Newsagency opportunities

Newsagents only need to look at newsagent industry awards and events to see the businesses which support them. Sponsors of awards, conferences and other events provide practical help to newsagents. My frustration is that it seems to be the same businesses each year.

The QNF Newsagent of the Year Awards dinner on Saturday night is a good example. The photo of the left shows the sponsors as published on the program for the evening. While newsagents ought to select suppliers on their merits, industry support has to be a factor for without this some events crucial to the health of the channel would not happen.

Some newsagent suppliers take and don’t give back.

I was at the QNF Queensland Newsagent of the Year Awards last night in Brisbane. It was a terrific evening with a lot of laughs and plenty of celebration. It shows the high esteem with which the QNF is held by the support shown then by newsagents and suppliers.

There was a special moment in the evening when newsagents thanked the Gordon and Gotch customer service team one by one. Gotch is disbanding this team later this month and, collectively, more than 100 years experience serving newsagents will be lost. It says something about these individuals that the whole room applauded loud and long as they were introduced.

There is a lot of talk about newsagent unity. It was on show last night in Queensland. Newsagents are supporting their strong and focused association.

In the photo are some of the winners of the evening: Vanessa James, Employee of the Year, from newsXpress Lowood; Warrick Hosking, inaugural New Technology Newsagent of the Year, newsXpress Gympie and Mark and Shelley Petersen, Retail Newsagent of the Year, newsXpress Sarina.  Park Avenue News won Distribution Newsagent of the Year.

We have replaced our old Konica copier with a new unit from Toshiba. In addition to a considerably faster operation, we have been able to cut our per copy cost and introduce new services such as scanning and emailing. We did look at a Konica unit but leant to the Toshiba based on a better deal.

In our own case, we do $15,000 a year in colour and black and white copying. Cutting our per copy operating costs by 20% significantly improves the return we achieve from this traffic generating service.

I am not blogging to say go with Toshiba over other brands but, rather, to highlight that there are good copier deals out there which can cut operating costs and therefore improve margin on copying and other services.

The key to finding the best deals are: prepare – know what copying demand you have in your store, shop around, don’t take the first price offered, and understand the features available and assess their value to your customers.

I was interested to read that Blockbuster branded DBVD kiosks are entering supermarkets in the New England region of the US.  Called Blockbuster Express, the kiosk is an NCR self serve vending unit.  Each kiosk houses more than 800 DVDs.  They plan to have 10,000 of these kiosks installed by mid 2010.  The retailer gets a share of the US$1.00 a night rental fee.  What is interesting is that you can rent from one location and return at another.

Photo creditL Endgadget.

These magic trick packs were on the Gibson stand at the GNS market fair in Melbourne a few weeks ago. The price was 15% off their usual wholesale price. They were not popular with Market fair attendees. We bought them for our newsagencies as we felt they would be a good impulse product. We have had the stock out for a couple of weeks and they are selling well. They are being bought as birthday gifts for boys as well as for early Christmas stocking fillers.

While they may not be the most attractive product or generate hundreds of dollars of profit, we will sell through all the stock quickly – pickling up sales we would otherwise not have achieved.

We need to look at trade shows like the Market Fair for even the smallest opportunity to extend each shopping basket. That means magic tricks today and who knows what tomorrow.

Further to my post earlier this week about charges for copying in newsagencies, click on the photo to see our fax price list. We settled on this pricing following discussion of the managers of my newsagencies and considering what I had see others charge. Customers don’t complain about our charges for faxing or copying. They are happy to have a locally available service accessible seven days a week for long hours each day. We took $2,600 in fax revenue last financial year.

Click on the image to see our pricelist for copying and related services at newsXpress Forest Hill.  I am publishing this here because of questions from other newsagents about what to charge for these services.  We review our prices every year.  Last year, we found we were too low in some areas and too high in others.  Copying is a good margin service offered by newsagents.  It is also a good traffic generator.  Getting the pricing balance right will determine the longer term viability of the business.

With copying the most common sold-alone service in newsagencies – based on recent shopping basket analysis – we need to ensure that we have offers around the copier which speak to those who use the service.