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.

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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.

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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.

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http://www.theluckycharm.com.au/

We received this today about the TLC reward program. Click on the picture for more details. Note the point at the end about POS Solutions

Here are the raw figures showing its growth.

I have never seen anything like it %$^!#%

HWT announced today a new delivery fee structure for newspapers that starts today. There was no warning to newsagents, customers of newsagents, industry suppliers, etc. Beside the confusion and extra work this creates in a last minute scramble, it certainly does not look professional.

This is very poor business practice.

The latest Artwrap catalogue file is available for importing into your system.

This and other catalogue files are available on our website.

Eight days ago, on the 18th of June, Fairfax released its "Fairfax of the future" plan stating large staff cuts, more asset sales, a change in the size of the newspaper and a more digital future. It received very mixed response.

Looking at the share price below it does not appear that the shareholders were particularly impressed. Here is a graph over this period comparing Fairfax to Seven West Media Ltd.

After Fairfax's recent announcements here, everyone in the newsagency industry was waiting to hear what News Corp had to say. The only ones talking were the doomsayers who predict calamity at every opportunity.

Well, News Corp's announcement today was not bad for newsagents. It is what I wrote earlier here that would happen. They are committed to print.

Newspapers are profitable to News Corp. They stated, “We believe in print and are committed to print. We still sell around 11 million newspapers a week. Advertisers still find huge value in print.”

Like Fairfax, they are going to be standardising their papers nationally. A local newspaper is becoming a national newspaper with some local content added.

If you deal with Fairfax, I think you will find this article in the SMH here interesting.

Fairfax is selling off assets, and intends to make another round of major staff cuts, which must reduce its product appeal further to the public. They are also now considering that if their revenue continues to fall sharply, to move to a digital-only service. I am sure this will speed up the progress of the model of a one newspaper town in Australia.

Furthermore, they are going to a compact-size tabloid format something they should have done ages ago. This is probably too late now to matter as the readers on public transport who were complaining for years have long since gone.

Fairfax have issued their plan for the future, it is available here.

Update: Part of the restructuring of Fairfax from what I understand is that The Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, will be merged making it almost the same paper.

I have finally received a response from InComm regarding the average sales per store of their products of the claimed figure of an average turnover of about $5000/month per store.

The figure actually represents the average sales across all their Australian stores. The ranges across Touch today are from $0 up to $13,000 per month for InComm. With the Blackhawk range the average increases significantly with some newsagents selling $3,000 of product per month. There is clearly room for improvement as the 7Eleven stores are doing much better with similar demographics then newsagents here.

Studies show the key to driving volume appears to be creating awareness with the customer as both iTune and Moshi brands are well known. The sales seem to be strongest where the customer is aware that the product is on hand. That is why there is Point of Sale marketing, and stands available on request to support the display of these cards to present them to customers. As with all things, results are determined by the demographics of the newsagent and the effort that the newsagent places into presenting the program to customers.

As such I would prefer to leave the message unchanged here of an average turnover of about $5000/month per shop as it does reflect the current average.

If anyone has any further questions on this let me know.

I have already released these figures before for May but these one will be of interest to our readers as they also contain digital figures in Appendix 4.

I decided to calculation what is the digital subscription rate compared to total paid sales

NSW/ACT 10%
Victoria 4.5%
Tasmania 0.2%

These figures are not particularly impressive. You can also note that often the digital is almost given away. I do not see any great pot of gold for newspapers online.

http://m.theaustralian.com.au/media/monday-section/fairfax-may-axe-week…

The board of Fairfax Media has discussed dropping weekday print editions of its newspapers last week. According to the article:

The plan was described as being in its "very early days". If implemented, only Saturday editions of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers would be printed. Tablet and online versions of the newspapers from Monday to Friday would come to the fore, while The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age would continue in printed form.

Readers here may be interested that there has been a rather heated exchange on the XChangeIT test results. Many want to see more than the summary figures I released.

Here are our full results.

Note since XChangeIT has not released what selection processes they used in picking our clients, I can only speculate on this. So although from XChangeIt point of view, they may not be random, however in the absence of the details not being given to us, I can only speculate who was picked but looking over the figures, I can tell you that not all of our users were selected.

XChangeIT clearly did not pick among our clients those that are.

1. DOS clients
2. Newsagencies choosing not sending sales data
3. Second shops that don’t invoice.

Software companies have been releasing some of their XChangeIT performance results for April. Although as far as I know we are the only ones to release the full figures. Still it appears that on one measurement out of three, we were beaten.

On the file integrity score, out of 606 sites we got 99.2%. Access got 100% on 90 sites.

It will be interesting to see what the scores were from other software supplies which I expect to be released soon.

You can get a Collins Debden catalogue file now at our website.

For this and many other catalogue files please visit our website here.

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The latest Distinguished Diaries catalogue for 2012/2013 financial diaries is available free to all readers here for importing into your system.

This and other catalogue files are available here.

(Outdated file - decommissioned)

Despite what has been a bad retail period, magazine readership was not all bad news. Some are up particularly those in women's fashions like Madison and Frankie.

Some are expected such as MasterChef to go down, since it is not doing well in its rating on TV.

Of major concern now are TV magazines, those targeted at men like Zoo Weekly and motorcycling magazines.

Roy Morgan Research released its newspaper readership figures for the year ending March 2012. They confirm the ABC circulation figures.