldn’t agree more. We had 3 nights
of trading until 9pm this week and we stayed open the whole time while the
shops around us in our gorgeous new
shopping centre just shut at 5.30 as usual.
After the first night of opening (with great
trading) I thought I would mention how good it was to some of my surrounding stores and the response was “it’s Xmas and we’ve got better things to do” or “we
work hard enough all day without opening at night as well” Interestingly the mum and dad stores did
open and the national type stores closed.
Portman’s, Peter Alexander, which are both Just group stores were closed and the only one of the new stores which opened was Zara which of course made a killing. I am at the opposite end of the new mall but I got the rub off of people walking towards me to get to Coles and it
was more than worthwhile.
I think the consumer gets confused as well but it worked for me.
Coles was open until midnight so I shut my doors at 9pm, washed the floors and
did my grocery shopping for Xmas over the 3 nights (easy peasy with very few people) so there was an upside for me.
My suggestion to retailers who don’t take
advantage of extended trading hours is to
“get out of the kitchen” because we are under attack from digital retailing and we now need to do it better than ever before.
Merry Xmas and a Happy New year to all the bloggers out there who have contributed to this site.
It enables us to measure ourselves against
our peers and it helps us to better understand our industry when we see what motivates others.
Personally, for me, it is about the chase.
I love, for instance, ordering an item that
doesn’t usually sell in my store, and then
challenging my staff to sell it.
We sold 6 musical carousels (plays Xmas
and other music) and 5 Ferris Wheels (same sort of music) and they were $400
each.
I have challenged all my staff to a competition to see who can sell the last Ferris Wheel today and there is a prize for
the seller.
It is on at the counter and it looks gorgeous and gives the shop a nice ambience for Xmas.
It also adds to the atmosphere in the shop
when the staff are motivated.
When we bought this shop about 12 years
ago I had never had anything to do with gifts because we had distribution and retail in our other shop.
I asked the person from whom we purchased the business if he could give me
any advice about gifts and this was his advice “Never ever have a gift over $19.95 because that is the uppermost price that people will pay in a newsagency”
I followed that advice for about 6 weeks and then decided to dip my toes into a bigger pool and we sell all sorts of things
that cost $200, $300, $400, so we are just unlimited in product and price as far
as I can see and to survive in a mall shop
we have to have much more than mags and papers.
Gifts & stationery are my first consideration because of the GP but I will
accede that Mags still play a very large part
in my mix. (papers are my least problem
and the thing to which I give my least attention these days after 33 years of them ruling my very existence)
Thanks Mark for sharing your experiences
with our industry.
I am so hooked on this blog that I arrive a
few minutes earlier than necessary each day just so I can “hop on” and read what
is happening out there.