A blog on issues affecting Australia's newsagents, media and small business generally. More ...

Month: January 2021

Your local newsagency is the best shop for Valentine’s Day cards

If you are looking for Valentine’s Day cards and / or gifts this year, shop your local newsagency first.

Why? Your local newsagency has range. They most likely have fun Valentine’s Day cards, serious cards, traditional cards and quirky cards.

Your local newsagency is an easier place to shop for Valentine’s Day cards. They give you space, they let you shop the way you want to shop. In a supermarket the aisles are full and there are people often looking at what you are looking at.

In your local newsagency, the staff can help you choose a Valentine’s Day card. They know all about good old-fashioned customer service. Tell them what you need and they can make some suggestions. At a supermarket counter this is challenging.

The thing about Valentine’s Day cards is that while it is a commercial season designed to get you to buy a card, or two, for which we thank you, it is an opportunity to add a keepsake they will cherish. Yes, there are people who hang on to every card they are given, people who keep them and look at them years later. This means that the Valentine’s Day card you give today could be a heartwarming memory tomorrow.

Newsagents are more likely to have the cards that will provide for better memories as they have range.

Fun fact: newsagents will sell more Valentine’s Day cards in 2021 than any other retail channel in Australia.

Newsagents go further, too. If you need somewhere to write on the card, your local newsagency is likely to help with this. Hey, if you need help working out what to write on the card, there will be team members in your local newsagency who can help with this too. This is what shopping local is all about, it is how local newsagents help more shoppers for cards express how they feel to those about whom they care.

For Valentine’s Day cards in 2021, shop your local newsagency and see for yourself how this local Aussie retail channel makes a difference in lives and communities. See how relevant newsagencies are today for cards and more.

While there are plenty of retail businesses selling Valentine’s Day cards, your local newsagency is the best place to shop. Go!

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Greeting Cards

Contact tracing required in WA retail, including newsagents, from Feb. 12

Click here to see the details of the requirements for contact tracing in small business retail as announced by the WA government today.

A contact register is a record of anyone over 16 years of age (including staff, customers, contractors and volunteers) who attends a specified business or venue in WA. It must record the following information:

  • Name
  • Phone number
  • Location
  • Date
  • Arrival time

Contact registration is not required for children under 16 years. However, adults that accompany children under 16 are encouraged to register their details.

The information will only be used for the purpose of COVID-19 contact tracing by the Department of Health WA, and records will be destroyed after 28 days. Their purpose is to allow health officials to quickly identify and assist anyone that may have been exposed to COVID-19.

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Newsagency management

Australia Post not proceeding with magazine trial

ALNA has shared news today that Australia Post will not be proceeding with the trial of selling magazines in its outlets.

This is great news.

ALNA has lobbied hard on this issue as have plenty of us.

I’m not sure who made the call … Australia Post, Are Media. It’s a good decision for the Aussie newsagency channel and for the magazine category more broadly. It encourages newsagents to remain or become local magazine specialists without a worry that Australia Post wants to take the shine off that.

For reference, here’s my video from October 28, 2020 on the issue:

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magazines

Learning about shopper perception from social media

Social media platforms like Twitter allow us to see what shoppers think about our channel. Looking this morning, I found the thread below on stationery. One of the comments caught my attention as they talk about the demise of local newsagents. Then, in the same thread is the comment that local newsagents were a godsend during Covid lockdown.

The more we engage on social media speaking about our channel the better. We have many good stories to tell.

Here’s the bit about the demise of our channel:

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newsagency of the future

Vale, Ted Rogan

Ted Rogan was managing director of GNS through its critical formative years. I first met him in the very early days of Group as it was commonly referred to at the time, it was at one of their first trade shows in the back streets of Sydney somewhere.

Ted was a force to be reckoned with. He certainly had his way of doing things. Once you navigated that and demonstrated value for newsagents, he was on your side.

One GNS was well established in NSW, Ted led the expansion interstate and for this he was, for a while, a target of interstate jealousy / rivalry. He didn’t care, though. As a good CEO, he focussed on what he thought was right for the business.

