The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. Over the years, Retail Newsagent has reported many stories of successful refits and how the retailers have witnessed increased turnover. I am delighted to say that looking back throughout July there have been three further examples.

In the 15 July issue of RN Graham Walker tells of his experience when he only had half a refit and few other changes and his sales went up by 15%. Not bad.

Then in the 22 July RN Charles Richard talks of the effect on his business in the aftermath of floods that stuck Cornwall. He refitted the shop to Londis Genesis standard and saw his turnover double. Not bad either.

Finally, in the RN issue dated 29 July, Harry Patel invested a massive sum of £65,000 in total refit. Not only his customers were stunned by the new shop, his turnover is increasing steadily and he is getting more and more customers. Not bad as well.

And these are stories over a three-week period. If ever proof was needed, here it is. I fully realise that investing in a refit is not an easy option and it requires considerable capital investment but if you have to run the business, you might as well run it professionally, compete with the big boys who are increasingly encroaching on your territory, keep your customers happy and earn a decent living for all the hard work you put in. And as I said before, if you are thinking of selling your business, you have a much better chance of selling a modern well fitted shop.

Of course this type of relationship is a two way process as the more we discover about our customers the easier they see us as a must-use business. Yes, I know that West Chiltington is an affluent community with a great variety in the vocations and interests of its residents. Shortly after we took over our shop a customer told me that what ever our hobbies or interests we would find someone to share them with, whether it was stamp collecting or burglary! And so the community has proved to be.

Recently I had the opportunity to use my customer knowledge in a very pleasing way. One of our former newspaper delivery boys who has just finished at university came in to use our Post Office so I asked him what he was planning to do next. He told me that he had landed a job with EDF Energy in the nuclear power division and was looking forward to starting soon.

At the same time another customer was being served on our shop counter who had told me earlier this year that he had been a project manager at Sizewell B during its construction. What a small world!  So I took the opportunity to introduce the two.

Apart from the surprise of having two people with an interest in nuclear power at our counter at the same time I was delighted to give our former employee a potentially useful addition to his network. I think that knowing our customers is key to operating a successful community based shops.

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But a big part of this success story is heavy investment in appearance, i.e. shop layout and design, lighting, ergonomics, signage etc. Appearance is crucial as it attracts and invites customers to their shops. It is not only the supermarkets who have invested in appearance so too have all of the big high street names. Take a look around your high street and see how so many retail outlets have upped their game on appearance.

It is a simple concept, first impressions count! There is a lesson here for small retailers who have neglected investment in their shops. I have been involved in the retail sector for over 20 years and have been a keen observer of what is happening in the CTN and convenience sector. Over the years I have watched retailers refitting and modernising their shops and benefitting by increasing their turnover and profits. I haven’t come across a single retailer who said he has made a mistake by doing this.

Investing in a makeover is a major decision and requires a lot of capital expenditure but it pays dividends. It is estimated that the payback period can be anything from 18 months to two to three years. But look at it from another angle. If you want to sell your business, you have a much better chance of selling an attractive and well-fitted shop.

The page is open to UK news retailers and is strong on humour and sharing frustrations about the behaviour of shoppers and the failings of suppliers.

Amid the general chatter there are some very strong items about issues, such as a post about how an epos system was sold or a post about a spate of armed robberies.

What I like are the posts about when something great happens, such as when a customer switches his Saturday newspaper order to the i but insists on being charged what he was charged before because he does not want the retailer to lose out.

Where I think retailers have to be careful is when they blog about frustrations. There is a danger that you can fall into the trap of sharing your frustrations online and projecting a negative world view. While it may be frustrating that your shoppers go to Tesco, it is also a fact of life. The solution is to provide a better service, consistently, rather than to be rude about customers behind their backs.

For some reason the previous group called Newsagents was disabled by the good folk at Facebook so the website has been restarted from scratch. With 61 members and rising, Emma and her fellow retailers hope more news retailers will use the site as a resource.

I stood at the counter and they continued to ignore me. I pulled out two pound coins and put them on the counter. They continued to ignore me. I waited for what felt like a minute but was probably only 10 to 15 seconds and then picked up the money and left the shop. One called “Sir” as I recrossed the threshold to the street.

What went wrong? As they are immediately next door to at least three c-stores of similar standard, it cannot be that they have too much business. Perhaps they each thought that the other staff member would serve me.

I reckoned that I would pass another Camelot outlet on my journey home. The lottery as commodity. Unfortunately for plan Z I forgot to buy a ticket. No-one won.

The failure to make eye contact was the worst part of the poor service. If they had caught my eye and smiled and indicated that it would only take a moment I might have waited. However, I was not happy at just being ignored. What not to do.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“I’ll be all right if you’ve got a black pair of size 10, leather pants for just £1,” she said.

Jeff’s first thought was that the Liverpool Echo had printed the wrong date for the start of his sale. His small shop in Church Street was doing OK and Jeff thought it could do better, hence the £1 leather pants offer. As an independent retailer, he was experimenting with marketing. He could not believe this girl was planning to spend two days camped outside his shop. He suggested that she could go home. She declined.

