The cover of the latest issue of delicious magazine is stunning. It cuts through against the colour in a busy magazine department. The use of red is inspirational. I can stand at the entrance to the aisle with the title and see it from metres away – it’s the title I first notice. We have the full cover on display as anything less dilutes the value of what they have created.
We’ve moved some confectionery from the counter and replaced it with a range of eco bags in cute owl bags. Owl products sell well for us. As the photo shows the placement has been done in a way to interrupt customers at the counter. We’ll maintain this counter placement for a couple of weeks and check sales data before deciding if we move them on. This is the second location in-store for these bags.
I don’t know what to make of The Babycare Book. At first I thought it was another outsourced title using cheap content from overseas. Inside, I discovered it was from Bauer, from the Mother and Baby team. I’m surprised the cover does not connect to the overarching brand and that the product itself does not have the production quality of many other Bauer titles. As I said, I don;t know what to make of it.
This space is already well covered for us so we early returned The Babycare Book.
When I first heard about Katter’s Australian Party platform of lower penalty rates for small business I thought it was a good move, one I could support. Upon reflection, this may not be such a good move for us.
Imagine you’re a small retailer in a regional town with a regional shopping centre on the edge of town anchored with one of the major supermarkets and their partner variety / department store. Imagine area has relatively low unemployment. Imagine you’re looking for someone for Saturday and Sunday shifts and as a result of legislation giving you a different penalty rate compared to the majors someone working for you on a Sunday is paid less than working for a larger retailer.
The only way to address penalty rates is across the board, for all businesses regardless of size.
My issue with penalty rates is not related to business size. My concern is that we pay a premium for inconvenient hours, such as working on a Sunday. However, for many who work on a Sunday this is their day of work of choice or of necessity because of education and other obligations.
Many small businesses I know would struggle to attract good employees if they paid less per hour than other businesses nearby. Indeed, I expect that should legislation pass allowing small businesses to pay lower penalty rates many of us would actually pay the market rate just to attract good staff.
This issue is considerably more complex than the slogan of lower penalty rates and I hope that Bob Katter and his followers consider that as they embark on their election campaign.
I’ve been looking at sales for the first two weeks of June and comparing them to the same period a year earlier. What is usually a quiet time of the year is good for us: cards up 16%; diaries up 22%; magazines up 1%; gifts up 500% (off an average base); plush up 12% (off a very high base).
Average sale value is up 10% and overall revenue up 6% off of flat traffic.
What we can see in the data is that our focus on cards, gifts and plush as traffic drivers is working. This has been our focus for some time – generating traffic from products we decide on for our business.
Plush, cards and gifts account for 39.5% of our sales – up from 26.4% for the same period a year earlier. This is the number I was most interested in as it reflects on the reinvention of the business. Such reinvention is vital for all newsagents, reinvention around conscious decisions we take on our businesses and the products we target for generating traffic.
We are pitching That’s Life as our magazine of the week this week because of the free comfort food cookbook that comes free with this issue. In Melbourne especially, this is a perfect week to pitch comfort food. We have it at the counter and tagged as our Magazine of the Week.
We received our first issue of fete magazine last week, twice as many copies as we should have been sent to launch this titles to our customers.
I’m happy to launch magazines, especially low volume titles, but I am not happy receiving too much stock. the distributor has sales data for similar titles and would have known from this that they were oversupplying. In this case I early-returned stock.
We experienced a glitch with publishing comments on the blog overnight. The process of authentication that a comment is from a human broke down following a security upgrade. This has now been fixed. Let the comments flow once more….
The imposition of an 80 cent per copy surcharge on newspapers delivered to newsagents in certain areas continues to stress the affected newsagents and leave plenty of others quietly wondering why they dodged this bullet.
News Limited has not imposed the delivery surcharge in all regions where it could apply, leading to questions about the motivation of this move. It has also not so far adjusted the cover price printed on the newspaper.
Coles and Woolworths have not so far imposed the 80 cent a copy surcharge. This is already hurting retail newsagents as newsagency shoppers change outlets. Here’s what else has happened in the last few days:
Questions put to News Limited remain unanswered. Newsagents feel treated poorly.
It will be some time before we understand the real game being played here. So far, based on the evidence, this appears to be a move that will harm newsagents unreasonably. There is no other explanation for the approach News appears to be taking and the lack of consistency in pursuing a more economically viable approach to distributing their product in all areas of Australia.