In the early 2,000s there were some political stoushes I got to see from close quarters. Ted tended to not let personality get in the way of what he thought was right for the business, leaving some opponents worse off.

One of the last times I saw ted was in the mid 2000s. It was a dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Sydney. I was on the ANF Board at the time and the dinner was organised for an informal discussion about the GNS / ANF relationship. Chinese was selected because we’d been told ted enjoyed the cuisine. It was a terrific discussion abut the channel as it was then, the changes already evident and a mutual desire to help local newsagents.

Ted played a critical role in GNS for many many years, making it an important business for newsagents at the time. The Board always had his back, which, in hindsight, may not have been ideal as it took GNS many years after Ted’s departure for the Ted influence to leave the building. Those years have not played out as well as they might for GNS.

Ted Rogan played an important and valuable role in the stationery side of the Australian newsagency channel for many years and for that he deserves to be remembered well.

In searching online today, I found this from the AFR from 1994:

VETERAN SURVIVOR OF A TOUGH SALES GAME

By DAVID DENNISTON

The newsagency supply business is about as competitive as it gets. Competition has brought the wholesale price of exercise books down to 1974 levels and “category killers” such as Coles Myer’s Officeworks are emerging all the time to bite off chunks of the market.However, a Sydney-based company, Group Newsagency Supplies, is not only protecting its own territory, but has been on the march in Queensland, seizing 15% of the state’s wholesale stationery supply business within 12 months and planning to gain another 15% in the next year.

GNS operates as a unit trust in which its retail customers invest, and it has supplied newsagencies for 30 years. Serious rivals have come and gone in this time, including ANCOL and Linkline. GNS has outgrown four premises and has become the leading supplier to newsagents in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.

The managing director, Ted Rogan, 52, has spent half his life with GNS. He left his job as a Woolworths store manager to buy a newsagency. “When I joined GNS, it was like a secret society. The four or five people in the group only bought for themselves, and you could join only by invitation. I have always believed that if you were not big enough you could not buy well enough. I wanted others in the industry to share the benefits.”

Not surprisingly, the GNS philosophy is to look after its customers, who own the business through the unit trust structure. To buy from GNS, a newsagent must become a member of the group. Members pay a 2% levy on each order, to a maximum of $5000. In return they receive units in the trust. The accumulation of units gives a member rights to join the trust board. If a unit-holder resigns, the value of the units held is repaid. The levy fund is used for prompt payment of suppliers’ accounts, which has ensured good relations with suppliers, and bargaining power.

The idea of operating GNS as a unit trust was born 10 years ago. Rogan recalls one meeting at which the members cheered the announcement of a loss and passed the hat around to pay the deficit. Another time the hat went round was when 21 of the 40 present chipped in $860,000 to buy a bigger warehouse. The operation has moved, but those who contributed still own the building as a separate property trust.

“We will work with anyone, including competitors, to keep costs down,”Rogan says. “It’s not difficult to buy supplies from 250 companies and sell to 2000 retailers. It’s just sticking items on shelves.” Members can have their orders delivered or collect them at a large cash-and-carry warehouse. The 40%who do this save at least 15% on their total costs.

Over the years, companies in the industry have established territories for marketing viability or protection. ANCOL of South Australia was servicing Broken Hill jointly with GNS, which was unprofitable for both. Because ANCOL made deliveries on the way to other markets, GNS stepped aside in the interests of customer service.

GNS has resisted attempts by others to move into its patch. When the 1300-agent Newspower of Queensland tried to invade NSW, GNS drove the intruders back over the border, and kept going, picking up a share of the Queensland market for good measure.

As business has grown, the need to keep pace with 15,000 product lines, more than 2000 members ordering or visiting, 250 suppliers, 80 employees, stock valued at $5 million and annual sales of $50 million has meant the introduction of computerised

sales information systems for members and the operation’s 20 sales reps. This gives the user up-to-the-minute sales and price information, and the ability to make or change orders and check warehouse stock levels. GNS has spent more than $250,000 on information systems in the past two years.

