nickshanagher

There are two things to learn from this fruit and vegetable display at Paul Cheema's Coventry, UK, local shop. The first is about benchmarking how shoppers use your store. The fruit and vegetable display is at the back of the shop. It looks fantastic. Every time I have visited it has looked fantastic. Paul says this is because fruit and vegetables were at the core of what his father sold when he originally opened the shop, that his father is good at displaying fresh produce and that he is proud of how good it looks. So what happens to the shopper who has strolled past the long aisle of fresh meat and dairy and then they come across the fruit and vegetable display and decide to buy? They can because the Cheemas have left them some baskets to use. They happily shop and go to the tillpoints to pay. However, the trick is that the baskets are unique to this point in the store. They are the only ones of this size. So every week the Cheemas get to work out how many shoppers were tem...

Mark Twain once said that "the best kind of experience is other people's". He was right, says Pino Tedesco, a business leader from Australia and one of 60 to contribute to a book just issued in the UK. One of Mr Tedesco's success secrets is to rent a hero. When times are hard, seek advice and ask yourself what would my hero do? If problems look too difficult to solve, ask yourself what Steve Jobs would do. Or Nelson Mandela. Another contributor, Jon Clarke, who runs 360 Business Marketing, a UK company, says: "Succeed by being remarkable and ignore the doom merchants". He advises businesses to "go where the customers are: the places where they source products or solutions to problems." Next to this, I scrawled in big letters: HOW? If you are a local shop, you cannot pick up your shop and move it to where the customers are. But the question is still relevant. If your shoppers are shopping somewhere else, you need to go there and find out what ...

The Newsagents Federation is calling for the newspaper and magazine industry to be referred to the Competition Commission and will be heartened by the views expressed by Baroness Kingsmill, a former deputy chair of the Commission, in the latest issue of Management Today. "All markets require regulation," she writes. "Market forces are red in tooth and claw and, unregulated, will lead to the survival of the fittest monopolist." Regulators usually restrict their findings to considerations of pure consumer benefits, which are "thought to be synonymous with the public interest". However, Lady Kingsmill argues that there are clear distinctions to the interests of consumers and of citizens. She also says that regulators had fettered themselves. Under the Fair Trading Act 1973 they could have been taking into account criteria such as the distribution of employment and enterprise around the UK - or environmental issues. In more than 20 cases she took part in t...

Half of all fish caught in the North Sea are thrown back overboard DEAD it says on the front page of celebrity chef’s Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s campaign website to change European laws governing this industry. After a visit to one of his restaurants last year when I left my email address I was invited to sign up as a supporter last year. Now more that 755,000 people have. I did so without having to think hard because I had seen his Chicken Out campaign in 2008 and agreed with its objectives. This campaign has changed the way that people shop, Mr Fearnley Whittingstall claims. I believe he is correct and all c-store operators who stock any chicken – or fish – need to be aware of the provenance of the food they sell. You may disagree. I have visited some great shops where people aspire only to cheap extruded snacks and cheap beer. But as a c-store retailer you need to understand your market positioning: what your shop stands for and what it does not. If you agree with this then...

The City analysts cannot make up their minds as to whether the supermarkets' investment in convenience stores is a good thing or not. The FT in a Monday analysis piece suggests that "Grocers count cost of smaller outlets". It is a clever headline. Obviously they are managing their costs. But also they are measuring the impact on their bottom line. There are several issues. If you sell 399 chicken dinners and have one left over, the cost model is very different from a shop where you sell nine chicken dinners and have one left over. If your 60,000 square foot hypermarket is sited where land is cheap and rates low, the cost of storing those dinners will be cheaper  than in a 3,000 square foot store in a city centre. How do the grocers try to manage the costs: 1. By clustering c-stores close together so you only need one truck to do deliveries 2. By tailoring what the stores offer to local demand and getting the stock levels correct 3. By trying to persuade shoppe...

The job of retail analysts is to advise investors on where to place their money and their views underpin much of the media coverage of the retail sector. In the wake of the latest Asda income tracker figures that show disposable incomes falling by 6 per cent in July, Dave McCarthy of Evolution Securities said that a tough era lies ahead for the UK food retailers, "for which the industry is not well prepared". In the UK, retailers have benefited from like-for-like sales growth which has driven the way that companies have funded their business models. Many stores are taking less cash than a year ago and facing real increases in costs, says Mr McCarthy. The result is a profits squeeze. The managers of Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons and Asda have benefited from two dynamics for a long time. In the past two decades, one has always been underperforming. As they are all doing the same, suppliers will find less need to pay to shift their sales around an "undifferentiated pack...

This photograph from Malcolms Stores, a Costcutter shop in Tile Hill, Coventry, shows how strong a soft drinks display can be - complete with meal deals covering breakfast and lunch. Enjoy the attention to detail and the adjacencies.

Originally published in May but given to me in a free taster issue handed out last week, the Economist has formed the view that supermarket-bashing is "elitist and muddle-headed". Its target is the Tesco bashing where the opening of a new outlet coincides with the closure of local shops. The political response from David Cameron and Ed Miliband was to "bring back the bustle to our high streets" and "people think the character of their local high street is being changed and they have no power against big corporations" respectively. What will happen? Nothing suggests the Economist, pointing out that the Competition Commission found in 2008 that the grocery market represented a good deal for consumers. The business magazine goes on to question how new the problem is, pointing to research from Surrey and Exeter universities that shows that as far back as 1939 chain stores and co-ops controlled half the market (up to two thirds today). And it shows that...

McDonald's is the best fast food operator in the world, details published in the September 5 issue of Fortune show. As part of a feature on chief executive Jim Skinner, the US business magazine lists the annual sales per store achieved by 10 leading fast food companies. The list is: McDonald's       $2.4m Applebee's        $2.3m Wendy's            $1.4m Taco Bell           $1.2m Burger King      $1.2m KFC                 $1.1m Starbucks          $800k Pizza Hut           $700k Dunkin' Donuts  $600k Subway             $400k These figures...