Ethics

While politicians have patted themselves on their backs for ‘fixing’ the Lottoland betting model, Lottoland is still in business as this Super Bowl promotional email shows. This must be frustrating to lottery retailers given how Lottoland mocked them in their TV commercials.

I can’t help but think this issue would have been resolved had all newsagent associations followed the ALNA strategy that led to the initial legislation being passed.

The headline, Chinese virus pandamonium (sic) on the front page of the Herald Sun yesterday was, in my opinion, racist and unnecessary.

I wish I had been at the shop because had I been and had I seen this I would not have put the newspaper out for sale.

Yes, I get that such a move is editorial in itself. However, in my shop I get to choose what I sell. This issue of the Herald Sun is not something I’d want to knowingly sell.

Back in mid 1996, a few months after I bought my first newsagency, we made the decision to stop selling cigarettes. We turned err back soon $2,000+ a week in retail sales. This was a decision based on what we felt was right for the business, for what it represented. It was the right decision.

Click here for more on this from Mumbrella, which was also the source of the image.

Footnote: now, before people say this is News Corp. bashing. I don’t care. I did not decide to run the headline in the Herald Sun. What I did do is label it racist. However, I think any reasonable person would reach this conclusion. News Corp. needs to be responsible for these race based and shrill editorial decisions.

Stories have been doing the rounds in some towns of retailers collecting bushfire relief funds and not being transparent about what they do with the money. My advice is:

1. Be clear about the charity for which you collect.
2. If collections, deposit donations regularly.
3. Get a receipt for each deposit you make and post the receipt in store and on your business social media pages.
4. Choose a charity that is known and understood locally and one that is not engaged with any agenda that may concern some – like any church organisation.

We took this approach following the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria and found our customers appreciated the transparency.

The other point about this is to maintain a business as usual approach as much and possible. I say this as the everyday needs you serve in a typical newsagency or newsagency like business are still there. Serving these needs and not having your attention diverted (as much as practical and possible based on your location) makes sense.

‘Dangerous, misinformation’: News Corp employee’s fire coverage email, by Zoe Samios and Andrew Hornery writing for the Sydney Morning Herald is fascinating look inside News Corp and how one employee views their reporting on climate change.

A News Corp employee has slammed the organisation for its “irresponsible”, “dangerous” and “damaging” coverage of the national bushfire crisis, urging executive chairman Michael Miller to think about the “big picture”.

In an email distributed to News Corp Australia staff and addressed to Mr Miller, commercial finance manager Emily Townsend said she had been filled with anxiety and disappointment over the coverage, which had impacted her ability to work.

…

“I find it unconscionable to continue working for this company, knowing I am contributing to the spread of climate change denial and lies. The reporting I have witnessed in The Australian, the Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun is not only irresponsible, but dangerous and damaging to our communities and beautiful planet that needs us more than ever to acknowledge the destruction we have caused and started doing something about it.”

I think the News Corp. reporting climate change has been appalling, ignoring science for baseless fantasy theories from the fringes. Add this to the extreme bias demonstrated buy News Corp on myriad political matters and non wonder people are cancelling their subscriptions and stopping purchasing newspapers.

News Corp. newspapers and online platforms seek to drive agendas rather than reporting news in my opinion. Shame on any of us how pay this American controlled company money to interfere in the future of our country in this way.

Facebook permits the publishing of clearly false and misleading information shared by individuals, community groups and commercial entities on the Facebook platform. Over the last four weeks, during the bushfire crisis, we have seen Facebook permit extraordinary lies to remain published, and, indeed, be shared by many. Facebook have cared little for truth during this.

Facebook ignores or rejects complaints to them about untruthful posts. I suspect it ignores the complaints because plenty of the posts are boosted, paid for. To reject the posts would harm the Facebook business model.

A week ago we discovered a bunch of boxes had been dumped in the car park at our office. The recipients of the parcels had to removed their name and address details. We took photos and I posted about it on Facebook. One of the named people complained and the post was removed by Facebook in a few hours.

Facebook says it was a breach of privacy yet the boxes were dumped, illegally actually, with the information I included out in the public domain.

That Facebook acted so swiftly demonstrates its editorial capability. It is disappointing that it does not use this editorial capability on clearly false and misleading information. My disappointment at Facebook turns to anger during election time when the company permits untruths to be spread, impacting informed engagement in the democratic process.

While we do have news outlets in Australia that also publish untruths, this is especially true of News Corp. outlets, there is some semblance, insufficient in my view but a semblance nevertheless, of accountability. Facebook faces no such accountability.

Truth matters. You only have to look at the back burning nonsense published on social media during the bushfire crisis to see this. There were hundreds (thousands?) of posts claiming that the Greens had blocked back burning. The Greens have never controlled any state or federal parliamentary chamber. The only time a Greens politician had any say over back burning was in the ACT for a brief time and that Greens politician oversaw extensive back burning. Yet, social media platforms like Facebook permitted the nonsense to be published. Complaints went unanswered.

Back to my post about the boxes. One of the people named called me and said that they paid someone else to dump their trash so it was not their problem and that it was not their fault that their address details were not removed from the boxes. They offered to come and pick up their trash. However, once Facebook removed the post I’ve not heard from them again.

Click here to see a New York Times article from today on this topic.

Too often we in small business discover that suppliers have one approach for us and another for a big business competitor of ours with the approach for small businesses impacting efficiency and, therefore, profitability.