GNS is planning a newsagency franchise called News Four, partly in response to competition from new groups such as Coles Myer’s mooted 60-store Officeworks chain. Rogan says that with the continued withdrawal from the local scene of many traditional retail outlets, it is increasingly important that newsagents reassert themselves as personalities in – and contributors to- the “village” community, and that the public can see this is happening.

Thanks to Graeme Day for drawing attention to Ted’s passing.

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Social responsibility

GNS outlines the importance of the office dealer network

I get questions about GNS every few days, even though I have no knowledge about the business other than what any newsagent can access.

Paul Yardley, GNS CEO, was quoted in an article at Office Products News a few days ago about the business and GNS strategy:

GNS means business with dealer groups.

ommercial sales now account for around half of the national distribution company’s $70 million turnover.

While COVID-19 has put a dent in commercial sales in recent months, GNS Wholesale is on track to increase its share of the office and business products channel, which it has grown from nothing to more than $33 million over the past 10 years.

The well-documented decline of the newsagency market has seen GNS develop into a two-sided business of roughly equal size: the retail side comprising newsagencies and post offices; and the commercial side, skewed towards the two major dealer groups – Office Choice, for which GNS is the preferred supplier, and Office Brands.

Sales are about equal between the two groups although Office Brands has shown the most growth over the past year, which was reflected in GNS winning the group’s ‘General Office Products Supplier of the Year award’ in 2020.

GNS was also named runner-up in last year’s Office Choice “Supplier of the Year’ award.

Interestingly, the pandemic has resulted in a spike in sales among the three to four thousand newsagencies serviced by GNS, driven by more consumers shopping locally during lockdowns.

“Sales on the commercial side have been flat since the sanitiser and mask gold rush – or bubble – at the start of the pandemic,” Paul Yardley (pictured), CEO of GNS, told Office Products News.

“Dealers generally struggled in metro areas and the CBD but the regional businesses have done OK,” he said.

Office Products News understands GNS’ first half revenue decreased by 3 per cent. while profit before tax grew to $1.6m (significantly improved versus the prior year’s breakeven position), a strong result considering the impact of COVID-19.

Central to GNS’s pitch to the dealer channel is the fact that the company (which incidentally is owned by 300 newsagent shareholders) is Australia’s largest stationery and office products wholesaler, bigger than all of its competitors combined.

GNS has five warehouses – in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth – the latter two coming on board with respective acquisitions of SATEX in South Australia (in 2018) and WA Stationery in Western Australia (in 2017).

GNS currently employs a national field sales force of 12 and customer service team of eight.

The business has a senior management team of four – Yardley, Nerolee Conaghan (head of sales and customer service), Adam Wedge (head of merchandise) and Peter King (chief operating officer) – who run the business “leanly”, with the customer experience foremost.

“We are a low-cost operator with around 16,000 SKUs, all held in every shed,” Yardley said.

As for stock availability, Yardley said this was a key focus. “If we have it, we’ll deliver it,” he said. “Our DIFOT rating (Delivered in Full, On Time) has improved to around 97 per cent.” Yardley added that COVID and port/shipping issues had meant supplier out-of-stocks were worse than usual industry-wide.

GNS supports national brands that “invest in brand equity”, according to Yardley but it also has stable of four private label brands that account for less than 10 per cent of its total revenue.

Through Neon Orient, GNS sources and supplies around 40 of 270 Office Brands’ Initiative products.

Sovereign, once the major own brand at GNS but now limited to exercise books, has been superseded by the Stat range of around 170 stationery products.

GNS also offers a small number of generic ‘white label’ products on seasonal and everyday items.

Since joining GNS in 2016, Yardley has held the view that the dealer channel has the same “transition issues” as other markets in terms of succession.

He believes that as the industry transitions down a generation, the new owners will not want to run a warehouse, with its added costs and operational issues.

