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Fresh Kitchen is a stand-alone sandwich shop under the Sainsbury brand that the FT says is ear-marked for an "agressive roll-out" into the UK if the first site, opened in London's Fleet Street last month, is successful. The paper says that the supermarket chain could open 200 of these outlets, pitching it headlong with Pret-a-Manger and, by extension, with fast food chains like McDonalds. Waitrose, it notes, is already selling sandwiches in some Boots shops and ran its slide rule over the Eat, a coffee and sandwich chain. "Takeaway foods is likely to be the next battleground between the big supermarkets," the paper says. Of course, most local shops with a convenience offer are already aware of the opportunity for food-to-go. This story is further validation of their strategy. While it may be unwelcome to have fresh competition from Sainsbury and others, who are already attacking the c-store market hard, it is still further confirmation that the local gro...

Independent retailers who shop at cash and carry wholesale depots are often characterised as less disciplined business people than their peers who stick to the delivered wholesale route. However, hard times are resulting in price wars between suppliers in some areas and this provides some opportunities. One London retailer I spoke to this week says he is selling bottles of a leading soft drink for 99p, compared to £1.19 in the multiples. The cheapest buying price he can find from a delivered wholesaler is 89p, which would lose him 6.5p on every bottle sold at a 99p price point, due to sales tax. But a new cash and carry depot next to two others near his shop means he can buy the product at 69p, which makes the price point achieveable and he is shifting volume at a 19.5 per cent mark up. He welcomes the battle between cash and carry companies to win his business but also reflects that if they can afford to sell it to him for 69p, then the big supermarkets are probably buy...

"Coast Ghost" it says in a headline in the Sun today and underneath "Margate worst for boarded-up shops" with a table showing that 37.4 per cent of shops in Margate are empty. The Local Data Company, which press releases this data every month, really does independent shops no favours with its negative doom-laden coverage of the retail sector. Shops are always opening and closing. Thirty years ago, every high street would have had a TV rental shop. 10 years ago it would have been a video rental shop. Shopping patterns change. While there is an issue for many high streets, it is often a property development issue rather than a retail quality issue. The problem is that too many people read these stories and think that out-of-town supermarkets are killing local independents. That is not the story. The story is that local independent shops are doing great. Remember to tell your shoppers about the great products and services that you offer them. Avoid the gloom.

"Is it unreasonable to expect the shopkeeper to get off his phone and acknowledge me rather than just stick his hand out for the money?" tweeted the friend of a friend. My friend passed the message on to me, observing: "I saw this tweet today by one of my friends and I thought you might be interested in it. Independents pride themselves on their service, but the experience my friend had below is a common one (certainly in my experience) and not something that happens in the multiples..." There is a mix of good news and bad. The good news is that my friends clearly have high expectations of independent retailers. The bad news is that for shopkeepers who live in their shops, balancing work and phone calls is tricky. Do you have a policy of never serving while on the telephone? Do you stick to it? The place to start is to stand on the other side of the counter and ask yourself as a shopper, what value is being added by the shopkeeper? If there is ample choice o...

My local Co-op c-store managed for a period of two week's to offer the same product at two different price points by two different tills. When I took the photographs, the sales assistant ran the 75p product through the till and it read £1.02. This means either no-one picked up a product from the 75p display in two weeks or no-one noticed that they were charged 27p more for the gum! Either way, the picture shows the power of clear labelling and bar codes in creating confidence that the price is correct - even if it is not.

Feedback from Steve Denham to an earlier blog that newspapers are a refill business fits with the action in this pair of photographs taken six months apart. At some point this news/gift outlet just across the road from Paddington railway station has lost its InStyle magazine branding and accepted a new fascia sponsored by a mobile phone card company. It speaks volumes about the relative marketing power of the two industries. Even a year ago the canopy was sponsored by Lyca, which frequently has agents on the station platforms selling top ups to people off the train from Heathrow airport. However, retailers I have spoken to recently are concerned that the increasing percentage of lower margin "services" products in their mix is hitting profits. While shoppers once refilled with an expensive monthly magazine, now they are looking for mobile top ups.

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.

Natalie Massenet has made a fortune from setting up and running the Net-a-Porter fashion web site by combining her skills as a journalist with those of a retailer. "My goal was always to be editor in chief of a magazine, and I feel I have achieved that, only it's also a magazine that you can shop - which is even better," she tells the FT. At the heart of her success was the insight that good editorial content alongside items of clothing would encourage sales. Much as in a real world shop, good staff knowledge and know-how helps to clinch a sale. One of her new ideas is to allow visitors to her web site to see real time updates on what other users are putting in their baskets. She got the idea by observing that visitors to her office always stand mesmerised in front of big screens that show sales as they are happening - "so I knew it would be exactly the same for users." This tells you two things. One, that people shop in herds and will buy what other peo...

The reason that US bookshops are failing is not because of competition from the internet but because selling books in big box out-of-town warehouses dos not work, suggests maverick Financial Times columnist Tyler Brûlé in his latest Fast Lane column. We need to “challenge the ingrained notion that … a super-size store is a superior place to shop.” Mr Brûlé does not declare an interest but his Monocle shop just of Marylebone High Street in London is one of the smallest I have visited. However, on the subject of bookshops he argues that if you ask most people what the perfect one looks like they think about:  Small windows stocked with titles selected by the shop’s long serving staff  Well worn tables stacked with a combination of new releases and classics  A comfortable atmosphere with room to browse  Decently paid staff able to offer advice, the men wearing “cosy cardigans” and the women favouring “loafers, kilts and turtlenecks”. “Perhaps the most important detail is...