From what we can see at the moment, a small group of South Australian newsagents are being treated unfairly.
While Vintage Caravan magazine is no longer being distributed by gordon and Gotch, it is alive and well and available to be socked by newsagents – for a better margin. here’s a letter to newsagents from the publisher.
Dear valued Vintage Caravan Magazine stockist,
It has been brought to our attention that Gordon & Gotch have been wrongly informing some of you that Vintage Caravan Magazine is “no longer in production” and that this incorrect information has also been being passed on to our customers.
The truth is that we have ample evidence of Gotch’s wrongdoings with regards to the distribution of Vintage Caravan Magazine and when we attempted to pull them up on this they reacted by ending our distribution agreement.
As a consequence of this we have made the decision to switch to IPS for distribution from the next issue and hope that this resolves some of the supply and remittance problems we have experienced with Gotch over the past two years.
Vintage Caravan Magazine is getting bigger and stronger than ever and has a growing and loyal readership and we will be increasing the magazine by an additional 8 pages from the next issue on.
We have also just been accepted by the distributors for America’s biggest book seller Barnes & Noble so no, we are not going away anytime soon!
I just wanted to take this opportunity to quash these malicious rumours on the head so that I don’t keep getting emails from my panicking customers who have been made to believe that their beloved magazine is no longer available.
If any of you have any documentation to indicate where this unethical misinformation is coming from I would appreciate it if you would send me a copy as this is grounds for legal action against Gotch and highly defamatory to my business.
I hope that you will continue to stock Vintage Caravan Magazine and place your orders now through IPS.
If you would like us to include you on our online stockist list please email me direct with your address so we can add you to the list.Kind regards,
Lisa
Lisa Mora
Editor/PublisherEmail: editor@vintagecaravanmagazine.com.au | www.vintagecaravanmagazine.com.au
Phone: 0439 993 963 | Postal address: PO Box 1052, Maleny QLD Australia 4552
Ash Long, Editor of Melbourne Observer, is an active supporter of newsagents in the pages of his newspaper. He also consults when making decisions, such as on cover price, that could impact us.
Earlier this week Ash shared a story with me about a potential Melbourne Observer advertiser and a newsagent that bears sharing. In Ash’s words…
I am a very careful reader of your blog, and take in every point that is made about how publishers need to support newsagents. Within our small business, we do the best we can, with newsagents listings in-paper and online, and “talking up” the newsagency channel as often as we can in the paper.
We had an occasion today where we had a potential advertiser wanted to see our newspaper first hand, which we encourage. We like our advertisers to make an informed decision. Our customer, at our invitation, went across the road from their shop to their local newsagent.
It disappoints me that our potential advertiser said that the newsagent “talked down” our product. Now, the newsagent is quite at liberty to make any comments on whatever subject they want. But do they realise they talked themselves out of a small regular sale, and lost us a sale too?
You often say that retail is theatre. I agree. Theatre involves delivering our “lines” to customers. These should always be positive lines to build sales. Casual, thoughtless commentary slowly kills the newsagent’s own business, paper by paper.
I am happy for you to relate this experience on the blog. You may use my name and that of the Melbourne Observer should you choose, but I would prefer that the newsagent not be identified.
My own experience is that the Melbourne Observer attracts loyal readers, readers who can be leveraged in to purchasing other products.
We shot a video of the latest Newsagency of the Future workshop today. Following post production it should be available from here sometime next week. This video is shorter than the live workshop but to covers the key themes and highlights the same recommendation and suggestions.
PaidContent is reporting that US book giant Barnes and Noble has slashed the price of its Nook e-reader. While the company offered context for deep discounting, it has been ignored by analysis who say sales of the nook are too low.
Newsagents will be thrilled to learn that Touch networks now provides access to Vodafone recharge. Read the announcement here.
Accessible by newsagents directly from within their Point of Sale software and for no setup of additional fee, the arrival of Vodafone to Touch will make many newsagents happy.
In an interview in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review, Bauer CEO Matt Stanton forecast that there would be more magazine closures as well as some launches as the business responded to title performance. Newsagents with a copy of yesterday’s newspaper should read the article – page 38.
The bigger story in the AFR article is the growth in digital subscriptions with Stanton claiming 20 to 30 percent growth quarter on quarter. He says they have 116,000 tablet subscriptions across their titles.
