Skip to main content

Use your imagination




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. One said: "No browsing." The other said: "Thieves will be prosecuted."

Perhaps the owner should talk a short walk up and down his own street and think about what he is doing to make his shop a destination for shoppers. He may have some problem customers but there must be an alternative to making your shop feel like a fortress.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Traffic lights: a fuss about nothing

I am sure that FT columnist Michael Skapinker has written about traffic lights food labelling before and his latest article is provocatively called: The food companies that make people fat. He criticises Coca-Cola and Unilever for sticking with guideline daily amounts (GDAs) when traffic lights work much better. Former Walmart Europe public affairs head Bernard Hughes wrote in to support Skapinker. He said: "There isn't ever a perfect information system flowing with beautiful logic. But traffic lights give powerful direction to the busy consumer." But in this age of smart phones surely this debate over the labelling on the packaging is easily overcome. The government can simply issue an app that when held over a bar code provides shoppers with a traffic light system. The supermarkets could do this on their websites. Surely the whole point about the future is that the internet and limitless data storage means that the shopper is being empowered with the informatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

A sign of retail stress perhaps

It must have been four months since this window was broken in the Tesco Express on Pentonville Road and I simply cannot believe that it has not been fixed. This is the sort of lack of focus that independent shops usually get criticised for. The only purpose in sharing this image is to encourage those independents with high standards who are finding the going tough that they can do better than this.
3 comments
Read more