nickshanagher

It is great to find an independent retailer who appears to be getting business right and today I stumbled across Hatton Garden News in central London. What caught my eye was a well lit and tidy magazine display. The morning was wet and windy and the shop looked inviting. The shop was carpeted and well merchandised with confectionery, savoury snacks, soft drinks and the lottery. Browsing, I bought a Galaxy bubbles bar that was displayed above a handmade sign that simply said "new". Good lighting, tidy full shelves, understated and friendly service. A welcoming business in a high footfall location. Well done.

With a Coffee Nation machine you can sell 120 cups an hour, perhaps leading to this fantastic claim of £40,000 extra a year from one square metre of floor space. More interestingly, in his sales pitch, CN's David says that builders are just as likely today to want a good cup of coffee as media types in central Manchester or London. With 800 machines already installed at travel points around the UK, his company is now looking for suitable convenience sites. While your shop may not have the footfall his company needs to site a machine into retail, the trends it sees should be relevant for your shoppers too!

Some time ago I wrote a blog describing the benefits of Tyler Brûlé's bench outside his shop in London's Marylebone High Street. Last week, I met London newsagent Ranjan Patel and she has a similar story about a chair in her shop. While space is tight, she says that older customers really appreciate the opportunity to sit down and it helps her build a sense of community in her shop.

In the last quarter Sainsbury's sales rose by 1.7% year on year, compared to 3.7% in the previous six months. For local shopkeepers in the UK, this is a useful figure to benchmark your sales against. If you have been tracking 2% in the first three months of this year, then you have been doing better than one of the big four supermarkets. A big chunk of the fall is because food inflation has dropped to 1%. The second reason is because shoppers have less money to spend. At the same time, Sainsbury's reports that it had increased its weekly transactions from 18 million to 19 million year on year, which is a 5.6% increase. In the last quarter, all sales, including those from new sites, were up 4.4%. This means that the average spend is falling. However, new shops include 51 convenience stores out of 102 new and extended sites, so perhaps that explains it. Even so, as the VAT rate, which is included in the sales figures, has returned to 17.5% in the latest quarter, you can see that ...

I was reading an interview with Howard Schultz, the man who made Starbucks into a global phenomenon, and he described how he developed his ideas while in Milan. He was captivated by the showmanship of Italian baristas and how they created a sense of community in their coffee shops. I seem to recall that the experience of Starbucks was once like that. Someone asked what type of coffee you wanted and appeared to put some effort into making it specially for you. Today, the experience is simply about standing a queue. But if you are a storekeeper, the ideas of showmanship and creating a community are two that you would do well to keep in mind. Once, they made Starbucks great.

Regulation is a big threat to business success and because treats are a major part of most local shops' sales regulation means politicians want a say in how your business works. In response, you need to influence as many politicians as possible and that means you need to take part in trade associations to get your message across. Last week, PepsiCo announced it would cut salt and sugar in its products by a quarter over the next 10 years. It wants to sell more of its "good for you" products. This appears to meet the needs of regulators. However, you have to question what is likely to happen. Surely, over time, big food companies have perfected recipes that shoppers enjoy. As the cost of food has fallen in real terms, shoppers then enjoy too much. In the European Union, a big debate has been running about what size a portion is. Agreement on the size is needed so that regulators can say how much sugar and salt is in the food that the consumer is about to eat or drink. But o...

Betty McBride, policy and communication director of the British Heart Foundation, has written to the FT today to attack the food industry for its objections to traffic lights labels appearing on food. Shopkeepers need to watch this pressure for regulation closely. She was responding to an FT column which highlighted discussions in Brussells over what a portion was: one biscuit or three. It depends, the industry suggests. Ms McBride disagrees and is happy to define "realistic portions". "Independent research has shown that a combination of traffic light colours, guideline daily amounts, and the words high, medium and low would be the best way to give shoppers the at-a-glance information they want," she writes in support of labeling. The industry, she suggests, desires to "deliberately confuse people about how unhealthy some of its products are." The danger of her words is real. For example, in Scotland, the government has suggested it might remove confectio...

Getting the price proposition of your business correct involves careful consideration of what your customers want to buy. For local shops this means thinking about what is important to the shopper. If you are on a busy high street or near a train station, will shoppers value speed of service? So that if you have what they want and they can get it quickly they will not notice that it is 10p more expensive. If it is available and your service is good, what else do you need to consider? Keeping the shop clean and the lighting bright may be important in that it will help the shopper trust you as a supplier. If you have a shop on a local estate, where shoppers appear to be price conscious, then your pricing policy may be more challenging. Obviously, you can price compare with Tesco and tell people where you charge the same price. It may not be a pint of milk for 45p. It could be McVitgies Digestives at 50p. Michael Jackson, writing in Business XL, argues that "assumptions about prod...