“Over the next five or so years a large proportion of dealers in Australia will change ownership – that’s an opportunity for us,” he said.

Meantime, Yardley is hoping the pandemic will ease off enough this year so that GNS and Office Choice can re-schedule their combined trade show OPIX.

“If not, we’ll probably run some smaller state roadshows,” he said.

GNS has been a ‘whipping-boy’ of newsagents for years, decades even. This article outlines news that should appeal to GNS shareholders. It also outlines pathway opportunities for newsagents keen to grow stationery revenue.

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Stationery

Local business collaboration tip for newsagents

A fruit and veggie shop near where I live home delivers mystery boxes of fruit and veg for a fixed price. They also offer a magazine with each delivery. Here’s what it looks like.

This is an easy collaboration opportunity for a newsagent and a fruit and veg shop. Okay, you get one magazine sale, but, hey, that with a flyer inside could attract shoppers to your business. Also, if they deliver 50 of these mystery boxes, that’s a good number.

My point is, collaborations like this one are smart and local and local is key in 2021.

Also, it is this type of small step initiative that can help a local business. There is much foundational strength to gain from many small steps as opposed to one big step.

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magazines

Did Better Homes and Gardens even check newsagents for their where to buy back to School article?

Better Homes and Gardens has published a story on the beside all for back to school. Here is the part of the story that connects with our channel.

Stationery

Typo

Flatlay of stationery
Typo

Save with back to school deals on stationery items at Typo. Buy 3 ‘Campus’ notebooks for $15, 3 pens for $5, and pencil cases starting from $9.99. ‘Getting it done’ stationery bundle, $55.

Available at: Typo

Kikki.K

Receive a free weekly planner (valued at $19.99) with every $50 purchase.

Available at: Kikki.K

Booktopia

Save up to 75% off book bargains.

Available at: Booktopia

Dymocks

Save on Dymocks’ range of notebooks, pencil cases, lunch boxes, educational games and flash cards.

Available at: Dymocks

Officeworks

Officeworks are running a back to school price beat guarantee. If you find another store offering a lower price on an identical stocked item, Officeworks will beat the price by 20%.*

Available at: Officeworks

*Terms and conditions apply.

I know of newsagents who beat these named suppliers.

I wonder how the journalist who wrote the article did their research? Did they focus on national businesses, advertisers … what? Newsagents should be listed if they have the best deals. Also, newsagents are more likely to support the local school and local community groups.

It’s frustrating that small businesses are left out this way.

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magazines

The Australia Day Foundation in the UK ‘honours’ Rupert Murdoch with lifetime achievement honour

I would have thought the no-strings $40M gift from the federal government was honour enough. Or the $0 tax paid by News Australia Holdings racked up $16bn income but paid zero tax over six years even on the $246m they declared in taxable income. Source Michael West Media. Or the scope of interference almost daily in our democracy. No, not reward enough, not the for the Australia Day Foundation in the UK. They have bestowed a new award. And, in his acceptance video Mr Murdoch says he’s not done. Sheesh.

The Australia Day Foundation is supported by a bunch of commercial sponsors. UPDATE (27/01): And, they operate rent free out of Australian Government funded Australia House in London.

It is surprising that some companies have more capacity for donations than they have for paying tax in Australia.

Now, a couple of things:

  • I have embedded this tweet as it is the only one with the video of the speech and for no other reason.
  • Also, if you disagree with me, it’s okay. I have not written this to change your mind. I do think News Corp is a cancer in our democracy, that News Corp regularly interferes in our democracy and that News Corp is not a socially responsible entity when it comes to its tax affairs.

Daily, News Corp. tells us and governments what to do yet daily it works to limit the resources available with which to do these things.

UPDATE (27/01): It turns out the trust does have ties to the Australian government and that this ‘honour’ is irregular. This thread, including evidence, is well worth reading:

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Ethics

Workshop: taking your retail business online

Tomorrow, Jan 25., at 2pm Melbourne time I am hosting a free Zoom meeting that’s all about taking your business online. It will cover how to, what to, when to and why to. It will be interactive … designed to answer all questions.