Later that night, after talking with his family, he decided to drive by to see if she was still there. He was amazed to find 12 people camped out. As he drove home he passed a fish and chip shop that was open so he bought them 12 suppers.

On Christmas Day he asked a friend who lived closer to the store to drive by and see what was happening. He called back to say that more than 80 people were queueing outside.

On Boxing Day he called another mate who owned a catering business and persuaded him to turn up with hot food. There were 150 people queueing now and Jeff called the local media who came out to cover the event.

Worried now about crowd control, he asked his brother in law and three mates to provide security on the front door the next morning. They agreed. As he drove to the shop the next morning he was pleased to see a big queue outside Army & Navy too. But the queue kept on going until it reached his shop – more than 1,000 people. Jeff had to call the police for back up.

As he went to open the front door he heard a cheer from across the road. The 40 members of staff from Chelsea Girl, the biggest fashion store in Liverpool, were cheering him. “Well done Jeff, good luck with the sale,” the manageress called out.

At the end of the day, they had taken £25,000 and made the front page of the next day’s paper and “our little boutique was now a household name on Merseyside.”

A Pocketful of Holes and Dreams is not intended as a business book but every local shop owner will find plenty of inspiration within it. Jeff’s mother’s family had retailing in the blood and despite growing up in poverty, he learned good retailing habits early on.

He is in the camp that believes good buying is the secret to retail success and he explains in detail how he made two fortunes. Even more striking is his integrity, with Jeff sticking to his values when his first company failed. His ideas about banks and wholesaling have resonance today.

Available from Penguin at £6.99, Jeff’s book is a must read for any family business. Set in the world of fashion, its strengths are in how Jeff communicates the simple to say but hard to execute actions that can make you a better retailer.

It is universally agreed that word-of-mouth customer recommendation is the best type of advertising, but Penny went one step further and told an acclaimed author Owen Sheers (pictured) that he had to visit our little store in South Herefordshire.

Penny a literary groupie attended the internationally renowned Hay Festival (www.hayfestival.co.uk), where after a question & answer session on Owen’s debut novel Resistance, (starring Michael Sheen and being made into a film in our neighbouring Olchon Valley), Penny proceeded to tell him to visit us. She must have been fairly persistent as I was given instructions on how to contact Owen direct and he said he would see what he could do.

Ten days later and Owen Sheers is giving a book reading in our store, this Friday! I can’t tell you how excited I am and how grateful to Penny for promoting us. I would never have dreamt that Owen would come to our store let alone do a reading!

This would never have happened unless our hero of the hour Penny had told Mr Sheers not only of our existence but that we stock all his books.

So from now on, I must remember my customers are my business advocates as well, telling others just how great we are.

If you want to know more about the novel Resistance click on this Youtube clip.

To find out more about Owen Sheers click here.

Clearly, armed with a ranking in the Sunday Times’s 25 Best Places to Work listing, McDonalds has many strengths. It is also benefiting from rising sales as people with less money in their wallets trade down to cheaper eating out experiences.

However, the move to asking diners to order at touchscreen terminals may open an opportunity for local shops interested in food to go. While the company says it will save three to four seconds for each customer served at a touchscreen ordering point – and with millions of customers that probably adds up to some big cash number – I reckon consumers are going to weary of having to do everything for themselves.

As with the robots at supermarket c-store checkouts, there are times when it is a good option for busy people. But you don’t get to upsell or build a relationship. Some McDonalds staff are extremely good at upselling. Some are not. Some local shop staff are extremely good at building a relationship with shoppers. Some are not.

The machines will take business from shops with poor service standards. For those with good service standards, they will surely help boost sales.

To help us make the most of the opportunity we ran a tasting day. To optimise the event we produced posters to advertise the day in store and in our window. We also printed leaflets that we delivered to our HND customers and gave to customers at our tills a couple of weeks before the tasting. Finally another leaflet the day before the event was distributed with our newspaper deliveries.

On the day we made space within our alcohol area so that we could have a small table for the wines and the tasting glasses. We choose five different wines from the festival offers, two white a rose and two red. We also offered three different varieties of Walkers Crinkle crisps that we currently have on offer to help clear the taster’s palate.

We were greatly helped by our Spar business development advisor, Steve Burchett who set up the tasting stand and was on hand to talk about the wines available with customers. We started the tasting at 11 am and had the wines available for the rest of the day. One never knows how a promotion like this will work and fortunately customers came in a steady flow. This gave us time to talk to people about the different wines and the offers available. It was interesting to see that while many people came specifically because of our invitation probably half the customers that took advantage of the tasting did so because we invited them to do so.

I think success can be calculated on two levels with sales being one of them and we more than doubled our sales of wine over the same day the previous week. Secondly there is the PR gain made by the activity and associated marketing of it. For us the event worked well with a good number of customers tasting the wines that we made available. It allowed us to talk about the category with customers who are interested in wine so hopefully will have a long term impact on sales. We will see.

