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This is a story about how a man started out with one market stall and 25 years later sold his chain of 1,000 shops for more than £500m to Tesco. But Kevin Threlfall’s book One Stop One Life is more remarkable than that. Any modern convenience store operator wanting to learn about business should read Threlfall’s remarkable life story. You will pick up some neat ideas about how to exploit loopholes and spot profit opportunities. But mostly you should just pick up his zest for life. His parents had a knack for sales and after his dad opened a cut-price market stall in the 1950s they had enough money to pay for Threlfall to get a good education. Knowing how much money could be made from market stalls, he went into partnership with his dad selling special offers and top-up shopping. In competition with the supermarkets, Threlfall made a list of all the “must buy items” and priced them lower, sometimes making as little as a penny per pack. “In being cheapest on known value items ...

A new report commissioned by England's greatest real estate expert Peter Wetherell explains how Mount Street in Mayfair has been regenerated as a retail destination. The rents paid today are quite staggering: Lowe pays £175,000 a year for 3,320 sq ft, for example. But the rules can be applied anywhere. The most important thing is that landlords and retailers and public authorities need to work together. Wetherell recalls that he founded the Mount Street Association at the request of the Duke of Westminster after the duke had "walked from the old estate office in Davies Street to dine at Harry's in South Audley Street and had counted 19 empty shops". Mount Street connects Berkeley Square with Hyde Park and you may think such a location guarantees success. But it does not. It used to be a "street you cut through" to get from A to B. The triggers behind its transformation were the arrival of an anchor retail tenant in the shape of US fashion desig...

Mark Bittman writes an excellent article in Time on How to Eat Now encouraging people to eat at home because it’s good for you, for your family and it’s far easier than you think. He challenges why so many people are eating “hyperprocessed food, the stuff that is correctly called junk and should really carry warning labels.” He believes preparing food should be a source of comfort, pride, health, well-being, relaxation and sociability for people. Something that connects us to other humans. The solution to the obesity epidemic he says is to do it yourself, eat meals and stop gaining 25% of our daily calories from snacks. Helpfully, Time prints a list of store cupboard basics so that you know what to stock for local shoppers who subscribe to the above ideas. Here are Mark’s pantry basics. How many do you stock? Spices and herbs ·         Salt and black pepper ·         Ground cumin ·  ...

We can read lots into Warren Buffett telling CNBC that he made a mistake in investing in Tesco. “I am going to make mistakes,” he said. “But not because I buy businesses that I like as they go down in price but I am just going to be wrong sometimes on the facts.” The interview that we can see does not go on to examine what these facts might be. What I would suggest is that Buffett is saying that Tesco is a well-run business for the world of shopping that used to exist when he bought into Tesco in 2007. The supermarket retail world has changed beyond recognition since then. Morrisons under Dalton Philips claims it will be the first retailer in the world to price match Aldi and Lidl with its Match & More initiative (based on its mid-range own brands, not its value range). If he reads Dieter Brandes' BareEssentials Philips will see this is not the case. History is littered with retailers who have tried to beat Aldi on price and failed. But is the Aldi UK model ...

In the past 20 years the science of behavioural economics has been adapted by consumer packaged goods manufacturers to create a revolution in shopper marketing. Independent retailers in the convenience channel will see the benefits of this thinking all around their store. For example, confectionery companies ask you to arrange your assortment according to shopper needs so that a hungry builder can find what he is looking for and a dieting social worker can find what she is seeking. Or in the beverages chiller, a brewer suggests how you should arrange your stock to make it easy for customers to find what they want. However a lot of this marketing investment may not work if the shopkeeper does not get the context right for her shoppers, suggests a new book The Irrational Consumer by  by Enrico Trevisan . Trevisan, an expert in pricing strategies, says that “the value created by a product and the resulting willingness to spend are strongly influenced by how the choice relat...

People jump to conclusions often with little evidence to back up their decisions, Daniel Kahneman observes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. “For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs,” he writes. Independent retailers must bear this in mind as they read national newspapers. Expect to see all sorts of self-interested story-telling dressed up as truth. Some of this will damage your business. For example, discount retailers are now in fashion. “The more consumers are led to focus on price, the more we benefit,” Roman Heini, joint managing director of Aldi UK told the FT this week. Is it true? I don’t know. You have to make your mind up. Worse. Greens newsagents in the heart of Mayfair has shut its doors. After nearly 20 years of buying his newspapers and magazines there, Tyler Br û lé, the FT’s Fast Lane columnist was forced to shop elsewhere. “This small drama on Marylebone High Street repre...

