nickshanagher

"Our circulation has gone from 250,000 and falling, to 600,000. The cost of getting each copy to a reader has gone from 30p to 4p. We used to pay newsagents for taking the paper, now they take it for free," Evgeny Lebedev, senior executive director of the Evening Standard, told the FT. I nearly choked on my rice pops! He says he has cut his daily distribution costs from £75,000 to £24,000. Which if he publishes 250 times a year is a £12.8m saving. But whether the sums add up, we may never know. Of more concern to a retailer planning to build a business on selling newspapers is Mr Lebedev's suggestion that this is the future for all newspapers. There may not be many of them if it is! Suppliers should not over-estimate the attractiveness of footfall to local retailers. Footfall does not help the weekly payroll, one Yorkshire retailer told me at CTN World, the trade show last weekend. He was particularly critical of a well-know payment services company, who he said h...

It is a shock to read that Borders UK is on the brink of collapse. The book seller had seemed to revolutionise the UK book market and was widely praised by magazine publishers for the way it displayed their products. However impressive its 45 shops might look, they simply are not working at generating profits. On one side, lots of book sales have moved on line, on the other, the supermarkets have made inroads into the best sellers market. My last visit, only two weeks ago, was a disappointing experience. The two books I went in to find were not available. The bookstore assistant expressed surpise I would be looking for one of the books - Ulysses and Us - in a branch of Borders. I guess that speaks volumes about how a retailer can lose its way. The previous time I was there, with a senior news wholesale executive, he said to me that he did not know how Borders could compete with supermarkets. He said this looking while looking at a magazine category full of browsers. I was surp...

The demise of Woolworths, almost a year ago, freed up some good retail real estate and left some shoppers with nowhere to go. Last week, property consultant CB Richard Ellis, released details of who had acquired the retail space. Discount stores took 39% of the space, supermarkets 26% and fashion operators 18%. On this basis, shoppers obviously went to Woolworths to buy cheap stuff, cheaply priced.

In a weekend newspaper article, Peter Davies, the elected mayor of Doncaster is memorably quoted as saying: "People will not use the buses: they are poor and expensive. People in cars spend more than people on buses, why wouldn't we want them?" At the same time, at the CTN World trade show in London, I was talking to a retailer who explained that her local council kept on making it harder and harder for people to park near her shop. They insisted on residents parking bays in roads that were empty during the day when the residents drove to work. They installed traffic lights which took more kerbside out of use for parking. The free parking that was available was not ample enough to support her high street. Even worse, the council ran buses from the train station to the out of town shopping centre where national retailers predominated and where there was ample free parking. Mr Davies puts his unexpected electoral success down to plain speaking on issues that matter. He...

A local foodservice business has just issued its new price lists. Its solution to the tricky issue of the 1 January VAT price increase? Put up its prices today! Not necessarily a strategy suitable for all businesses but those who can will know that they can.

There was a clutch of stock market updates by major UK retailers last week, with Asda unveiling a £150m price war ahead of Christmas and Tesco following up by saying that it planned to save shoppers £250m. Some City analysts talked in terms of "cut throat" tactics; others suggested shoppers would be hard put to spot the difference. Sainsbury declared excellent first half sales and profits. In the detail they said that one in three sales were of items on promotion, which was largely funded by suppliers. The owners of Waitrose talked optimistically about Christmas and thanked Marks & Spencer for mentioning its Essentials range in its advertising, which had helped sales. Overall, the message was slightly upbeat. However, Asda warned of a "few frosty moments" ahead. So too, did Sainsbury. And the message from Wal-Mart in the US was that shoppers "continue to tell us they're concerned about their own finances and unemployment." What are the analys...