Of course there are easier ways and leading wholesalers, publishers, and manufacturers will be gathering, along with 200 retailers, at the inaugural Local Shop Summit to discuss a few of these.

Representatives of Booker, Imperial Tobacco, News International and PepsiCo will be on hand to offer independent retailers tips to grow their profits.

We spoke to PepsiCo’s Kate Woolf last week at Pro-Retail and she told us that her presentation was going to be on the potential benefits of using social media in your store, a subject that we at betterRetailing are of course very supportive of!

The entire event is running alongside the NFRN annual conference in Torquay on June 7, so many of this blogs readers may well be on their way down to the English Riviera anyway.

Tickets are £37; to find out more about the event, which is being organised by Newtrade Publishing’s face-to-face team, call 020 7689 3369.

One of the big recurring themes from the big companies is that, even in times of recession, people want to buy brands that they trust. It’s true that they may look to downtrade on certain non-essential product lines, and might even do away with some luxuries altogether, but we repeatedly hear that shoppers love the big name brands that dominate the shelves.

A survey reported in the Daily Mail last week backs up this thinking. Mothers, it claims, trust only 18 big name brands.

Names like Heinz, Bisto, Cadbury and Walkers Crisps all made the list – proving their value to both shoppers and the retailers that sell them.

The survey was conducted by www.MumPoll.com – a collective of 10,000 market researchers, trained journalists, creative PR professionals and mothers that offers the opinions of mothers to those who need them. This means that brands like Vaseline, Sudocrem and Calpol make the list, meaning that the results may not be the most unbiased you’ll see – I believe that if teenage boys (who make up quite a large proportion of some convenience stores’ shoppers) were surveyed then the results would differ greatly!

What they do reveal, however, is that big brands are widely regarded. Mothers are still the main shoppers in families – and even doing top-up shops, most members of any family will try and buy the brand that is used regularly at home or that is most famous and widely regarded.

Shoppers love the big brands – so even when you think they’re looking for cheaper alternatives sometimes, don’t forget about them.

1. Key range optimisation advice
2. Planograms
3. What to stock
4. Retailer testimonials

“Valued at £4.9 billion and growing at 5.3%, the confectionery market offers excellent sales opportunities for retailers if executed well in-store.  We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to category management at Mars Chocolate and are committed to working closely with our retailers, helping them to better understand their customers’ shopping needs and tailor their ranges accordingly. There are however some key tips that every retailer can follow to drive return…” – Bep Dhaliwal, Mars Chocolate Trade Communications Manager

Key Points

Display space is at a premium, which makes it imperative for retailers to stock a range that drives sales every day. Shoppers have higher expectations than ever and there are some products that they always expect to be available, these are often the brands they know and trust.

Profit growth is about having the right core display of confectionery; retailers should continuously evaluate which of the lines they stock add value every day and delist poor performers as a matter of course. This will automatically create more shelf space for stronger lines.

There are six simple steps that retailers can follow to boost sales:

1. Select the right range
2. Locate the bestsellers in the best sites
3. Multi-face the bestsellers
4. Group lines by product category
5. Allocate space according to sales achieved
6. Site confectionery in areas of high traffic flow

Simply implementing these steps could generate a sales uplift of up to 12%!

Once the main display is optimised, retailers can then look to implement secondary sites throughout the store, for example, siting exciting NPD such as Galaxy Bites at the till-point to create an additional point of interest and capitalise on impulse sales opportunities.

What to stock

[tab name="Countlines"]

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[tab name="Sharing bags"]

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[tab name="Large block confectionery"]

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[end_tabset]

Planograms

Select the size of your display: [tab name="1.5 metres"]
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[tab name="2 metres"][/tab]
[end_tabset]

Retailer Testimonials

Mr and Mrs Thevathas, of Spar Hazelton, Waterlooville, Hampshire have not only seen a significant increase in confectionery sales after introducing Mars’ category advice, but also report that more customers are purchasing chocolate items on impulse now that they have placed the confectionery in their chillers due to warm weather.

Independent retailers Dipak and Dina Gandecha have been in business since 1990 and play a well-established role in the local community. They have recently taken the time to install a number of secondary sitings in-store as consulted by their Mars Sales Representative. They have so far achieved a 225% uplift in their sales of Galaxy Large Block chocolate, achieved by installing branded POS; a 12% average uplift of the confectionery products on sales in their Bambino counter-top unit and have been able to stock 5 new Treat Bag lines, thanks to installing a Slenda Glenda fixture. The couple commented: “Secondary sitings have performed amazingly well in our store…they directly attract the impulse shopper and tempt them into making a purchase. The results speak for themselves!”

Independent retailer John Hothi from Denton Burn, Newcastle recently implemented a number of the Mars confectionery display principles in his shop and achieved a 20% uplift in overall confectionery sales!

Having run Premier Stores in Benwell for over 25 years, Mr Hothi knows most of his customers by name and hopes to help support and promote the local youth football team in the near future.

Following on from his display success, Mr Hothi advises that retailers should delist the slowest selling 10% of their confectionery ranges and fill the new space with the bestsellers.

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