The decision to remain a member of a newsagency association ought to be a business decision based on tangible benefits.
How much does it cost for a year? What tangible benefits have you achieved in the last year? What other use could you make of such an investment?
Talking with a newsagent recently, they cited access to award rates as the main benefit for their considerable cost a year. In less than a minute I showed them online access to a free service via Fairwork.
The ANF on their website (see image) lists annual membership at $876.00 per year. Think about what you could do with that $876. The new product range you could bring in, the ads you could run, the changes you could find in the business, the manager you could pay while you have a week off.
I can think of plenty of products categories you could introduce for this spend, categories off of which you can expect to make between $3,000 and $5,000 in GP a year.
Note: this discussion is about any association in any retail channel. The numbers and needs are the same.
Each of these benefits would be, I suspect, more practically useful to the business than what the ANF provides.
Associations need to justify the fees they charge. It is not enough to say support us and we support you as on the representation front they do a mediocre job at best in my view.
I estimate newsagents pour around $2,500,000 a year into their associations nationally. I doubt newsagents see a return equal to this flowing to their businesses.
Think about that. Can you identify $2.5M in value to the newsagency channel from any of all of the newsagent associations in the last year?
Now, think about what else that $2.5M could have been spent on your behalf.
I would love to see this debated publicly in front of newsagents with representatives from newsagent associations. Not to tear them down but to flesh out if they are delivering value. It could be I am wrong. If I am the associations ought to make the point and show it, they ought to show genuine bottom line value to newsagent members.
With the commercial future of newsagency businesses further removed from what the associations are interested in, I see little value in them.