The Financial Times published a quick guide to US grocery sales last week, pinpointing the products that are in and those that are out. The winners are: ice cream and cakes, performance drinks, glazed popcorn, frozen chickens and nut butter. The losers are: eyewear, cheese slices, cola, film and disposable cameras, and crisps in a tube. The reasons are: more children's parties at home; these drinks are "costlier but healthier" than cola; evenings in watching movies; prepared boneless birds cost more; "healthier" breakfasts and packed lunches. And they are: sunglasses are a luxury, impulse buy; higher prices; fizzy drinks lose out to smoothies; camera phones; and fewer "impulse" buys of pricier potato snacks. What can the local shop make of this? Healthier still seems to work and impulse seems to be under pressure. Even better, analyse your own top five growing categories and your top five fallers and see what it tells you about your shoppers.

The USA is not the UK but we keep on watching it because so many of its trends become our trends. Experts working with the Retail Wire website have tried to work out what long term changes they see in shopper behaviour as a result of the recession. Shoppers buying videos, toys and consumer electronics now choose discount stores ahead of ones with added-value services, they say. Shoppers choose coffee in McDonalds ahead of Starbucks. They choose discount department stores over luxury ones. However, when it comes to buying groceries, meals at restaurants, and clothes, then added value is still winning. The biggest area where added value wins is in beauty-care. From this simple scale you may draw some interesting comparisons about where shoppers choose to go. For example, if you want a cup of coffee, you will buy as cheaply as possible. If you want to meet a friend, you may pay more for a nice table to sit at while you drink. All the products that a local shop stocks move up and dow...

The definition of what makes a convenience store often depends on the outlook of the person asking the question. For a local retailer, stocking milk, bread and a few essential grocery items is often enough. For a major grocery supplier, 3,000 square feet of gleaming store, well planogrammed and merchandised is often a starting point. I like Nigel Mills' definition. If most of your shoppers pick up a basket when they walk in, you have a convenience store, he says. So news that Waitrose is to open hundreds of c-stores around the UK may be a concern if your shoppers are picking up baskets. It could be that your shoppers are the ones it is targeting. However, this week's stock market update by Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Rose shows that he believes Waitrose is after his shoppers. M&S has unveiled advertisements showing that its wise buys are cheaper than Waitrose's essentials. If shoppers think M&S is more expensive, it is not true, says Sir Stuart. ...

Last month I noted that Wal-mart was selling hardback best-selling books for $9, which is some $5 below cost price. Why are they doing this? To win customers of course. But which customers? Marketing expert Seth Godin suggests that the sort of people who buy hardback best sellers are the sort of people who have plenty of money to spend. "Every industry has people who are worth more", he says. "Don't treat people the same, find the ones that matter more to you, and hug them!" That is a pretty useful business rule for local shops. Use it to target the shoppers you need. Be aware of it in terms of winning supplier support from your competitors.

Sadly, I missed Heston Blumenthal's televised visit to Little Chef in an effort to turnaround the restaurant's fortunes, which have ebbed steadily for more than 20 years in the face of nimble competition and cheaper alternatives for road users seeking a quick meal. Fortunately for me, the FT's management writer Stefan Stern did not. Mr Blumenthal, one of the world's top chefs, criticised Little Chef as being "hardwired into spending as little as possible on ingredients" and for poor service standards. Under his coaching, quality improved as was show in a second TV show. However, Mr Stern noted that standards slipped between Mr Blumenthal's visits and took his family on a visit after the TV show to evaluate progress. Or the lack of it. "Service was poor," he said. "The waiting staff distracted and inefficient..." The problem, Mr Stern suggests is about supervision. Management, he says, is hard work. Change can only be driven by we...

Suppliers are spending more and more money on trade promotions and the more they spend the more it seems they complain about compliance, which is when they measure how good retailers are at delivering the promotion the supplier has paid for. Mostly, suppliers assume that multiple retailers are better at compliance than independent retailers, which means that local shops lose money from the start. But this is a notoriously subjective area and few suppliers share their data with their trade partners. This makes a new survey from the USA quite interesting. AMR asked suppliers to rate how good retailers were at compliance on a scale where 1 = poor performance and 10 = good performance. The grocery channel rated OK, with a best score of 6.1 on price promotions and a worst score of 2.3 on cross-category promotins (like meal deals!). According to AMR, the most money has been wasted on special events, where difficult to execute promotions (including floor displays and customised products) s...