Here are some examples of the types of different approaches that concern me:

• Big businesses paying suppliers only for scanned sales while we have  to pay for everything, including shrinkage.
• Big businesses receiving invoice and other data in a format suitable to their systems while small business retailers are told it is too hard.
• Big businesses getting supply without impediment while small businesses nearby are not supplied due to an internal systems error.
• Big businesses being supplied sought after new release items  ahead of small business competitors.
• Big businesses benefiting from marketing and other fees that reduce the carrying cost of an item or range.

These approaches compounds the disadvantage small business retailers encounter on price and service. Any supplier advantaging big businesses in these and other ways need to look at their operations and decide on the retailers they prefer  to  supply.

Too often, I see small business retailers delivering financial benefit to suppliers that is far greater than their proportion of GP from the total GP pool of the supplier.

Every week I hear from a different landlord (or two, or three)pitching a tenancy, or tenancies, if their centre that would be ideal for a traditional newsagency. When I ask what they think a traditional newsagency sells they almost always say: papers, magazines, lotteries, cigarettes and lollies. Pushed, they will add cards and phone recharge.

Some say they would not permit a newsagency to sell gifts while others say yes to gifts but no to homewares or toys.

Landlords of shopping centres are a problem for our channel. They are living in the dark ages.

These shopping centre landlords do not want newsagencies of 2019 and beyond. No, they want convenience stores offering categories that we either have left behind or managed to a small footprint as we chase new traffic and higher overall GP%. Which is okay. There is a place for those businesses, the businesses that offer papers, magazines, lotteries, cigarettes and lollies as their core.

So, in addition to Australia having more retail space per capital than most other countries and our retail space priced higher than most others, we also have to content with landlords who guide retailers to setup businesses that are focussed on the past more than on the future.

They get people agreeing to this. I heard from someone last week who had just signed a lease for a new 30-shop centre being built in regional Australia, in an economically affluent area. They had agreed to a 150 sq m newsagency that would sell papers, magazines, lotteries, cigarettes and lollies. Oh, and cards and small gifts (under $20).  This would be their first retail business and they wanted help to create it. They thought they were on a winner, based on projections from the landlord.

I suggested they get the projections in writing and ask the landlord for people to speak to, to guide the creation of the business. The landlord refused, saying the projections were guidance only and not  to be relied on. In talking abut how they planned full the shop they figured it as 33% magazines, 20% cards, 25% lotteries and the rest in convenience products and management.

I asked they has created a cashflow projection model for the business. They had not. They referred back to the landlord projection on  how good a newsagency would be.

And landlords wonder why some traditional newsagency businesses go broke.

The ABC has reported the ATO is clamping down on small businesses using sales suppression software to minimise tax.

Ms Jenkins said the ATO was also cracking down on the use of sales suppression software that disguised the transactions within a company’s records.

“There is some really sophisticated software out there that is helping people avoid paying the right amount of tax.

“But whether it is cashless payments or whether it is the use of platforms or apps, it means there is really a trace of your transactions.

“We use merchant data and other sources of information to identify where things just don’t look right. Then we go and have a chat to them and say, ‘Hey, can you explain?’

In the mid 1990s there was sales suppression scam operating in the newsagency channel. I became aware of it because my newsagency software company lost businesses because we refused to offer such a facility.

There was a software program into which the retailer could enter a code and then an amount of cash they wanted to take out of the business unreported. A second set of records was maintained for the ATO and another records for the business owner.

I know because the software was demonstrated to me several times, by someone who had worked for the software company that created the software. They had approached me. I did some more checking with newsagents and discovered the facility in the software was being used.

The matter was reported to the ATO. At their then Box Hill office in Victoria they assembled a task force including representatives from the ATO, Federal Police, Federal Attorney General office. Victorian State Revenue and Victorian Attorney General office. Several of us with knowledge were brought in for a demonstration of the software. There were several follow up meetings with the ATO in Sydney.

Eventually, my software company stopped losing sales because we did not have the tax avoidance facility in our software.

Any retailer deliberately and systematically underreporting their income to avoid tax deserves what they get from the ATO and from any suppliers they impact through their actions.

A report from Chris Woods at Crikey Tuesday about whether a boycott of News Corp. titles could work is interesting reading, especially for newsagents and other retailers of newspapers. Click here to access the report. Here are the opening pars of the article…

Over the weekend, two major things happened in the News Corp universe.

First, The Australian launched a new page technically titled “gender issues” that, coincidentally, is 99% directed at trans people. Of those, the majority either focus on the Prime Minister’s squeamishness about trans people playing cricket, fear-mongering over Victoria’s new birth certificate laws, or flat-out lies about people “castrating children”. The folks at Junkee go into this further, but the short story is that no, neither early childhood support or latter-stage puberty blockers are anywhere near the same thing as castration.

Secondly, journalist Rick Morton published his first major story since leaving The Australian, which, not for nothing, covers a world-first study examining how News Corp papers embolden far-right groups that use stories around safe schools and immigration as recruitment tools. Morton joins a growing stable of journalists and editors who have left the media giant.

Both these events didn’t come from nowhere — and they have both helped spur existing campaigns against News Corp, each targeting different facets of the organisation. But can they work? Crikey looks into the realities of such a disparate push.

What interests me is that social media has evolved into an easy to access protect platform through which people can organise. This is a risk for News Corp and its use of its newspapers and other media outlets to yell at people. push agendas and tell people how to vote.

Regulars here will know I have been interested in the newsagent boycott of The Sun in the UK. I wonder if that could happen here now that there are more respected former News journalists outside of News Corp.