Too many marketers focus on the pay-off that their product or service offers the consumer and miss the point about the architecture of how people decide what to buy. “When for example we must assess what price we are prepared to pay our decision is determined not only by the value we associate with that product but also by our expectations of what such a product should cost,” says Enrico Trevisan in The Irrational Consumer. His book explains how to apply behavioural economics to your business strategy. It deserves a space in every marketing toolkit as he teaches you the same things that you may have read in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman in a way that you can quickly apply to your plans. Trevisan is a partner with Simon-Kurcher & Partners, world leaders in price consulting, and his economical use of language helps you to focus on how to use the insight instead of admiring the genius of unlocking how people think. For wholesalers seeking to influence indepen...

Successful local convenience shopkeepers know that they are having to consistently raise their standards as more shoppers abandon the out-of-town big box in favour of buying a little locally and more frequently. But as standards rise and as Tesco moves into every nook and cranny it can find, shopkeepers also know they have to be outstanding at something. Sourcing local food suppliers is one route and if you are passionate about serving good food as part of your mix then Food DIY by Tim Hayward is a book that deserves a place on your desk. Do-it-yourself, Hayward advises in this attractive, substantial and easy-to-read book. While Hayward’s target is the person who is rejecting “shop bought” food, I suspect there is a substantial cross over with the customer base for some local shops. Hayward promotes “getting your hands gloriously dirty” at a time when skills like “baking, processing and curing are in danger of being lost forever.” While Hayward promotes grasping back food prod...

Abstract: Thoughts on how to influence independent convenience retailers, a disparate audience that is becoming increasingly important for FMCG manufacturers. Combined they are as significant in size as a major multiple, but a tailored approach is needed to reach them as individuals.   Independent convenience stores have a 13% share of the UK grocery market, says the Institute of Grocery Distribution. Sales will rise from £22.2 billion today to £29.4 billion in 2019 at a much faster rate than the grocery market as a whole.   The growth story is driven by changes in how UK shoppers behave and also by the better store standards achieved by most independent retailers. The challenge for FMCG marketers is how to effectively be a part of this growth story. There is so much variability in the way that these shopkeepers operate. They are promiscuous buyers prone to chasing the best price available and from a wide range of suppliers. Even the many distributors, who...

There is a story in the Times today under the headline "Lidl fools the foodies with fake farmers' market test" showing that the "average person could not tell the difference between artisanal fare sold at markets and the products available on its shelves". The company set up a farmers' market in the east end of London and filmed shoppers who bought the products and then were surprised to be told that they were sourced from Lidl. For example, they bought mangoes at 75p and aubergines at 45p. The Times goes on to compare this with the prices at "the fashionable Borough Market" where they cost £1.99 and 70p each. The results will be provided to us all to see in a £20 million advertising campaign next month. This "news item" from the Times is of course not really news. It is part of the media story that portrays Lidl and Aldi as plucky little underdogs rescuing the UK consumer so that, in the words of its UK managing director Ronny G...

Software is eating the world. This is the title of the last chapter of The Launch Pad by Randall Stross , which is a book about how Silicon Valley invests in start-ups run by small teams of brilliant software engineers and salesmen, which then go on to change business as we know it. This book is one of the most gripping business books you could read. It is about the realities of modern entrepreneurship where 20 year old college drop outs create ideas that can disrupt any industry. I was reading Peter Blakemore’s remarks on turning 70, reflecting on his very successful career in wholesaling built on a very simple business model: buying well, knowing your staff giving great customer service and competitive prices. A simple strategy executed well. The scary thing about the Launch Pad is how Y Combinator, the school for start-ups launched by Paul Graham, is enabling digital businesses to find simple strategies that can change how your world works. Stross followed 64 teams (out of...

How Philip Clarke must have been hoping for an interesting Queen’s Speech. He did not get one. Its absence meant Tesco’s worst results in 40 years were the news. But don't kid yourself. Tesco is still a great business doing lots of things right. On the front page of the Financial Times were three graphs showing how badly Tesco is doing: ·         Five quarters of no growth in UK like-for-like sales (down 3.8% in Q1 201) ·         2.0 per cent fall in market share since 2010 as measured by Kantar. Aldi is up 2.7%. Lidl 1.2%. Waitrose 1.1%. ·         Total shareholder return since March 2011 down 13.9%. Only Morrison is worse at down 16.9%. The FT says Tesco’s big stores are out of favour with consumers who are “switching to convenience stores, German discounters and online grocery shopping”. Analyst Bruno Monteyne of Bernstein told the paper that half of the like-for-lik...