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retail management

One sale, or three hundred newspapers

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.

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Newsagency management

The customer who brought scissors

We had a humour card with a small floppy balloon penis on it. Funny card. Customers loved it. Sold consistently.

Then cards started appearing on the display with the balloon missing. We assumed a product fault — attachment not holding, supplier issue, something in the handling. We chased it down. Nothing explained it.

We checked the security footage.

A woman, late seventies or early eighties. She’d come in, browse, wait until no one was close, and snip. Clean off. She’d done it to several cards before we caught on. Came back and did it again after that.

It’s genuinely funny in hindsight. A dedicated, recurring mission to rid the shop of a balloon penis.

It also points to something that isn’t funny. Some customers believe they have standing to decide what a shop carries. Not by choosing not to buy something — that’s their right — but by removing the choice for everyone else. She didn’t want the card there. So she solved the problem herself, repeatedly, with scissors.

We see other versions of this regularly. Customers who complain about products they didn’t buy. Who tell you directly that you shouldn’t stock something because they find it offensive. Who seem genuinely surprised that their discomfort doesn’t automatically override your ranging decisions.

A retail range isn’t built for the most easily offended person in the customer base. It’s built for the whole of it. That card made people laugh and it sold. One person felt differently and handled it with craft supplies.

Stock what your customers want. Not what survives the most conservative person in the shop.

Back to our snipper. We confronted them and asked that they stop it. They complained. We invited them to shop elsewhere.

While our approach may have lost us customers through word of mouth (we certainly heard the complaint had reached others) we felt better for being true to the retailer we see ourselves as, stocking what more customers like and what we can have a laugh about.

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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.

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Social responsibility

Your rent problem started the day you signed the lease

When a retail business hits financial trouble, rent is usually the first thing that gets blamed. The landlord is charging too much. The centre isn’t generating the foot traffic that was promised. The deal that looked reasonable three years ago now feels impossible.

Sometimes those complaints are fair. But more often, the rent problem was created the day the lease was signed — by the retailer, not the landlord.

A rent problem started the day you signed the lease

This video unpacks that hard truth.

Signing a retail lease under pressure is one of the most common and costly mistakes in small business retail. It happens two ways. The first is optimism — a retailer projects the sales they hope to achieve rather than the sales they can reasonably expect, decides the rent is workable on those numbers, and commits. The second is FOMO. A good site comes up, there’s competition for it, and the fear of missing out pushes them to sign before they’ve done the work.

Neither is a business strategy. Both create the same outcome: a cost base the business can’t sustain.

The lease you sign determines your occupancy cost for years. It determines how much revenue you need to generate just to cover the floor you’re standing on. Get that number wrong at the start and you spend the life of the lease trying to catch up.

Before you sign anything — whether you’re starting fresh, expanding, or moving — stop. Get independent advice from someone with no stake in the deal going ahead. Map out a strict budget based on conservative trading figures, not optimistic ones. Understand what the landlord can and can’t control, and know the difference between a shopping centre lease and a high street lease before you commit to either.

Shopping centre leases come with restrictions that high street locations don’t. Trading hours, fit-out requirements, centre levies, exclusivity clauses — these affect your operating costs and your flexibility in ways that aren’t always obvious from the headline rent figure.

The numbers have to work on paper before they can work in practice. If they don’t stack up in a spreadsheet, they won’t stack up in a shop.

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newsXpress works with members on lease negotiations and landlord issues. I’ve seen what goes wrong and we know what to look for. But this can only help if you seek help before you’ve signed, not after. Once the lease is executed, the options narrow fast.

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retail leases

What good foot traffic in a retail newsagency actually looks like in 2026

Foot traffic is one of those metrics newsagents talk about constantly but rarely define. When someone says their traffic is down, what does that mean exactly? Fewer people through the door? Fewer transactions? Smaller baskets? The same customers buying less?

The distinction matters because the response is different in each case.

Here is what I see in the businesses that are actually performing well right now. Their traffic story is not about volume. It is about who is coming in and what they are buying.

The old model is not coming back

The newsagency of 2010 ran on high-frequency, low-value visits. A paper every morning. A scratchie. A magazine. Frequent visits, small baskets, thin margin.

That traffic is declining structurally. Newspapers are bought online or not at all. Lottery players are being pushed to apps — deliberately, by the people who run the lottery. Magazine readers have moved on. You cannot run a campaign that fixes a habit change.

The businesses I respect have stopped trying to. They are building something different.

What the better businesses are doing

The stores growing right now attract less frequent but higher-value visits. A customer who comes in three times a year to buy gifts, cards, and a collectible is worth more to the business than one who comes in five days a week for a paper and nothing else.

That requires a different shop. The product mix has to give people a reason to come in when they are not running an errand. That does not happen by stocking what your rep suggested. It happens when you look at what your customers actually respond to and build around that.

Seasonal traffic compounds

Newsagents who take seasonal execution seriously — real displays, a genuine reason to visit around Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas — see something interesting. The spike visits convert. A customer who comes in for a card and finds a gift range they like comes back.

That repeat visit did not come from advertising. It came from having something worth discovering. You earned it.

The number worth watching

Stop asking whether your traffic count is up or down. Ask whether the traffic you have is getting more valuable.

Check your average transaction value over the past year. Look at whether repeat customers are growing as a share of your total. Ask yourself whether the people coming through the door are browsing or just transacting.

If those numbers are moving the right way, the business is in better shape than the foot count suggests. If they are not, the problem is almost certainly in the product mix and presentation — not in how many people walk past the window.

Volume is a vanity metric. Value is what you actually manage.

… 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.

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Newsagency management

A Sunday thought: back yourself

I spend a lot of words on this blog telling newsagents what to do. Cut this category. Chase that one. Review your card range. Watch your roster costs. Plenty of advice, week after week.

Today I want to say something different.

Back yourself.

You already know your shop better than anyone. Better than your suppliers, better than any consultant, better than me. You know which customers come in on pension day. You know which lines move and which ones sit there gathering dust while you tell yourself they will come good. You know, honestly, what you would change if you stopped putting it off.

That knowledge is worth more than you give it credit for.

I have been around this channel for decades, and the retailers I have seen thrive were rarely the ones with the best location or the deepest pockets. They were the ones who trusted their own judgement and acted on it. They tried things. Some failed. They tried something else. They did not wait for a supplier, a landlord or an industry body to save them, because nobody is coming to save any of us. That sounds bleak. It is actually liberating.

If you have been thinking about dropping a category that no longer earns its space, you are probably right. If you have been eyeing a product area that excites you, something you would enjoy selling, that enthusiasm is data too. Customers can tell when a shop owner loves what they sell. It shows in the displays, in the buying, in the conversation at the counter.

The shops growing in this channel right now do not look like the newsagencies of twenty years ago, and thank goodness for that. Every one of them got there because an owner decided their own instincts were worth acting on.

Doubt is part of running a small business. Anyone who tells you they have never lain awake over a decision is lying. But doubt is not a reason to stand still. It is the toll you pay for doing something that matters.

So here is my Sunday encouragement. Make the change you have been sitting on. Start small if you need to. Measure it. Adjust. You have survived in one of the toughest corners of retail, through structural decline, a pandemic and everything since. That is not luck. That is you.

Back yourself. You have earned the right.

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Social responsibility
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