I am hosting it through my POS software company for retailers from a range of channels. newsagents are most welcome. Here’s the link:

https://zoom.us/j/91352559972?pwd=Z2Vwa2wrVVQwekJCbDYrVENEb3A3UT09
Meeting ID: 913 5255 9972 Passcode: 308883 Anyone is welcome to join in.

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Newsagency management

Inspiring community shop solution to managing shopper access during Covid

What a terrific story from the Itteringham Village Shop, Norfolk, which I found through Better Retailing, an excellent online news and resource platform for indie retailers in the UK. Their practical solution for managing the monitored access to to the shop by shoppers is excellent.

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Management tip

Making Valentine’s shopping easy

Offering ready to give gifts is a terrific way to increase gift sales in the newsagency or any retail business.

Placing the wrapped ready to give item next to a clear description or a showing of what is in the gift makes the purchase easy.

Offering a diversity of gift choices is key, too … where diversity can be in the wrapping itself. This is especially true for Valentine’s gifts given the evolving diversity of this season.

What I particularly love about the gift pictured, which I did not wrap by the way, is that it looks non traditional and it appeals more broadly than is common for val gifts.

To me, this gift and others from the pre-wrapped range represent a good example of us differentiating our business and making our own success.

It is also a way of repositioning existing inventory. In this photographed package, for example, is a candle, which, alone on the shelf, may not feel like a val gift. Packaged this way it does.

Valentine’s Day 2021 will be different to other years because of what we all went through in 2020. Engaging early and outside traditional is key to maximising this difference I think.

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marketing tip

Late barcode duplication advice from Ovato

Ovato sent this advice to newsagents today at 2pm, not to the software companies that are on the front line for handling such matters. Ugh!

Please be advised that Mr Wisdom Sudoku #128, on sale today 21st January, was incorrectly printed with the same barcode (931339800258901) as Better Homes & Gardens Sudoku #9 which went on sale 28th December.=

Could you please ensure you maintain both titles on sale for their respective on sale periods and process returns against the correct title code when each title recalls.

Note that this may require you to review any returns processed by your POS system, should you use a POS system to process your returns.

For agents on NPR (No Physical Returns), we will exclude these titles from your NPR calculation due to the errors that may occur in scan sales.

Mr Wisdoms Sudoku
Title code: 20638
Issue code: 1280
On sale: 21/01/21
Recall date 18/03/21
RRP $4.99

Better Homes & Gardens Sudoku
Title code: 17428
Issue code: 90
On sale: 28/12/20
Recall date: 18/02/21
RRP $4.99

Please accept our apologies for the inconveniences this may cause.

Thanks for your support.

What should Ovato have done?

  1. Picked this up earlier.
  2. Advised the software companies first, to leverage their own comms channels with newsagents.

In their note they say should you use a POS system. They know exactly who uses a system. Seriously!

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magazine distribution

Check your data backup, please!

A ‘tech-savvy’ staff member in a newsagency changed the approach to data backup for the business, setting up their own cloud backup to run automatically.

They did this back in 2019. They since left the business.

Following a hardware problem, there was a need to access the backup, to restore data. There was no data to be found.

The way the cloud service had been setup was such that it had an initial time period, which had not been renewed.

The business had no current backup from which to restore.

A disaster recovery arrangement or plan is only useful if it works.

My advice is that you check your backup, or have it professionally checked, every six months. Think of it as a fire extinguisher in the workplace, which specialists check and certify on a schedule.

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Newsagency management

Tabcorp reviewing additional terminal approval process

Some retailers in line for an additional lottery terminal since mid 2020 have been wondering why they are yet to receive the much-needed additional terminal.

It turns our Tabcorp decided to review the process through which it assessed additional terminal requests. This decision to review stopped the sending of additional terminals that had already been approved.