As a local retailer you need to back yourself and to have confidence in your offer to shoppers. A recent Financial Times interview with billionaire Laurence Graff, whose parents ran a tobacconist in the East End and who left school at 14 to work in the jewellery trade, provides some inspiration. First, when asked about a raid at his New Bond Street shop from which £40m-worth of gems was taken, the interviewer reports that his eyes lit up as he explained the reason for the robbery: "[Thieves] want the best!" Second, from his youth: "I saw people buying and selling. I saw as a young boy that people could make something out of nothing." Finally, at the age of 17 after learning how to repair and make jewellery he became an itinerant seller to jewellers all over England. "I knew I could sell, I knew I could do anything." As with so many successful operators, he has the ability to back his talents, to spot market gaps and to talk up his services. His story is...

Making shoppers feel special requires some careful calculation by local retailers as to the value that offers provide to their customers. In a recent Retail Newsagent magazine it suggested that local retailers think about providing loyalty cards to encourage regular coffee purchases, for example a "buy 10 cups and get one free" offer. Is this generous enough for most shoppers to appreciate the value that you are offering them enough so that they change their behaviour? Doing the maths, if the cost of each hot coffee to go is 50p and you sell them for £1, then on a deal where someone buys 10 to get the 11th cup free, the discount is worth 10% to the shopper and it costs you 50p to give this value to him or her (the sales tax does not apply). The impact on your cash profit is that it falls by 14.2% from £3.50 to £3. If you do the offer at "buy six cups and get the seventh free", then the potential cost to you is 23.7% from £2.11 to £1.61. However, you also need to f...

The people making a profit out of putting books on line see a future for printed products and the reasons why they do may help retailers understand what their shoppers value. The current number three player in the e-book market is the Cool-er, and the company that makes it is owned by Neil Jones. Interviewed by the Financial Times earlier this year he said that e-books and physical books will coexist for many years. "I love cricket," he says, "so I buy two copies of Wisden, one to have on the shelf and another to read on my Cool-er".

Any product that you sell that can be provided over the internet is under threat because of the turmoil higher up in the supply chain, where once dominant content publishers are likely to have their business models ripped apart. This is also a business opportunity. At the same time that Apple was announcing its iPad launch, coming early next month, the boss of McMillan was visiting Amazon to say that he would pull its catalogue of best sellers if the on-line bookseller did not raise its prices from $9.99. Amazon initially said we're not playing and then changed its mind and backed down because it needed the range, perhaps also aware of the threat to its Kindle reader from the iPad. There are two reasons for McMillan wanting to have a higher price. One, it wants to establish as high a price point as possible for the new e-book market. Two, it wants to protect its existing book sellers for as long as possible. Unfortunately for publishers, in the digital world even $9.99 is expen...

Is Apple's i-tunes store a competitor for the local news shop in the UK? Yes, if the "success" of The Guardian's i-phone application is anything to go by. Priced at £2.39, the app gives readers unlimited (at the moment) access to the Guardian web site with up-to-date news every 15 minutes. Apple takes 30% of all revenue, which as the Guardian has sold 100,000 apps since December is now £72,000 and counting.

Ranjan Patel used her first speech as president of London's Newsagents Federation this week to urge independent shopkeepers to use their imagination to win business from shoppers. "We can exploit [our shops] by using our greatest gift, our imagination, ensuring the environments we create are interesting and inviting," she said. On the street in London a day later I passed by an Italian deli, which was beautifully presented and outside had this little sign encouraging shoppers to book an Italian cookery course, under the headline I love Cooking! Make your own Italian dinner £35, it promised. Further up the street, was a Mexican restaurant with fresh oranges and limes in boxes by the window...plus a mass of chilis. It was completed by an A-board outside saying that it was the Observer's best cheap eats in the UK award winner. In between was a newsagent business with a Camelot national lottery station outside. Inside I was greeted by two signs on its magazine rack. O...

While the magazine and newspaper industry is fearful that its current distribution model, dependent on sales through corner shops, is at risk from the rise of the internet, the people who will make the decision are your shoppers not your suppliers. Free is the big selling point of the internet on the basis that access to the internet is cheap and easy and the advance of technology means vast amounts of data can be stored cheaply and easily. In the film industry, there is a widespread view that DVDs will disappear as people take to buying movies over the internet. However, a report from leading US media research group Screen Digest says that hopes for the rise of digital media have taken a hit - with it downgrading its forecasts following lower than expected sales last year. "The level of interest in digital downloads just isn't there," analyst Arash Amel told the Financial Times. Why? Becaue people don't like the restrictions that come with digital downloads, he sugg...

What do your shoppers need that you could provide them but don't do so at the moment? This is an important question to always ask yourself. Corner shops used to specialise and groups of specialist outlets would locate near each other in a parade, encouraging more shoppers to visit them all. However, improvements to product packaging, looser regulation, and supply chain developments mean that there are fewer and fewer areas where a specialist can survive unchallenged. Shoppers increasingly expect an integrated offer "in which they can mix-and-match among delivery channels", says Andrew Higginson, chief executive of retailing strategies at Tesco. As his company has a UK-wide network of stores, a web site, clubcard, smartphones, a catalogue, a credit card and a bank, you can see why he would view the world this way. The new services that Tesco wants to develop offer higher margins than grocery. Because of its size in the UK it is able to attract lots of new customers chea...