VANA has put together a Publisher Information Session.

This is one item that I do suggest that you pencil in for the Victorian show if you are coming to the show.

It will be on Saturday 18th August at 1:00pm

The speaker will be Stephen Kaye, Circulation Director, Herald Sun. This is an important opportunity for newsagents to learn more about the T2020 plans of News Limited for consolidation. VANA will also be there to answer questions.

This is something important and I encourage you to attend.

We will be demonstrating our newest smart software, at the Victorian GNS Market Fair this weekend.

We have built a special stand to house it. What we will be showing is the latest security systems. It was a big hit when we first released it in the Perth show. So we are sure you will be impressed. You can try it out at the show to check its flexibility.

See it for yourself.

Several newsagents complained to a well-known radio personality about the HWT T2020 plan. So what Derryn Hinch did was interview Eugene Ahern from Nextra Bulleen Plaza newsagency in Melbourne on his drive program about the HWT consolidation program. I took the relevant bit which you can hear if you click here.

What will be absorbing today is that HWT is invited and expected to respond today on 3AW on their T2020 plan, it should make for interesting listening to anyone in the industry.

At 4:30 PM EST today, Derek Hinch will be interviewing Eugene Ahern from Nextra Bulleen Plaza newsagency in Melbourne on the drive programme about the HWT consolidation program.

There is a lot of comments about the latest proposals from HWT called T2020. 

I actually was interviewed extensively about it by the HWT consultants before they wrote their report. Parts of what was being proposed I heard from my clients too.

Many are looking at this proposal and seeing their margin dropping from 25% to 12.5%. That is a big blow to some. Interestingly for some like my client interviewed about it in the daily telegraph here, margin will go up by 2%.

The core of the proposal is that they intend to replace many newsagencies with one newsagency. This agency they propose will deliver 10,000 newspapers a day.

That would be a substantial entity which would need to cover a lot of territory. As a punt depending on the size of the area, probably 10 to 20 staff looking after about 4,000 active customers (so you could double that to 8,000 customers on the books) together with about 200 subagents.

We have a few clients with those sort of figures. To do such a job would require a substantial setup cost, a depot, trucks, plastic wrap machines, a good computer system, etc. Anyone planing to do this would require a lot of money upfront probably the cheapest way to do it would be for many newsagents to voluntarily merge their runs. Much of the equipment these people have will be useless soon anyway.

One problem here is that the mapping of these areas are to be done by HWT. These areas will not follow the existing territories. This means that it will be harder for a voluntary group to be created.

Some other points that I did not like were the areas are assigned by tender, as such there is no-good will. If someone created such an entity, lost the tender the next time it comes around, then they would lose all.

No compensation to people that have existing territories and that are going to find their newspaper margins slashed in half.

Another issue is what is going to happen with Fairfax. It is marginal enough for many newsagencies now to do Farfax with HWT. If the agencies have no HWT to deliver many are just going to drop Fairfax. Many Fairfax subscribers could be left with no deliveries.

One issue I would like to see discussed which is briefly brought up in the FAQ is

Q: Once T2020 is implemented, there doesn’t seem to be much to differentiate a retail newsagent from a sub-agent. What will News Limited to do to distinguish a retail newsagent?

A: We will continue to invest in the branding and in-store merchandising solutions for retail newsagents that differentiate newsagents from other channels.

I suspect that this and other questions are not needed to be worked out as clearly, they have already been decided.

Herald weekly times have increased the Saturday Herald Sun by 10 cents

The new rates will be:

Recommended Retail Price: $1.6000
Less N/A Commission 25%: $0.4000
Newsagents Rate: $1.2000

Nothing anyone needs to do as an automatic update has been issued that will update our client's prices automatically.

For the older DOS systems, where people still have to do manual prices changes, a help sheet will be issued with details on how to do the price rise.

A study was done of sales results for businesses that display these Touch light box units. The results show that there has been an average increase of 30% in prepaid product sales at these merchants when compared to the prepaid volumes that these sites were achieving prior to the units being provided.

It makes sense people both in the shop and in the street can see that the merchant sells these products.

Please click here for details.

http://blogs.abc.net.au/queensland/2012/08/narky-newsagent-shines-light…

You can hear here a discussion in the ABC over one newsagent who facing a slowing down of newspaper sales, who has been sending messages to customers pleading with people to buy some stationery, biscuits to keep him in business.

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3559580.htm

You will find here a discussion of Fair Work and an interview with a newsagent in ACT over it.

As I blogged here already ACP is being sold off probably to the Bauer Media groups which is one of the largest magazine publishers in the world. If so, it will give ACP access to many more magazines.