Stanton I think mistakenly says that tablet subscriptions are pure profit once you have the back end setup costs covered. This presumes that you have a print product to cover all editorial costs. My reading on the topic indicates we are not seeing people embracing both platforms in large numbers – it is digital or print. So it would be wrong to say that a digital subscription is pure protect. It must wear part of the content creation cost.
The AFR article reports Stanton saying its feasible Bauer could achieve 500,000 digital subscriptions across titles such as AWW and Gourmet Traveller. The road to such an achievement is by way of current print sales. I expect strategists in all print publishing businesses see the current print products as the bridge to the platform they expect one day to overtake print in sales and value to the business. This is why publishers will continue to tell newsagents that print is important to them for some time yet.
An area where the company could save is in oversupply. There are several Bauer titles I’m receiving where sell-through is lower than 50%. These titles are loss making for us. The continued excess supply does not make sense.
We just about sold out of most Despicable Me 2 items over the weekend, selling more than 75% of our stock in two days. As the photo from Sunday shows, our display was looking pretty sad.
With the highly-anticipated kids movie still in preview this is an excellent result. It also speaks to the value of brands. Despicable Me 2 has attracted shoppers who would not usually visit because of the products being placed at the front of the store, facing into the mall.
the more we attract shoppers for high-margin products the better. It’s our goal to be known as the go to retailer for movie related product tie-ins. We have a major cinema in the centre, rear us, so this goal makes sense. We also have access to proactive suppliers who bring in a decent range of licenced product.
We have backup stock on the way.
We continues to have success with Diabetic Living by placing it with: weeklies, newspapers and other off-location positions such as the placement in the photo above our English magazines and next to our min placement of weekly titles. Diabetic Living responds to the extra attention with sales. We work on the view that it’s a title people don’t necessarily visit us to purchase. The cover of the latest issue demonstrates the broad appeal of the title.
We’re promoting the launch issue Batman Automobilia on the lease line facing into the mall as well as placement with other partworks in-store. This co-location approach works well for us with partworks – sales this season have been good for us.
While not the most attractive unit, the dump bin approach works in terms of driving sales and the floor space it takes up.
In a move with far-reaching ramifications for the entire newsagency channel, several Coles petrol outlets in Victoria are about to commence a trial selling Tatts lottery products.
It’s expected that the product mix will be similar to the Tatts products currently sold at 7-Eleven. When 7-Eleven got Tatts products newsagents were told it was about incremental business – business not won through the then current network. That has not been the case. 7-Eleven has marketed the products well, especially at jackpot time. I have no doubt that their consistent offer and marketing have seen some traffic diverted from newsagencies to their network.
I’m told the trial will be in seven Coles petrol locations. I expect it will expand beyond this in Victoria once the trial is completed and into other states as local hurdles are overcome. I’d expect Woolworths to follow in the Caltex outlets they acquired some time back. I can’t see Woolworths letting Coles get Tatts products and them not.
An additional 2,000 lottery outlets could open around Australia over the next two or three years. If this happens it will negatively impact on lottery driven traffic and sales in newsagencies with lottery products.
Newsagents facing Tatts mandated shop-fitting need to take this increased competition into account when planning for the capital investment. The capital investment must be responsible. Tatts cannot make you invest uneconomically. Indeed, I would have expected Tatts to disclose their longer-term intentions so that newsagents can make fully informed decisions.
Expansion of Tatts products into supermarket controlled petrol outlets would add strength to the perfect storm we are experiencing – migration from print to digital, migration of product sales to other channels, shoppers buying online products we’d usually sell, a soft economy, growing diversity around the newsagency shingle and its value and more retailers chasing the traditional newsagency shopper.
While Coles and Tatts can do what they like, newsagents could consider complaining to the ACCC. Rod Sims, ACCC Chairman, has the supermarket duopoly in his sights as he has noted several times since taking on the role. This move by Coles ought to interest him as it is a grab for greater market share by one of the two major supermarkets.
The geographic spread of newsagencies and other lottery outlets indicates, to me at least, that consumers are well served. More outlets does not necessarily mean more competition or better customer service. No, more outlets in petrol locations controlled by one or both of the supermarket duopoly businesses will, ultimately, lead to less competition.
