Melksham Post Office

We used Melksham Post Office for the second time today as we had several things to do that included things to post, bills etc. We were served by the same assistant as on our first visit last week and firstly she remembered us and then served us in a professional manner. We took some time at her counter as she went through a varied transactions, but as there were 4 clerks on duty queueing was kept to a minimum.

Marvellous, we will be using this Post Office regularly.

PS It was announced last week that the Melksham Royal Mail Delivery Office will be continuing in operation, clearly good for the town.

Newspaper Cover Price too expensive?

Today the Guardian reports on the NFRN's cover price research. Roy Greenslade says in his column:

"The National Federation of Retail Newsagents (NFRN) believes it has an "overwhelming" case for an Office of Fair Trading review of the newspaper and magazine industry."

This is an interesting piece of public opinion research that HIM have undertaken for the Federation in the long running pursuit of a Competion Commision enquiry, but does it actually tell us anything that is new? And more importantly will it get the OFT to take yet another look at the newspaper and magazine industry?

My guess is that it will not, but the lessons I have taken from the last 20 years are that if there is an investigation:
1 It will be treated in the manner of the last one with a revolving door at the OFT or CC supplying yet more new people taking a bored look at the industry as they go by to better jobs.
2 Any result will not be the the liking of NFRN members.
3 There will be a danger that the physical structure of the industry will morf along the route into something different as the current disruption forces dramatic change.

The good new is a report in this weeks Retail Newsagent indicating a 'good' set of newspaper sales figures for December. The best for 11 months.

Something good at Tesco

My latest post on betterRetailing reflects on nearly four months experience at Tesco's Pulborough metro store.

http://www.betterretailing.com/2012/01/managing-your-store/customer-service/maintaining-high-customer-service/

Trip to West Sussex

Yesterday I hired a Luton van and drove back to West Sussex to pick up his business stock. I can't say that the vehicle was fast, top speed I managed was around 55 mph so it was quite a look trip. The bonus for me was to drive along 2 of my favourite roads, the A303 and A272. The A303 reminds me of holiday trips to Devon and the A272 is just a lovely not to be rushed country road (its not been spoilt with dual carriage).

The advantage of a van over a car is that the view from the cab is much better being high from the ground. A great day.

www.airsoftsupplydrop.co.uk

Tesco: a lesson in confusion

So Tesco has taken a tumble and fingers are being pointed at The Big Price Drop and quite right to. Compared to Walmart/Asda's long term Roll Back promotional tool it was a very damp squib. We have been using a Tesco store as our main shop for all of their recent reporting period and can only report that the BPD promotion didn't gain traction with us at all. What it did was just add to the confusion of offer that we were confronted with. We did not take on the underlying message that the targeted products were cheaper. What we need to see is a consistent style on shelf edge labelling that shows the relative price of any particular product per standard volume/weight. The confusion pricing that Tesco uses makes value judgements close to impossible. This makes the BPD look incredibly light weight. As long term Club Card holders the reduction in the customer 'reward' to fun BPD was a bit of an insult. It will be interesting to see what Tesco do this year to resolve this disaster and how the other supermarkets react. One thing that is clear retailers are going to have to work harder than ever to attract customers and then encourage hem to spend.

Moving experience

Today we moved to a new house in Wiltshire. We did this as the fruition of the sale of our village shop and post office back in September. The removal firm that we used were excellent. Now it's just a matter of unpacking all the boxes and getting things straight. From the experience gained when we moved last September this may take a week or two.

We were over charged at Tesco

Since we retired from front line retail back in September we have been shopping at many different stores both independent and multiples. The store we have used most is a Tesco Metro which is just 100 metres from our home. We have had good service from the store on nearly all visits, but yesterday something went wrong. We were over charged for all our loose purchases, some feat. What happened was that checkout assistant was resting the handle of the handheld barcode scanner on the built in scales. This cause 2 normal sized apples to weight at 750grams. We bought 3 different loose products and when we weighed them on our own scales all of them were between 100g and 300 g less than was stated on the Tesco receipt. We went back to the store and spoke to the assistant at the customer service counter. She needed to get the checkout supervisor involved as the products required reweighing on a checkout. This done the supervisor returned with another till slip and the pair of them attempted to rearing our purchases on to the till at customer services. This was hugely time consuming as they needed to manually enter each products PLU and the weight. Eventually we were offered a refund of 13p which we queried and the Tesco's employees took another look at our original receipt and we pointed out that they had missed an item that was at the end of the ticket. This found they made a refund of 99p and we went away a little less than happy. I just wonder how many other customers had gone through that checkout that afternoon and how many we're over charged. Even more worrying, just how many supermarket checkout staff operate in this way and are checkout supervisors trained to lookout for this sort of bad practice. Hum, I can't say that I have ever noticed it before, but I will be on the lookout in future!

I now post on betterRetailing.

As you may have noticed I have stopped posting here and my posts now appear most week's on betterRetailing. I have been there from its start in August 2009 with the very first post.

Two Decades of Missed Opportunities

The Newsagents Federation are off to conference again next week and  the agenda for this rule change conference runs to 55 pages. Will any of it make a difference I wonder.

I had an interesting chat with one of the head office management team this week about the NFRN's lost decades. I have been a member for 22 years and look back at those years and see 2 significant failures. First being the lost opportunity to help members understand how to get the best out of the newspaper and magazine supply chain. The NFRN went for the OFT, Mergers & Monopoly Commision and JIG route. I went down the course of developing my relationship, contact and knowledge and don't have any supply chain issue. If the NFRN had spent the huge fund that it did on member education instead.............

