Skip to main content

A shortage of selling space for magazines?

I aim next week to visit the Monocle shop, which is said to be very small and sells mainly back issues of the Monocle magazine.

Looking up the address on its website I flicked over to the listing of what's in the current issue. A few of the headlines caught my attention and I made a note to buy the December/January issue before it was off sale. I also made a note not to buy it from WHSmith, which is easy as it has outlets at Paddington and Reading stations, which are two parts of my commute. Instead I got off my bus early with the intention of visiting the newsagent at Angel.

As I approached, I could see the shutters were up. I had been an infrequent visitor to this shop. While it had a big magazine range, its service was poor. Nothing really made you want to journey two minutes off route to visit.

No problem, I thought, I will go to the shop that we buy our newspapers from. It is tiny and used to be stuffed full of magazines. Now it is tiny and stuffed full of snack products. Its magazine range is the usual suspects. It has two and a half shelves of magazines, not fully stocked, where it used to have seven crammed full.

I turned around and walked back to the kiosk outside Angel tube station, where the issue was available. But it is a shock to find as a consumer that the easy access to magazines that you take for granted can disappear, almost overnight.
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

The secrets of persuasion: No short cuts.

The best moment in my interview with Terri Sjodin, who teaches many of the world’s top corporations how to sell persuasively, is when she smiles at me and asks to hear my “elevator speech".   My mind literally goes blank. The author of Small Message, Big Impact , her new book on how to craft powerful messages that persuade people to listen to you, has thrown the gauntlet at me. There was nowhere to hide. I had just told her how I had used her book to write out my three minute speech to open the Local Shop Summit. She listened patiently to my pitch, thought for a moment, and said: “I bet you had an illustration in your mind of an independent who really capitalised on your ideas and has taken them to the bank.” I could swear she was reading my mind. I blushed and nodded. “So you should open with this story,” she said. “Start out by saying: ‘Let me open the conference by telling you a great story with a happy ending.’ So the audience will say to themselves: ‘He is goi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hundreds and thousands

Shopkeepers should make a note to regularly visit the supermarket dotcom stores and check prices. Supermarket groups raise and lower so many prices that shoppers are left confused, analysis by The Guardian last week suggests. Former competition watchdog head John Bridgeman claimed this could add £15 to a £100 shopping basket. The stores studied said most of the increases were because promotions came to an end. For local shops, it is the sheer scale of price volatility that will be the major challenge. The study, for a three week period ending 22 December, saw Tesco increase prices on more than 1,500 shop keeping units (SKUs) and lower them on more than 2,600. At Asda, 2,000 went up. (A separate study by Paul Dobson of Loughborough University has found the most common price cut is 1p.) The newspaper notes that Asda increased the price of four Duracell AA batteries by 103% to £2.98, up from £1.47. Local shops would find it difficult to buy this pack for much under £2 and are being ...
Post a Comment
Read more