nickshanagher

The highlight of my month was a half hour one on one interview with Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur and teacher, prior to his London Icarus show. I will post more stuff from my Retail Newsagent and Better Wholesaling interviews shortly. However, at the end of my interview Godin commented on my fountain pen and said that it was one thing he had never mastered. I realised later that he was complimenting me by finding something remarkable about me. No-one else had taken notes with a Lamy pen in the recent past. I replied that it was a great pen but I was having trouble with the nib, which was coming loose. In fact, ever since I was first given the pen 10 years ago I had being having trouble with the nib. Can you not get a replacement, he asked. I don't know, I said. I looked at the pen and I thought that I had never considered the idea that I could replace the nib. While I regularly bought refill cartridges, I had never thought there were other parts I could change. So, a wee...

Hugh Thomson's The Green Road Into The Trees is a remarkable book about his journey across England from Dorset to Norfolk. Tracing loosely an ancient road, The Ickneild Way, Thomson uncovers the hidden local histories of England and the changes to the way we live. He celebrates life. He writes about highs and lows, geographical and human. About law making and lawlessness. For retailers seeking to be at the heart of their communities this is a manual on what belonging is about. The rural memory, he notes, is both very short and very long. This following observation within a conversation with countryman David Hughes in Oxfordshire is typical of the quality of Thomson's thought and writing. "Over his cup of tea and morning cigarello, David talks about the changes he has seen in the countryside. He think it's too easy to make the usual assumptions about how 'it's all commuters now and the heart has gone out of the villages'. That needs to be qualified ...

 You get the impression from Bill Grimsey, the former boss of Wickes, Iceland and Focus DIY, that all it takes for success is some vision and some guts. He may be right. His book, Sold Out , aims to propose ways to save the high street and by extension independent retailing. What makes his book stand out, however, is not his pitch but the detail of his career in retail. For independent c-store operators there is much to think about. Grimsey provides a useful overview of how the supermarkets took over in the 1960s as more and more households bought fridges and the weekly shop became possible. The next step in giving supermarkets an edge was widespread car ownership. Grimsey describes the success of Tesco’s price cuts in 1977. He was personally involved in the next step forward, helping to deliver improvements in customer service in the late 1980s. On page 150 he provides a very useful four point summary of how to create a good impression with shoppers. Moving forward to...

My friend David Adams has been promoting The Fast Diet for some time. David is also the person who has tuned me in to thinking about gaining lightness rather than losing weight. And armed with the fast diet he has gained some fantastic lightness by fasting two days out of seven over the past half year. Now Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is promoting the same programme in the Guardian. What is interesting about his article is the context. "All my books and TV shows are largely complicit with [society's] disastrous approach to eating," he writes. "I like to think I am at the healthier, more natural end of the spectrum...but I think it would be unwise not to acknowledge that even the 'River Cottage diet' - rich as it ought to be in fresh vegetables and fruit - is open to abuse. "The fact is that even those of us who know exactly what a sensible...healthy diet looks like still struggle to keep to one much of the time. "The industrialisation of f...

The value of UK c-store businesses are near the bottom as a five year pattern of decline looks to have slowed, leading business agent Christie + Co said this week. In its 2013 business outlook, the company said that an 0.9 per cent fall in average sale prices in 2012 compares to the previous year bucked the trend compared to hotels, pubs and restaurants, where it also has a leading market position. Steve Rodell, the director who heads its retail team, suggested reasons for optimism even though the market remains polarised. Both the major supermarket companies and the co-ops are competing strongly for good c-store sites, particularly with petrol attached, and these businesses are getting good prices. Again the south east is strongest but Christie's teams make a good case to look at the profit potential in suburban Manchester, for example. The business outlook report tends to reflect current thinking about the market overall rather than lead thinking but this year Chr...

Politicians and public health officials should watch The House I live in by Eugene Jarecki because it makes some interesting points about the war on drugs that could improve the debate about the war on tobacco. The documentary is very powerful and Jarecki demonstrates the way that ideas can drive political action. Tobacco control is being driven by health concerns, which are no longer controversial. Drug control, Jarecki suggests, was driven by racial concerns. Opium, he suggests, was outlawed so that Chinese labour could be disrupted. Cocaine to crack down on black people. Marijuana, Mexicans. However, once the public imagination gets hold of the idea that drugs are a threat to their lives and that people who sell drugs are dangerous, then public policy against drugs is driven by a punishment of users rather than treatment. And politicians are afraid to speak against the prevailing wisdom. When Nixon launched the war on drugs, two thirds of the money the US government spent was...