We can only speculate what will be the long-term effect on Australian magazines like Women's Weekly, Cleo and Woman's Day.

The latest copy of the Darrell Lea price is available. It assumes a 22.5% discount. It is now available for download and importing into your system.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

This weekend we will be at the Newsagent trade show in Adelaide.

You will find us on stand 27 here.

In view of the theme for this year we will be displaying security.

We hope to see all our clients from South Australia there.

What went wrong with Darrell Lea? I have read many observations such as the general state of retail, bad management, owners taking too much out of the till, etc.

One matter I think is important is despite the chocolate market going up 2.2% annually in Australia from 2007-2012, Darrell Lea sales have fallen over the same period 20%.

Much of this is because people are going now for more up-market chocolates such as Guylian, Lindt and Max Brenner. Darrell Lea is being left behind but they are not the only ones.

Take a look here at a graph of sweets sales in a country, inner city and suburban newsagency during the same period.

As you can see sweets in newsagencies are following the same trend as Darrell Lea. Why it is not being noticed is because sweets are a minor department in many newsagenies.

This downward trend in a growing market is not right. Newsagents need to see Darrell Lea as a wake-up call for their own confectionery market. What I suggest is look at their product mix because clearly in many newsagencies, what they have is not selling like it used to.

This is an example of how you can use the sales reports in our system to monitor what is happening.

Update: Getting back to Darrell Lea. It has much value in the market place, but it needs to change. It clearly will not remain in the marketplace as a middle-range chocolate supplier. It will go either up or down. Say the buyers are a mass-market supermarket operation they would want to use Darrel Lea to expand their market share. They do not need many of the company stores and franchises. Alternately if the buyer wants to go up, they would need to refit some of the shops and get rid of many of them as they do not need that many. In both case there will be major changes to the product mix! Both scenarios require a big commitment and a lot of money!

What is clear is that it will be a different company from what it is presently with different products. It will also mean that many newsagents that stock Darrell Lea will change.

The following here is a list of the Touch products together with their margins. Optus I noticed if you are set up correctly is now 8% as is Telstra.

The Artwrap catalogue file is now available for download and importing into your system.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

I have been advised that if you have any questions in relation to what is happening with Darrell Lea, the best place to look is here

It appears that there are many companies that have expressed interest in buying Darrell Lea. I know some newsagents were thinking seriously of newsagents making a bid. If so, they will have to move quickly partly as Darrell Lea is running out of money, and I doubt the administrators will be prepared to wait long. In my experience, administrator's interest tends to last only as long as the money is there.

On the plus side, it does appear that Darrell Lea sales have skyrocketed to 400%. People are queuing up to buy it. I know I was one of them. Clearly, the public wants Darrell Lea products.

[link removed]

I was stunned as chocolate sales in Australia are very good now. It has been called a recession-proof industry.

Now, many of my clients will have to find out where they stand as they have a substantial commitment to Darrell Lea.

I was asked by a client in the Mornington Peninsula to look into his data and see if I could find anything, to provide him some insight into his business. So I asked him for five years of sale data and off I went to find something.

Doing this is a long task, as it takes ages for data to properly analysised in such a manner.

Now I only have preliminary results still what I notice is very interesting. One point that did strike me immediately is that his newspaper sales except for magazines are having little effect on any other department. This is not a result I expected.

Clearly, the guy when I was behind the counter who came in every morning before work in the shop to buy his smokes, and newspaper is long gone.

Today it is actually his telco and magazine sales that are boosting his tobacco sales.

It makes me wonder about newspapers.

I was really pleased that Network decided to issue a warning to its clients today that the barcode on next week’s issue of Woman’s Day #29 (On sale 9th July) will not scan properly.

On investigation is appears the actual barcode is correct, but the issue extension will not scan.

What will happen with our software is:

1) When scanning at the cash register this will not be an issue as our system will default to the most recently received issue if there is no extension.

2) When scanning returns, the Newsagent will be asked to select the correct issue. Normally, this would not happen as the extension would provide this information.

Note: I would like to thank Network Services in both testing and identifying the problem and then notifying everyone in advance.

[link removed]

For those still following the Bill Express story, which ended with a $250 million debt, the chief accountant was found guilty of inflating Bill Express's profit by $7.5 million in 2007 by recording non-existent sales of SIM cards. He ruled as having lied to the group's auditor and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. So he got 21 months in jail, wholly suspended, and fined $10,000.

I think he is the only one convicted of anything about what Bill Express did.

In another case, it was decided that the insurance company does not have to pay Optus 27 million dollars compensation partly because of inadequate disclosure by Optus to the insurance company.

[link removed]