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...

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...