The Harris and Hoole story about Tesco's not so independent coffee chain has several lessons for independent retailers. Broughtonscoffeehouse has written an interesting blog on how the national press has got the story wrong. Coffee industry insiders, it says, know that this is a case of an artisan coffee shop getting the backing of a big supermarket chain. Not, as the papers say, a case of Tesco dressing up its multinational offering as something local. Just as Paul Fisher may feel the only way he could preserve his independent supermarket was by way of a joint venture with Sainsbury, so Nick Tolley of Harris and Hoole sees the Tesco deal as integral to his business plan. He says he wants his managers to think about the local community, to source product locally and to hire locally."We design each of our shops individually so that each local town or neighbourhood feels like it's got something unique to call their own; we're not some pre-fabricated, soulless temp...

There is a lot of news about the performance of retailers on the television at the moment. This is positive because it means that there are fewer global disasters, wars, tax rises, scandals and terrible crimes to take up all the airtime. It is negative because it is so broad brush. For example, on the television news they talk about retailers as if they are interchangeable when in reality a food retailer and a white goods retailer operate in different worlds. Shops that sell books and DVDs and CDs face incredible pressure from internet sales. Ones that sell bread and milk do not. Local shops in the news and convenience channel face a very tough trading environment this year, perhaps more so than for some time. One leading wholesaler told me in November that trading was very, very difficult. For him this was a departure from his more usual optimism. I would speculate that the pressure from the multiple operators on the convenience channel, particularly in London and the South East...

This is an important question, according to Seth Godin, the world’s leading blogger on sales and marketing. This question is just one part of his latest book, The Icarus Deception , which tells us not to be afraid to fly too high. Godin is left field of most business book writers that you will come across. He writes like Dr Seuss with more words but the same tipping from the insane to cold common sense truth. Perhaps he knows this is his style. In his introduction he has one sub head referring to “green eggs and ham”. Godin tells us that to be successful today, we have to be artists. Are local retailers artists? I think so. He does too. On page 97 he shows a picture of a blackboard outside Joe Dough’s store. It says: “Come in and try the worst meatball sandwich that one guy on Yelp ever had in his life.” Good retailers around the UK already engage with their shoppers like this. It is the art that gives them an edge against the multiples. This book is not for everyone. 2013...

The supermarkets have a £5bn problem and growing with on-line groceries. The problem is that they charge £5 for each delivery and it costs them £15 to £20 to make the delivery. If they don't go on-line, then they lose market share and buying power. If they do go on-line, then they cannibalise their own profitable sales. If you are a supermarket making a 10 per cent margin, then you need to sell more than £100 of groceries to break even on each home delivery order. A £200 order is effectively cutting your margin in half to 5 per cent. Is this good news for local shops? Probably not. Hundreds of thousands of shoppers are being trained to buy in a way that destroys retail margins. The supermarkets are also having to open local shops themselves. This helps reduce the turnover from their larger - and most profitable - stores by around 5 per cent. It sounds toxic. Avoid moving your business into the same space.

Tyler Brûlé writes a column at the back of the FT every Saturday and talks about his hectic week shopping in Italy, partying in Tokyo, swimming in the Baltic, and so on. In other words his is a demographic most local shops will not have living near them... Even so, his advice to Stephen Clarke, the incoming chief executive of WHSmith, which used to dominate the UK magazine retailing market on its own, makes useful reading for a local retailer wanting to benchmark his business. Mr Brûlé's five point wish list is: print is not dead and you should broaden your range so that you are a place to discover new titles and not just to find the expected turn down the lighting a bit so your shops are warm and inviting add a bit of wood (oak or ash) experiment with a few smaller kiosks focussed on the best in print for high traffic sites better stationery please. If  Mr Clarke decides to pass on the ideas, perhaps you could make good use of them.