In the meantime, there appears to be no delay to new location approvals. Hmm …

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Ethics

Excellent example of journalism worth paying for at the Washington Post

This video is a 14 minute except from a 41 minute video released to Washington Post subscribers in which they meticulously lay out what happened in the attack on the US capitol. As a WaPo subscriber, I have seen the full length video. It is chilling. It is also representative of excellent, fact-based, journalism, for which I am happy to pay.

This is the challenge for commercial news outlets, creating genuinely valuable content that people can trust.

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Ethics

The latest Vogue US magazine popular in Australia

I’ve had 8 people ask about buying the latest edition of the US Vogue magazine, the issue featuring incoming Vice President Kamala Harris on the cover. A couple those inquiring made it clear they didn’t care about the price.

It’s in situations like that I’d love an online portal through we could demand order single issues with certainty, even with a firm sale requirement. I am sure we could grow magazine sales. It would be easy to setup and run.

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magazines

Greeting card sales through Covid in the news

There have been several articles about greeting card sales I the US during the pandemic that are worth reading:

As I go through data for the Q4 2020 newsagency sales benchmark the results in Australia are similar to what you will see in the above articles. Not in all stores but most. The growth was most prevalent in the stores with a stronger gift and giving success as the two go hand in hand.

The card category has had a good covid. Sales are up, hopefully in a way that sticks through 2021.

Across in the UK, the news is not so good with City A.M. reporting a tough year for Card Factory, the card retailer now supplying the reject Shop in Australia with cards.

Closed stores over the Christmas period meant Card Factory suffered significant losses, sending its shares down 4.1 per cent this morning.

Card Factory experienced a year-on-year decline of over 38 per cent, where forced store closures prohibited openings for 37 per cent of available trading days.

Sales over the eleven-month period fell from almost £425m in 2019 to £281m in 2020.

The greeting card retailer said it expected to report a loss before tax of around £10m for the year, compared with a pre-tax profit of over £65m a year earlier.

Executive chairman, Paul Moody, remains convinced that Card Factory resonates strongly with its customers and will bounce back from a tough year.

He said: “Despite the obvious uncertainties in the first half of 2021, I am confident that we have the opportunity to return the business to sustainable profitable growth and will do all that is necessary in the near term to ensure that we can maximise that opportunity.”

Card Factory’s online services performed very strongly, achieving like-for-like sales growth of 137 per cent during the same period.

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Greeting Cards

Woolworths and cashless retail

Another Woolworths Metro store in Sydney is going cashless. The announcement of the move is kicking up a storm on social media with over 2,000 tweets yesterday in a few hours.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for the company. In several US cities now regulations have been passed requiring cashless retailers to have a facility for taking cash from people who request that.

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retail

Careful what you wish for

Following relentless lobbying by News, Nine and some other commercial news outlets, agreement was reached for Google and Facebook to pay a fee for news stories to appear in search results.

Now, a few weeks later, Google is said to be trialling eliminating some news outlets from search results. It’s a kind of careful what you wish for moment.

This story has a bit to play out yet. It will be interesting to watch and see where it lands.

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Media disruption

More trade shows delayed due to Covid

More overseas trade shows have been delayed as retailers and wholesalers deal with Covid challenges.

The New York Toy Fair, a key buying event for Australian toy wholesalers, has been moved two months. Some expect it to be delayed further. Some suppliers are not waiting and have scheduled their own online events at the timing of the original Fair – Mid February.

While trade show delays here in Australia impact retailers and suppliers, it is the overseas fairs that impact suppliers.

This time of the year, January through early March, it is not unusual for buyers from Australian businesses to be overseas for almost the whole time bouncing between trade shows. that is not happening this year. This will play out in terms of product ranges we see available.

the product catgegories most challenges by this disruption are gifts, homewares, toys and games.

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Uncategorized

Interesting Twitter thread on newspaper returns at a local newsagency

The thread was drawn to my attention when a journalist tagged me in a comment. The whole thread makes for interesting reading. The original poster has 260 Twitter followers. Looking at the comments and re-tweets, it has reached tens of thousands. That in itself is a story about the ripple impact of social media.

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Media disruption
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