The price increase you most likely haven’t tried yet
If you are like a ship I visited a few days ago, you are likely sitting on hundreds of well-selling products right now where a 50 cent or one dollar increase would go completely unnoticed by customers but would add real dollars to the bottom line by the end of the year. Not a dramatic margin overhaul — just a quiet, deliberate look at what you’re charging versus what the product is actually worth to the person buying it. That gap exists in almost every shop. The retailers who go looking for it find it.
When did you last put a price up just to see what happened?
Not because a supplier raised their cost. Not because the margin report flagged something. Just because you thought a product might be worth more than what you’re charging for it.
Most newsagents never do this. Prices move when costs move. Margin percentage drifts down without anyone noticing, and the business quietly earns less than it should for years.
The products worth testing are the ones customers want rather than need. A card for a specific occasion. A gift that’s genuinely hard to find locally. A collectible that’s selling faster than you can reorder it. For those products, shoppers will often pay more than the current price suggests — you just haven’t asked yet.
Put one price up. Watch it for a couple of weeks. If it keeps selling at the same rate, you’ve found margin you were leaving behind. If it slows, adjust it. Neither outcome is a problem. One earns you more money. The other tells you something useful about your customers.
The retailers doing this well aren’t testing everything at once. That’s not experimenting, that’s chaos. They pick lines with strong, consistent demand and move carefully. Over time those small experiments add up to a margin position that looks nothing like where they started — without a supplier negotiation or a ranging overhaul in sight.
Your POS data already shows you which products are moving consistently. Start there. Pick something with steady demand, nudge the price, and watch what the data shows over the next few weeks.
The worst that happens is you learn something. The best is that you find margin that’s been sitting there the whole time, waiting for you to notice.