nickshanagher

There are two schools of thought about magazines and newspaper sales in the 21 st century and how they fit with a local convenience store. The one that is winning appears to be to stock a limited range of top sellers and get on with the day job. For a great many independent retailers, this makes good business sense. But in the rush to convenience, does this mean some retailers are missing a brilliant business opportunity? The answer is yes, according to Colin Mullins. Mr Mullins, who today heads the retail consultancy Fore, has a track record of building profitability for retailers through news sales. His current clients include Tesco, M&S, Asda, Spar and Nisa. He set up Fore in 2007 and sold to Menzies Distribution last year. One of the tasks he has been given is to breathe life into Superleague, the news sales club that Menzies set up in 1999 to get a piece of the “pay for display” action pioneered by WHSmith in its high street and travel outlets. The launch of Su...

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.

On a return visit to Hatton News in central London this week, I was surprised to find that two metres of the magazine display had been replaced by cards. Trade has been difficult for Manoj Harji but he took advantage of the closure of Clinton Cards further down his parade to change his product mix. The cards are generating more profit from the space than the magazines were, he says. I did not have the opportunity to check his numbers and his range is similar to that in Funky Pigeon, which opened a concession in WHSmith, which is located on the far side of the closed card shop. The first problem is lower footfall and the second is about filling your linear feet of shelf space with what is scarce, and scarcity is hard to find in the middle of London. (Mind you, across town at Exmouth market Space is selling tiny cards at £3.99, imported from the USA.)

'We don't have it in stock but I can order it for you!' The words that are the death knell for small bookshops, according to Harry Mount, writing in the FT. He points out that thanks to Amazon he can order it himself and the book will be delivered straight to his door. Mr Mount's article is entitled: Shed no tears for the death of the old bookshop. He is confident that book shops may survive but only if they get the emotional pitch correct. They need to provide a quiet yet communal atmosphere in which shoppers can sift through ideas. It all sounds a bit fancy but the magazine retailer has something to learn. What Mr Mount describes is the commoditisation of buying books. In my local bookshop, when I ask for a book that they don't have, they suggest that they can order it for me. That means I must remember to come back. It also means if their wholesaler is out-of-stock then there will be more delays. I have never said yes. But what might make me say yes? This w...

"We're just fooling ourselves if we think that the staff at Tesco Express can't smile or be pleasant. We've got to be much more than just nice people," an un-named retailer tells wholesaler Menzies Distribution as part of its major research exercise to better understand its customers. David Cooke, its commercial and marketing director, writing in InPublishing warns publishers - particularly magazine publishers - that they risk losing a large and successful route to market. Why? His analysis splits the independent retailer universe into four types: entrepreneurs, who are doing well and join everything, always looking for better ways to do things and will pick up tips and tactics from wherever they can get them. They can compete with the multiples but they are prepared to cut out a category if they felt they would have a better or more profitable business by doing so traders, who mainly have one shop, know what they want to do but do...

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.

I aim next week to visit the Monocle shop, which is said to be very small and sells mainly back issues of the Monocle magazine. Looking up the address on its website I flicked over to the listing of what's in the current issue. A few of the headlines caught my attention and I made a note to buy the December/January issue before it was off sale. I also made a note not to buy it from WHSmith, which is easy as it has outlets at Paddington and Reading stations, which are two parts of my commute. Instead I got off my bus early with the intention of visiting the newsagent at Angel. As I approached, I could see the shutters were up. I had been an infrequent visitor to this shop. While it had a big magazine range, its service was poor. Nothing really made you want to journey two minutes off route to visit. No problem, I thought, I will go to the shop that we buy our newspapers from. It is tiny and used to be stuffed full of magazines. Now it is tiny and stuffed full of snack products...

