Sell a newspaper for $3.50 and you make about 12.5 per cent. That’s 44 cents in your hand. Sell a $250 item at 55 per cent and you make $137.50.
Do the division. One $250 sale is worth more than three hundred newspapers. You could sell a paper to every adult who walks past for a week and still not match what one good sale puts in the till.
We all know this. So why do we keep leaning on the 44 cents?
Because the paper is easy. The customer comes in, knows what they want, pays, leaves. No risk, no money tied up, nothing riding on your judgement. It feels like business because it’s busy. But busy isn’t the same as making money, and the newspaper proves that every single day.
The $250 sale is hard, and it’s hard in two ways we don’t talk about honestly.
You have to find the item first. That means backing your own read on a range, spending real money on stock that might just sit there, giving it decent space and light, and waiting. Some of it won’t work. You’ll buy the wrong thing now and then. That’s the price of playing in the part of the shop where the money actually is. The paper never asks any of that of you, which is exactly why it pays you 44 cents.
Then you have to find the shopper. And here’s the bit that stings. That shopper is already in your shop. They come in for the paper, or the lotto, or a birthday card. You see them twice a week. You know their name. It has just never crossed your mind that they’d spend $250 with you, because somewhere along the line you filed them as a paper buyer and left them there.
They’ve filed you too. Years of selling them a paper has taught them what you’re for. They don’t look at your good stock because they don’t think of you as the shop that sells it. So they buy the $250 thing somewhere else, from someone who bothered to see more in them than a paper sale.
That’s the real work. Not just buying the right product. Looking again at the people who are already in front of you, and shifting what they think you’re for.
The maths was never the hard part. The habit is.
Now, what is the gift item you sold was worth $1,500? yes, there are ‘newsagents’ doing this.
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Mark Fletcher founded newsagency software company Tower Systems and is the CEO of newsXpress, a marketing group serving innovative independent retailers, including newsagents, who continuously evolve their businesses to be enjoyable, relevant and successful. You can reach him on mark@newsxpress.com.au or 0418 321 338.