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The papers are full of stories about Tesco's desire to become a bank, without many commentators pointing out that the Post Office is still ideally positioned to provide people in the UK with an alternative to the (currently) tarnished high street banks. While some postmasters have pointed out that their network is set up to handle financial transactions, it seems this will be yet another missed opportunity for the local store due to governmental inaction.

FT columnist John Kay recently argued that an innovation that people want but that the banks are avoiding is a faster payment systems. In 2000, the government promised to act to make the system less slow and expensive by setting up an agency to oversee payments. A year later it backed down and proposed giving the powers to an existing agency. Two years later it set up a task force to monitor developments. Two years later it set up payments council to take over from the task force. This council was headed by the man who ran the banks' payments system and 11 of its 15 members were from banks. Lots of activity, little action. In the US, George Bush found a neat way to trim the powers of regulators overseeing the financial institutions. He cut their budgets so they could not afford to do their jobs. Local retailers hoping to persuade their politicians to support their businesses may take two things from these stories. First, getting legislators to act in favour of the little guy is...

While retailers spend most of their time facing shoppers, they also need to think carefully about their suppliers. You cannot take for granted that you will always be able to get what your shoppers want at a price that the shopper wants to pay. There are five things you need to do: - talk regularly to your key suppliers and build a relationship with them - find out about their financial health and who owns them; and look for stability - watch product quality and challenge changes immediately - understand who is supplying your supplier and who else your supplier is supplying. Talking to suppliers is obviously critical as this will build trust and help yout to get a good feel for what is going on.

Six months ago an Asda survey of 2,500 shoppers showed that 40% were going to the hairdressers less fequently and sales of do-it-yourself hair dye had jumped by a third. "Frivolous is out, frugal is cool", said Asda boss Andy Bond. For many shoppers the best way to be thrifty is to stay at home. However, a few bad hair days and saving money by home dying will go out of fashion. Cheap fun treats may be frivolous but many shoppers will want these to relieve the boredom of thrift. This is an opportunity for local stores.

Cigarette warning labels encourage smokers to light up, brain scientists say, as the part of the brain that creates cravings is stimulated by the sight of the warning. This nugget comes from Buy*ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, a book by Martin Lindstrom, based on a three-year-long neuromarketing study that measured brain activity in 2,000 volunteers worldwide. Apart from being an interesting "fact", this research provides another reason for retailers to watch shoppers closely. People frequently do not behave as you (or your suppliers) expect them to. Understanding how they behave will give you an edge, no matter how small.

Nobody has to buy confectionery, Fiona Dawson, the UK managing director of Mars, told the press to explain why her company was investing money in ensuring the provenance of the raw materials used to make chocolates. In my local cafe, I challenged the man making my tuna sandwich where the tuna came from. He did not say anything but smiled. The next time I came in and asked he said "Ghana", smiled and showed be the big tin. I was impressed. Many of your shoppers will be too! Nobody has to buy tuna sandwiches...

"Rather than just telling people we have a store full of products, we are selling the idea that hobbies are an enjoyable low-cost way of occupying leisure time", says Chris Crombie, chief executive of HobbyCraft, which supplies knitting and model-making supplies. Newspaper retailers have a sense that they need to do this, as do their suppliers. One of the newspaper industry's problems is too many potential readers focus on what they can get elsewhere for free and too few focus on the value that papers deliver. Shoppers need to be educated and when they are, mostly they like it. Waitrose and John Lewis put educating shoppers at the heart of how they differentiate their offer and it works for them. If they can, newspaper retailers can.

Retailers and retail landlords who watched Save our Shops on the BBC Money Programme last month would have seen at first hand the impact of vanishing footfall on the high street. When people say retail success boils down to "location, location, location", what they mean is that without shoppers you cannot make money. All retail is about getting someone to spend money with you and to buy stuff from you at a price greater than your cost in buying it and putting it on display. The interesting twist in the SOS programme was its demonstration of the death of high streets around the UK. Local retailers and landlords need to work hard to ensure that people want to visit their shops and properties. In big retail parks, video surveillance is used to monitor where people go and what they do. In many high streets, local retailers fail to even look outside and count how many shoppers are passing by. For high streets, the programme shows, collaboration may be the only answer to cre...