This rough sketch by me represents a traditional Newsagency layout. It is close to what shopfitters designed for newsagents, encouraged by Tatts, newspaper publishers and magazine, card and stationery companies.
Everyone wanted their space. And they got it. Little regard was paid to what was right for the business, for its future. Little was known.
No one invested time in understanding the whole business. Newsagents too often did not think about the bigger picture because, too often, they were not retailers.
So, newsagents ended up with a zoned business that was inflexible and at its heart, selfish for the suppliers.
Sadly, there are Newsagency businesses with layouts like or close to this today.
The bold colours on the drawing represents floor traffic for the key traffic driving product categories. I know from years of basket analysis that lottery, weekly magazine and newspaper customers rarely purchase any other product.
Take newspapers, around 75% of newspaper purchases in newsagencies do not include any other product category. For lotteries that number is close to 80%. For weekly magazines, on the day of issue, the number is 65%.
The shop layout encourages inefficiency in these products. Lotteries are the worst, demanding front of store location and barring other products from their location.
Look at the red, blue and yellow trails of traffic. This is what I see in traditional newsagency businesses. The lines represent inefficiency. The show a business not leveraging traffic th way it should.
In this drawing you can see a core reason news agencies are closing in Australia right now. They have not been built to cope with change. Shame on everyone, involved. Shame o,n those continuing to build businesses like this today.
Back in 2009 I designed a plug and play newsagency, one where it could be relayed without a shopfitter, changed dramatically, evolved to serve evolving needs. The flexibility in the core structure of the business has helped it go thorough tremendous changes.
That was in 2009. I know of people who visited that shop and said it was too radical, went on to build an old school business and got out losing money years later.
For years, through this blog and through the work I do with newsXpress, I have been speaking about the need for change to commence on the shop floor. I am pleased to see that happening. But it is not happening in enough businesses.
Newsagents have to push back hard on any supplier who demands space allocated to their category and it alone. They have to push back on suppliers who demand front of store. These pressures need to have a commercial reason, something you can bank on. A simple demand is no longer enough. We are better than this.
My advice to newsagents is to look at your foot traffic. Fast forward through camera footage. See your hot spots and see how you are not leveraging traffic to its fullest potential.
You want to work on this before it is too late.
If you have an old school Newsagency like in my sketch, change, now, quickly, the radically.
Structure your newsagency business to change the three key traffic flows, to get the deeper into the business and more integrated with the whole of the business rather than selfishly staying in the destination category.
The Newsagency of the future starts on the shop floor.
