For newsagency owners recognising the need for transformation but facing challenges with inadequate business data, there’s no need to despair. Immediate, impactful actions can be taken directly on the shop floor to initiate significant change.
In our experience, businesses in this situation often feature a very traditional shop floor layout. The advice we’re about to share focuses on deliberately disrupting your current setup. We’ve found this approach incredibly helpful for retailers, allowing them to view their business with fresh eyes and identify new possibilities. It’s a radical, somewhat rough method designed to significantly shake things up.
It’s crucial to understand that any changes you implement aren’t set in stone. Make these moves, observe the results, learn from them, and be prepared to adjust. Your shop needs to be in a constant state of evolution.
Confronting the Old Guard: The Newspaper and Magazine Unit
If your shop features a traditional magazine fixture running the length of the store, with newspapers facing customers as they enter, here’s what you need to do: remove all the stock and rip the entire unit out. Don’t overthink this; just get it done.
That prime central space is valuable retail real estate that should be dedicated to products yielding a gross profit of 50% or more. Allocating this high-visibility area to products with a 25% gross profit or less is simply not a sound business decision.
Tear the whole unit out.
Now, using basic, low-cost shelving – the kind you’d find in any hardware store – relocate your magazines to the back wall of the shop. Whatever was previously in that back wall space will need to be moved elsewhere. Simple strip shelving with adjustable brackets will suffice. Place your newspapers on a low, flat shelf beneath the magazines.
Furthermore, if you’ve been displaying newspaper or magazine posters, it’s time to stop. They don’t effectively increase sales.
Filling the Newly Liberated Space
Find a couple of old tables or some sturdy wooden boxes. Use these to create display areas on the main shop floor. On each of these makeshift displays, tell a story about a specific product category. Bring products to this central part of the shop that customers might not typically encounter.
If you don’t have spare tables, check out your local op shop, your garage, or a discount retailer like Amart. Keep your spending to an absolute minimum.
Resist the urge to use spinners in this newly recovered space. Carefully select products that you are genuinely proud to offer. Crucially, make sure to include some products that you think won’t work for your customers. This is a vital step in uncovering what you don’t yet know about their preferences and buying habits.
Be prepared to completely change these displays within a week if they aren’t generating the results you’re looking for.
Observe and Learn
The initial changes might not yield immediate success, and that’s perfectly okay. If they don’t, make further adjustments and continue experimenting until you see positive outcomes. You might also experience some early wins. If that happens, capitalise on it – do more of what’s working.
If your business still has that traditional central magazine and newspaper unit, we suspect you’ll see some encouraging results from this radical shift. That’s been the pattern in every similar business we have seen try it.
Most importantly, have fun with this process. We know one newsagent who, after making these changes, hosted a Saturday afternoon sausage sizzle specifically so people could watch as they literally used a chainsaw to dismantle and remove the old magazine unit from the shop!
The fundamental aim of this initial move is to disrupt your ingrained view of your business. Yes, the shop floor will be temporarily disrupted, but more importantly, you need to be disrupted in your thinking. That’s why you need to undertake something radical that you’re likely to initially resist. These suggested changes could potentially do more for your personal perspective than for the immediate bottom line of the business itself.
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