Further to my post last week about Gerry Harvey talking down retail, I was interested to read Eli Greenblat’s piece in The Age on Saturday. Greenblat took a more considered view of the situation and recorded the disappointment aired by some about Harvey’s comments.
My concern about the retail commentary is that it continues to focus on overall numbers without delving into then success stories. Consumer confidence is driven, in part, by the negative stories.
Our job as retailers is to give shoppers what they want. We need to pursue this relentlessly. But we need to be smart. It is too easy to say that shoppers want value and that value means cheaper prices. There are many ways to deliver value, price is but one.
Newsagents are lucky in that we have a core group of habit based products which will drive shoppers through our doors: magazines, lottery products (for some at least), greeting cards, newspapers and photocopying. While we can argue about challenges for each of these, today, at least, there is good regular traffic off of which we can build growing newsagenices.
The question is – are we leveraging this existing good traffic to our advantage? Are we being smart in giving shoppers what they want? I worry that too many newsagents are too busy complaining about factors outside their businesses and ignoring that they should be fixing what they can within their businesses.
This is our biggest challenge – to be retailers of the moment.
Our future is up to us just as the future of Harvey Norman is up to gerry Harvey and his management team. We each have to own our respective situations.