nickshanagher

A short item on the Sun's City pages notes that high street sales were up in April by the highest number for that month in nine years* and linked the good news story with Booker's results. Wholesaler Booker is a good bellwether for the go ahead independent shopkeeper who is investing in their business. Booker, the Sun reported, said that customers were shopping locally and the paper reported that its Premier store chain had achieved a 10 per cent rise in sales. Wow! The Sun's paragraph may skew the facts but it is a great warm story about the success of local independent shops. Over in the FT, comment on Booker was missing. However, this does not mean the company is lacking fans. Analyst Dave McCarthy of Evolution Securities says it has world class management and is investing sensibly in development. While some of the upside comes from India and foodservice, it is also doing a great job of serving local shops. The secrets of Booker's success are not secret. They m...

Last weekend I spent some time discussing business with 10 local retailers from all parts of the UK. Their message was that sales are tough.  Probing further, they were saying that they were trading 10 per cent down year-on-year, on average. What were they doing about this? They were out in the market looking for new ideas, things that would work for their shops. However, many accept that progress will take some time. One shopkeeper told me how she could see her customers counting out how much money they had to spend before coming into her shop. While this was depressing, she is looking for ways to get them spending more. Yesterday, talking to wholesalers I heard them saying that sales were flat. While everyone in public wants to talk up how well they are going, they admit that many of their customers, the retailers are struggling. At the same time, across London, Tesco's new UK head was busy talking up how his company is performing. Christmas sales will be the best ever, he ...

"We're blessed with a wonderful business where we sell moments of pleasure at cents a time...billions of times every day," Muhtar Kent, who heads Coca-Cola, tells the Financial Times. I have cut the quote in half because the first half is what lots of local retailers are in the business of providing in the CTN market. CTN, which stands for confectionery tobacco newsagent, is a specific term that covers a loose style of retailing where people make frequent out-of-pocket purchases. In the modern convenience store, CTN is a major category alongside top-up shopping, food to go and a food for later offering (fresh and chilled). Mr Kent is clear that selling moments of pleasure for cents at a time is a recession proof business - provided you have enough scale. Most local shop owners recognise that they are in the pennies business, needing to build sales volumes. A second theme is his commitment to investment in the future of the business. It is why Coke has supported the ...

A good idea, good marketing and good sales skills helped Emilio Lavazza spread the concept of the Turin coffee bar through Italy and the world from the 1950s to today. Mr Lavazza, who died earlier this year, and his family business developed vacuum-packed coffee, which meant that cafe-quality coffee became widely available. Secondly, they invested in advertising on television, which set up their coffee brands as the benchmark for quality. Finally, they exported their coffee to the world. The family business started out as a grocery store in 1895 but when Mr Lavazza joined the business as a salesman it specialised in supplying coffee. His passion for all things coffee helped him to persuade his father to invest in technology and marketing. Importantly, he never stopped investing in new ideas and never lost his passion for coffee. This focus made his company the most successful in Italy and has helped the world think of Italy as the home of coffee.

Reading about how Jack Welch says he ran General Electric, the giant US conglomerate, offers a useful test for local retailers thinking about how to invest in their shops. "Our job is capital allocation - intellectual and financial," he said. "Smell, feel, touch, listen, then allocate. And make mistakes - but we're big enough to make mistakes." As a local retailer you need to manage your financial and personal assets. You need to think hard about new ideas. You need to take risks. But not life threatening ones. Swansea retailer Salaman Rasul says he made several attempts to move into fresh food over his 22 years operating a convenience store. Then a year ago he made a big investment in a chiller, spending £12,500, and it has worked. The chiller keeps the food fresher longer and encourages shoppers to buy his products.