Tag: retail transformation

Yes, it’s time to stop calling your business a newsagency

The proposal we put to the newsXpress national conference this month is simple to say and confronting to hear. Decouple from the channel. De-identify as a newsagent. Stop defining your business by a word that is losing its meaning, and start defining it by what your customers actually value.

Think about what the word newsagency now means to a shopper. Almost every story about newsagencies is a closing story. The last one in town. Another one gone. Each story is true, and together they teach the public that a newsagency is a business on the way out. That association attaches to the sign over your door whether your own shop is thriving or not. Every newsagent in the country is carrying the reputational weight of every closure in the country, for free, on their own shopfront.

Listen to what the public says online when it thinks we are not reading. “Are newsagents still a thing?” We are called “glorified last minute gift shops”. People group us with video stores and milk bars. Asked whether to buy a newsagency, the replies are blunt: a dying business model, you would be buying a job. That is not a competitor talking. That is our own community telling us what the word already means to them. The nostalgia is real and kind, but affection is not a sale, and the affection is for a good local shop, never for the word newsagency.

Let us be clear about what we are not saying. We are not telling anyone to close. We are not saying print income is worthless tomorrow. Take every dollar the papers, magazines and lotteries still pay, but take it knowing what it is: a declining annuity, not a foundation.

What must change is the identity. The sign, the window, the Google listing, the socials, the in-store experience, and above all the position your shop holds in the customer’s mind. You can be anything you want. The best card and gift destination in your community is the most natural move, because the categories that resist Amazon and Officeworks, cards, gifts, the tactile, the local, the last minute, are already in your shop. But members have become the best toy shop, the best homewares shop, the best coffee stop in town. What you become is entirely up to you. There is simply no longer any value in being the best newsagent.

The businesses that survive the next ten years will not be the ones that held the word longest. They will be the ones that quietly stopped being one, early and on their own terms.

Tomorrow: the how. Five jobs, two years, four numbers.

Website: www.newsxpress.com.au | Find out more: help@newsxpress.com.au | CEO: Mark Fletcher: 0418 321 338

From newsagency to accelerator: why the shopfront still has a future

Independent retail is not dying. The traditional newsagency model is under real pressure, and the numbers are hard to argue with. Newspaper unit sales fell 13% in 2025. Magazine revenue keeps contracting. Lottery players are steadily moving online. These are structural shifts, not seasonal dips.

It’s easy for local small business retailers, independent retailers, to talk their situation down, to find a negative well and wallow in it. newsXpress helps you see opportunities and leverage the for a healthier and more valuable outlook.

It all starts at the front, what people walking past see.

The same shopfront, rebuilt around the right categories and run with the right tools, can become genuinely profitable and enjoyable to own. The businesses that prove this every day have not moved premises or spent a fortune. They have simply changed what the space is asked to do.

This is the difference between a marketing group and an accelerator. A marketing group promotes a channel. When that channel is declining, better promotion does not fix the underlying problem. An accelerator changes how the business operates, working on margin, space productivity, stock turn, new traffic, and day-to-day efficiency.

newsXpress now describes itself as a Local Retail Accelerator rather than a newsagency marketing group. The change in language reflects a change in focus. The goal is measurable improvement in business performance, not the promotion of categories that are quietly shrinking.

For a retailer, the practical starting point is a simple question: is each part of the floor earning its keep? Newspapers, magazines and lottery may still have a role, but they rarely deserve the space they once held. High-margin gifts, cards, collectibles and emerging categories often do far more with the same square metres.

None of this requires a dramatic leap. It begins with the data a retailer already has, an honest look at the floor, and a willingness to change what is not working. The shopfront has a future. It simply needs to be pointed at where the money now sits.

If you would like an honest look at what your shopfront could become, start a conversation with newsXpress today.

A Sunday thought on hope, and why this channel has more of it than people think

Sunday is a good day to step back from the counter and think about why we do this.

It is easy to feel weighed down in independent retail right now, especially in our channel.

Newspapers keep declining. Magazines too. Costs are up. The big retailers keep getting bigger. If you only listened to the noise, you could believe the local newsagency and gift shop had no future.

The data tells a different story, and we find real hope in it.

Last week, we finished analysing five months of trading across 32 newsXpress member shops. Transactions were down 4%. Revenue was up 4%. Customers are visiting less often and spending more when they do, an average of $21.97 a visit, up from $20.29 a year earlier.

Think about what that means. Fewer people walked through those doors, and the businesses grew anyway. Not because of luck, and not because print recovered. It did not. They grew because shop owners made brave decisions about what their shops stand for. They backed gifts. They backed collectibles. They put quality cards where customers could find them. They let go of what was not working.

That is where our hope comes from. Not from wishing the past back, but from watching ordinary local retailers reinvent their businesses in real time, with their own hands and their own money, and win.

There is hope in the community side too. Behind every shop in that study is a family, often staff who have been there for years, and a town or suburb that relies on the shop for more than what it sells. A good local shop is a meeting place. The conversation at the counter matters as much as the transaction.

newsXpress exists for these people. The benchmarking, the supplier access, the marketing, the phone call when things are hard. All of it is in service of one belief: local retail is worth fighting for, and it can thrive.

If you are reading this on a Sunday, tired from a long week in your shop, the evidence says your best years can still be ahead of you. The retailers proving it are not different from you. They just decided to change, and they did not do it alone.

Enjoy your Sunday. Monday is full of possibility.