Sitting on the floor, cross-legged and tucked into the magazine fixture, this browser worked her way through a range of women’s magazines for more than half an hour.  I don’t mind browsers (I do actually but I am usually able to remind myself that browsers can be customers if you give them time) – I have never put up signs saying this is not a library or told customers to move on for browsing for too long.  What I saw last week went too far, it made it difficult for others looking at magazines in the same area, especially some of our otlder customers in walking frames.

Years ago, we briefly contemplated putting in some easy chairs, like you see at Borders, for our browsers.  We realised that they would need to be in the aisles, near the magazines and we didn’t have the room for this.

I’d be interested in how other newsagents handle the power browser, someone who sits in front of the magazines like in the photo or, worse still, someone who sits on the flat stack.

We are promoting the latest issue of Men’s Health at our lottery counter – in addition to our usual location for the title.  Around 33% of customers presenting at this counter do not shop further in-store in visit – they may venture deeper in another visit.  The lottery counter location works for magazines for us.    Good Food is the most recent title we promoted in this location with an extra three of four sales we probably would not have otherwise achieved.  I think the space works because it is free of the visual noise of the more traditional magazine fixturing.

Our focus is about trying to drive a better return from lottery customers.  Just as we try and drive a lottery result from more traditional newsagency item customers.  There is balance being pursued in all of these small moves.  It is what we have to do in newsagencies.

We have Cleo at our prime counter position this week because of the free tote bag.  While we are over tote bags as gifts with magaznes, this one, from Kookai, looks good on the display.  ACP has provided useful marketing collateral.  Hopefully, this will result in good sales.

In this same counter position on the weekend we sold out of Who magazine.  A week earlier we sold 60% of our allocation of Weight Watchers Magazine.

This counter location works, it drives impulse purchases – the key appears to be the value of the offer.

The free Skin Minerals for Men from Giorgio Armani with the latest issue of Men’s Style magazine has not come through the distribution process well.  Customers will have trouble finding an undamaged box in our newsagency.  While the skin product itself is not damaged, the poor presentation of the box will be a turn off to the target demographic.  Men’s Style is not alone in delivering damaged gifts.  The answer is smarter packaging of these free gifts.

We are promoting the latest issue of Dolly magazine in this new space we created by using the back of another stand.  This space is at the end of our two main magazine aisles and is passed by considerable foot-traffic.  Our team at Forest Hill created this space around two months ago and it has worked well for us, driving some excellent sales results.

This was was previously dead space in our shop – generating no revenue.  I am grateful to the local in-store initiative which has turned this into sales success.

I have seen someone leave an aisle with their purchase and then purchase off this stand.

We are promoting the latest issue of Who at the counter of our newsagencies.  The free Rimmel natural bronze product which comes with the magazine should result in excellent weekend sales.  This is an excellent impulse offer – newsagents would be crazy to not leverage this to the max.