There's an unlimited supply and there is no reason why, the Sex Pistols used to sing of the 1970s music industry. What drove sales was fashion and people's need to be first to have the new song and the new hair style. For local shops that want to sell magazines, however, the lyrics could be changed to there's a limited supply. The maths behind this are simply explained in a recent Neville Rhodes's column in Retail Newsagent. There are only 42 magazines in the UK that average a sale of more than three copies per outlet - out of a universe of 3,500 magazines available. As 52 per cent of the sales are achieved in 15 per cent of the outlets (mainly supermarkets and WH Smith) and independents with 60 per cent of the outlets achieve 27 per cent of the sales, this shows that most magazines are more likely not to be sold in most outlets. The short shelf life of most magazine titles - either weekly or monthly - and the promiscuity of magazine shoppers who will buy their favo...

News this week that the average price of a CD has fallen below £8 for the first time, compared to more than £11 in 2000, tell all retailers that prices do not have to just go up. While the recording industry may blame the internet and supermarkets, which are accused of below cost selling, the business of music may not be suffering in proportion. Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien told Time magazine that "the music industry isn't in crisis, the recording industry is; it is an unbelievably good time to be a fan of music and new bands." Whatever, most corner shops are not big into music. However, the implications for book, magazine and newspaper sales is more sobering. The Boston Consulting Group has just studied the attitude of shoppers towards buying digital content in the US, China and Germany. They will pay $100-$150; $70-$120; and $130-$160 respectively for an e-reader. For a book the price ranges are $5-$10; $1-$2; and $7-$12 respectively. For a magazine $2-$4; $1-$2; ...

While the magazine and newspaper industry is fearful that its current distribution model, dependent on sales through corner shops, is at risk from the rise of the internet, the people who will make the decision are your shoppers not your suppliers. Free is the big selling point of the internet on the basis that access to the internet is cheap and easy and the advance of technology means vast amounts of data can be stored cheaply and easily. In the film industry, there is a widespread view that DVDs will disappear as people take to buying movies over the internet. However, a report from leading US media research group Screen Digest says that hopes for the rise of digital media have taken a hit - with it downgrading its forecasts following lower than expected sales last year. "The level of interest in digital downloads just isn't there," analyst Arash Amel told the Financial Times. Why? Becaue people don't like the restrictions that come with digital downloads, he sugg...

Wow. Steve Jobs says that his new iPad device is "extraordinary" and if you take time to look at his launch presentation on the web you may agree. Will it kill the magazine and newspaper industry? Perhaps not but it will change it! For example, if you are on a journey, devices like this make it easy to watch a movie rather than flick through a magazine. Armed with an iPad are you going to read a book or watch You tube? I reckon the latter. News and views in magazines and papers are key footfall driver for many local shops. The iPad is yet another competitor for shoppers' time. The biggest issue for local retailers is if its launch takes away the attention of publishers on making sure they do a good job for shoppers who like buying news and views from your store.

I spoke to some retailers last year about how worried they were about e-readers, such as Amazon's Kindle, and the impact it would have on their business. Most looked at me blankly. Software company Adobe has now developed AIR, which allows magazine publishers to sell their magazines on to devices like the iPhone. Condé Nast is reportedly going to offer its Wired magazine in the US in this format. At the same time, HP is offering US publishers the ability to print magazines on demand... Who will buy this? Probably your most loyal magazine shoppers, based on my sample size of one. Today, on my train into work, I bumped into a man using an e-reader. His company had invested in them so that staff could review reports. They don't work for that. But he now downloads novels and reads two a week on his reader. Previously, he was buying two a week from a bookshop. What can the owner of a local shop do? Find out who your most loyal magazine customers are and pamper them. Make ...

The UK's magazine market has been under investigation by the Office of Fair Trading, the UK's competition watchdog, for many years. A recent ruling on the acquisition of the UK's largest magazine wholesaler Smiths News of assets formerly owned by the former number three wholesaler Dawson News makes interesting reading. To make a judgement, the OFT assesses the supply of services to the publishers, which is paid for by a proportion of the cover price and includes delivery of titles and handling returns. And it assesses the supply of services to retailers, which is paid for by carriage service charges, for the right to receive deliveries. As many retailers challenge the back-door way that CSCs were introduced and expanded in the 1990s, it will be interesting to see if this distinction is allowed to go through unchallenged. More interesting is the OFT's concern that if Smiths did not complete the acquisition then some retailers could potentially have been left without su...