The second issue is of course tobacco and underage selling. The NFRN developed a wonderful tool in the 1990's, Tobacco Watch then threw it away. We all know where tobacco legislation has gone and I am sure you know that up to 30% of tobacco retailers still fail test purchases. But of course the NFRN chose to fight Government instead of solving its members failings though education.

Theres a theme here don't you think.

Remember This?

Were They UK Shoppers Bags?

I recently posted on  betterRetailing about supermarket carrier bags following the publication of a report by the Environment Agency. It's an interesting report that makes some useful observations on which bags we should offer our customers including the flimsy 'single use' plastic bags.

Both on Saturday and Sunday just past the Mail polybagged their magazines. If this happened cross all regions that is around 4 million of these single use bags that real do only have just the one trip. Hum, this is from the newspaper that launched a big campaign against the supermarket carrier bag three years ago.

Of course the only reason why the Mail polybags is to include a multitude of third party advertising inserts. This weekend it was 6 items on Saturday and 4 on Sunday. The Sunday polybag also included several parts of the newspaper where as the Saturday bag just held the Weekend magazine.

So is the Mail for the environment or not?

End of Green Giros: A letter to our MP

Dear Nick,

No matter how the loss of Green Giro payments to the Post Office is wrapped up, it’s a great disappointment. I do understand that the need to have a cheaper method of paying benefits to the people left on this system, but I question whether PayPoint retailers are capable of delivering a safe and satisfactory service.

My wife and I offer both a Post Office and a PayPoint service. The key difference between two is that with the Post Office we offer a bespoke counter fitted for the purpose of handling money payouts securely and our shop counter is not.
With the epidemic of  violent crime  that shops like ours are suffering from we have a policy of removing excess cash from our tills regularly with a low limit for available cash held in each till. The experience we have with Green Giros would suggest that the demand for money from these clients would be much higher than our staff safety driven policy could deliver. It would seem that we and other PayPoint retailers will have three choices:

1 Invest in improved security for cash that will allow Post Office style safety at a significant expense. The transaction payments from PayPoint are unlikely to be sufficient to cover this sort of investment.
2 Increase the risk level to staff and customers by holding more money in the tills to cover potential cash requests. I am sure that our staff would not accept this option.
3 To cease being a PayPoint agent and disappointing our customers who use the service for a variety of bill payment services.

At this time I suspect that we will chose option 3 as the safest way forward, but for the elderly ladies (the over 90 year olds) that have their benefits paid by Green Giro would of course lose the convenience of collecting their pensions from a store in their village. As for these ladies they have their own challenges, one is almost completely deaf and can not use a telephone and the other suffers from Alzheimer’s.

The Pension Service appears not to have a solution to allow either of these ladies to move to an alternative payment method as neither of them can give instruction that will allow the start of moving them to the Post Office card account or any other bank account come to that.

I accept that the decision is made, but it is a long way from being delivered.

I am on betterRetailing

My jottings here have been spasmodic over the past few months one of the reasons for this is that I am part of the betterRetailing team.

My latest post was about a visit my wife and I made on a cafe run by friends in Castle Cary.

The aim of betterRetailing is to support enterprising independent retailers with a site full of ideas and business opportunities from each other and selected trade partners.

Daily Express running late today

CRAWLEY HOUSE

WEDNESDAY 02 MARCH 2011

NEWSPAPERS

RE RUN EXPRESS/STAR/SPORT/FOREIGN TITLES

Due to late arrival this morning the following rounds are re running the

above titles:

301-302-309-310-311-312-319-320-321-322-330-331-339-340-341-342-350-3

51-352-360-361-362-370-371-380-381-382-390-391-392-400-410-419-420-421-430-431

FIRST ROUND AWAY 4.08

LAST ROUND AWAY est6.45

ARRIVAL TIMES

Daily Mail 2.55

Daily Mirror 3.50

Daily Express 4.33

Daily Star 4.33

Independent 3.50

Sun 3.00

Daily Telegraph 2.40

Times 3.00

Guardian 2.45

Sport 4.33

Racing Post 3.50

Financial Times 0.20

Argus 2.05

I 3.50

Another Electricity Meter Problem

Late last year we discovered that our electricity meter had a fault and reported this knowledge to the power company. A date was arranged to have this dealt with, but the December snow defeated the company's engineer. Another date was arranged and a new meter was fitted last month. This exercise required us to close our store due to electricity being cut off the allow the work to be done.

Unfortunately the wrong type of meter was fitted and today we wil;l go through the excercise again. So some time between 12 noon and 2 pm we will be closed again, last time it took around an hour to complete the work.

Lets hope they get it right this time!

A letter to the NFRN

The National Federation of Retail Newsagents has recently lost its General Manager, Paul Chambers. His departure follows that of John Rowe (Director of Wholesaler Operations), Stephen Coles (Head of Accounts) and Rod Stevens (Head of Commercial), to go along with Bob Frost and Roger Clarke (both Chief Executives), Adrian Holmes (Director of Operations), David Goddard, (Assistant Chief Executive) and Stefan Wojciechowski, (Head of News and Magazines) from leadership positions for the NFRN. I have to ask how this cascade of failure has happened at no doubt a significant cost to members.

Are these failures set by a poor selection and appointment process with the wrong people being employed or are there other reasons that are causing this series of key personnel losses to the NFRN?

Clearly the National President, the National Executive and other elected national officials have a role in ensuring that people employed for these key leadership roles are not only the correct people, but are also set with effective terms of reference and written rules of engagement with the Federation. These national elected officials also have a responsibility to support and encourage the Federations leading employees in their position. What is apparent is that the NEC does not have effective terms of reference for this task.

With the all too regular cost of ending these contracts being put at members door it is about time the relationship between elected officials and employees was put on a professional basis with a proper and understood division between governance and management functions!