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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...