The team at A Current Affair did a hatchet job on the Aussie newsagency channel with their story about the closure of the Elenora Heights Newsagency. This is an ignorant and emotive story that has potential to harm thousands of good newsagency businesses.
Just as ABC News did last year, The A Current Affair team have failed to adequately research the story about the state of the Aussie newsagency business. And they have the audacity to bring in some bloke to talk about TikTok shop. Just stupid!
Looking at the details in the A Current Affair footage, this business in Elenora Heights looks like it has not kept up with the times. Even allowing for the fact that they are running down stock, the shop looks like a newsagency from the 1990s, when that type of business started to fade.
Smart newsagents started transforming their businesses 20 years ago. Moving into gifts, homewares, toys and more – attracting new shoppers and selling products at margins four and five times more than newspapers.
Plenty of Australian newsagencies are thriving!
This story about a newsagency closing may not about anything other than poor business decisions. A dive into the business data and their decision-making would confirm this, or not. Journalists would do this research and let the truth of the evidence speak through the story rather thaan the oemtional drivel they peddled on A Current Affair.
As I have written here many times and in emails sent to all newsagents, I’ll help (for free) any newsagent keen to work on transitioning their business from relying on legacy product categories to attracting new shoppers through product categories not common to our channel and in pursuit of growing overall business grows profit and thereby offering insulation to the disruption of change.
I know of newsagencies right around Australia that are thriving, growing. These businesses are not selling last-minute gifts. Some are selling fashion items for $300 apiece and more. Others are selling $500 homewares items. Some are doing $80,000 a year in the best coffee in town. Some are achieving 33% of revenue online selling to people interstate and overseas. Some are selling over $100,000 a year in collectibles.
I know of regional newsagencies doing $250,000 a year in gifts and more, achieving far more in gross profit each year than newspapers and magazines ever delivered combined.
A typical newsagency today should be making less than 10% of their turnover from print media products, 30% of revenue from lottery commission and 60% from gifts, homewares, books, toys and more. That is, 60% of revenue from items delivering 50% and more gross profit.
The difference between this type of transformed newsagency business and the traditional newsagency is decisions made by the business owners.
You can’t blame the decline in print for newsagencies closing. Newsagents make a paltry margin from print products. It’s disrespectful, and embarrassing how little we make. A business closing because of this is a business rooted in the past.
Smart newsagents started transforming their businesses 20 years ago. Moving into gifts, homewares, toys and more – attracting new shoppers and selling products at margins four and five times more than newspapers.
This is the story A Current Affair should be covering, a story of a channel navigating extraordinary change with plenty of local retailers, local newsagents, evolving their businesses to be relevant, vibrate and valuable. I know of newsagents doing $500K a year on online sales. I know of newsagencies growing in-store sales 20% a year and more.
While news outlets and suppliers consider newsagents a channel, newsagents are not a channel and have not been for many years. You can’t go into a newsagency expecting they will have what you want if your expectation is rooted in decades ago.
I don’t think the shingle matters. What matters is what shoppers feel when they enter a retail businesses. If they step into a shop that nurtures a feeling of comfort and happiness and offers them a treasure hunt retail experience they will tell others, and they will come back. The shingle above the door is irrelevant.