Financial year diaries have never been big for us at Forest Hill – our customers are mainly retired people happy to forget their need for such things. That said, we don’t ignore the opportunity and always carry a small selection. The key with anything like this is to buy appropriately. While suppliers pitched enticing deals, we bought based on our sales data and not their spin. We allowed for some growth.
The performance figures I see from many newsagencies suggest that in the stationery department newsagents are bad buyers. Stock turns are low and the cost of dead stock – items and whole categories which have not registered a sale in six months. Buying is too often based on supplier or sales rep hype rather than sales history of the same or similar products in the business.
Ideally I would like to see a code of practice by sales reps guiding them to use sales performance to guide the order they pitch. With new owners especially I often see sales reps overselling and then wondering why new newsagents struggle.
WHAT WE DO IN OUR STORE IS A HAVE A POLICY THAT WE DO NOT BUY FROM REPS . WE FOUND THAT THERE IS NO BENIFIT FROM BUYING FROM THEM AND THAT THEY TALK YOU INTO BUYING STOCK THAT IS NOT REQUIRED .