So, I’d hope that newsagents and those who represent them take this issue up with the ACCC. I’d also like to see it taken up with politicians in the lead up to the election – calling for a halt to the growth of Coles and Woolworths. We need legislation to do this and this lottery move by Coles is a good reason to prosecute that case.
Now is not the time to worry about the reaction from Tatts if unified action against the Coles move is taken. Put your interests ahead of fear of reprisals.
Newsagents cannot afford for Tatts products to get into the petrol outlets controlled by the supermarkets. Newsagency businesses would suffer and the communities in which they serve would suffer.
Before anyone goes off about the ANF on this issue I’d note that it came to their attention a few days ago and that they are working on it.
Footnote: over the last six weeks, at the Newsagency of the Future workshops I talked about Coles and Woolworths, observing that they must want lottery products in their petrol outlets because of what 7-Eleven has achieved. I predicted that the supermarkets would pursue Tatts.
I made this observation without any inside information. Indeed, the dots have been there for several years for all of us to connect.
I connected the dots for hundreds of newsagents to underscore the importance for newsagents to assess whether their future is as agents or as retailers.
I was disappointed to see Get Your Business Online on the shelves of one of my newsagencies yesterday. It’s an expensive special interest title and as such should not be sent unless we request. This is the magazine distribution model I want, a pull model for special interest and other magazine titles that fit a range of criteria. In a pull model I am sure I’d be able to increase my magazine sales.
I don’t want Get Your Business Online because we have had titles for the same shopper recently and they have not paid their way. Indeed, the distributor has this data – there is no justification for now sending us this title other than for them to get paid a fee by a willing publisher ken to get stock onto shelves.
Blah blah blah, same old same old. I’ve written posts like this many times before. Magazine distributor behaviour has not changed. the sooner all magazine publishers realise that the distribution model is what causes newsagents to early return stock sometimes irrationally. It is also what is causing some newsagents to seriously think about getting our of magazines altogether.
I worry that publishers will not act on the model until it is too late.
We are promoting the latest issue of InStyle magazine with this in-location display at the entrance to our women’s magazine aisle. We’re showing off the free mascara that comes with this issue – to leverage the email campaign being run to promote the free gift to shoppers.
Newsagencies often offer appreciated services that are not well promoted. many such services are actually hidden or forgotten. My suggestion today is that you promote them.
Magazine putaways, customer special orders, LayBy and photocopying are some of the services I am thinking of with this tip. Promote them and through this promote a point of difference you offer over other retailers.
Create a flyer to be handed to each customer, consider an ad in the local newspaper or have posters professionally developed for promotion in-store. Focus on services you offer that differentiate your business.
One newsagent I spoke to recently increased copying sales by $550 a month. That’s close to $400 a month in GP.
Many newsagents I speak with worry so much about decisions or situations that the worry gets in the way them taking action.
My experience in business is that the only way to deal with a fear is to confront it. Worry will not change anything.
I faced a major fear of mine yesterday when I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Ever since I was a kid I’ve been scared of heights. While I still am, that I made it up and down without freaking out (much) has left me feeling more empowered in relation to my fear, stronger.
Embarrassing photos like this one will remind me to not be blocked by a fear.
It was a thrill to be part of the ANF newsagent of the year awards dinner in Hobart last night. My newsagency software company was a sponsor so I got to say a few words before presenting the Tasmanian Retail Newsagent of the Year award.
My message was simple – we need to move from being agents making cents from a sale and embrace being retailers where we bring customers in based on our decisions and to purchase items at 50%, 60% and more GP. This means owning our own success and not expecting others to own it for us. It means being retailers being responsible for and pursuing our own success.
In a room with plenty of suppliers I made the point that our success depends more on us and less on our suppliers.
Let’s focus more on action and less on complaining.
I’ve just caught up with an interview on ABC Radio’s AM last Saturday with Andrea Carson a Melbourne University lecturer in media, politics and society. In the interview, Carson says:
So I think five years’ time, it would be unlikely to still have a Monday to Friday hardcopy newspaper for Fairfax.
I think the weekends have other attractions. They’re still in the broadsheet form at the moment, and advertisers do like the weekend papers because they know that readers have more time to sit and read the newspaper over a weekend.
From what we see happening around us, moves large and small, I except to see capital city dailies start to withdraw from seven day a week publishing of print editions much sooner than five years. This is not a new position for me, it’s something I’ve been saying for a couple of years now. What is different today is the increase in moves by publishers supporting my (undesirable) expectation.