I wonder if anyone has tried this out?

We were talking about some automatic way of putting stock locations into magazines. If we could get this going we could quickly do pocket analysis.

When someone pointed out that in the U.S. they recommend sorting the magazines using a slightly different method to what we do here. What they recommend is having two separate sections. One near the checkout and that holds only a few of the top sellers e.g 6 items. These are the publications that impulsive shoppers would buy. I notice the supermarkets here are do this too. It is a good idea to go to the local supermarket to see what they are. I notice the Woolworth's near me had a few sections for magazines. The main one had all the titled stocked but every checkout had about 6 items of some popular magazines e.g they had NEW IDEA, Cleo and NEW WOMEN.

If you try this I suggest that you check sales and efficiencies for checkout separately. Then add it to the main section to see if there is any increase. After all it is the most prize part of the shop we are talking of and you have to see if it pays.

By the way the top 5 magazines probably do about 40% plus of your magazine turnover so if works it should be noticeable.

Awhile ago, I made an appeal to the ANF to look into the issue of newsagents suppliers having fractions of cents in their price. As far as I know nothing happened as if this problem is going to disappear because no-one is going to look into it.

This is a recent problem as over seventeen years ago old-timers here like me can remember a massive effort in the Newsagency industry to make all prices in five (5) cent lots. It made sense. As people do not pay in fractions of cents, if they pay with EFTpos it is in whole cents and if the pay in cash it is in five (5) cent amounts. As a result retail is geared to whole cents. Since most people in our industry pay cash, five (5) cents still makes sense.

What is happening now are suppliers are doing a price increase with say 7.5% increase across-the-board so say an eight (8) cents a day delivery fee is now 8.6 cents a day. Retail customers want to see on their bill whole cents a day for example eight (8) cents or nine (9) cents. This is helping to create an unnecessary argument and/or bad will with the customers.

In different states there are different requirements and some papers that are Australian wide like the Australian probably need to be handled differently to the local state papers.

I think as an immediate measure the ANF should look into this issue and issue some broadsheet stating what newsagents are suppose to do with these fractions of cents. At the least it would be used by the newsagent when he is trying to justify his bill why he has done what he has done.

As a medium to long-term measure the ANF must talk to the newsagents’ suppliers and explain to them that these types of increases 7.5% should be structured to overcome this problem.

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Tobacco is an important part of our industry, and a short time ago, I was talking to a newsagent about it when he commented that chop-chop (illegal tobacco) was hurting his business.

Later, when I spoke to a few more and it came up. All reported that it was a major problem with them too.

It is not just costing honest retailers but the government too.

Officially about 10% of all tobacco sales now is chop-chop in Australia. About twenty-nine per cent (28.7%) of all smokers/recent quitters are aware of loose tobacco sold in plastic bags or rolled into unbranded cigarettes. Of these, 62.4% have smoked it, which accounts for about 20% of all smokers who use it.

I found this interesting report which you might want to read.

The conclusions of the report seem correct.

Australian growers find it hard to grow any other product.

They have plenty of product that is not good enough to sell in the legal market.

They cannot export it. I was stunned by his comment that Australian tobacco was inferior to overseas product. I am a light smoker. I have been overseas. I don't find Australian smoke bad at all. It is better than what I trying in the Middle East, India and Europe. I found it as good as the stuff in China and the US. Maybe the writer here means that it is not the quality you need for export. Also, I am sure that it is overpriced for the world market. You could make a good business buying high-quality smoke in China and selling in Australia if you did not have to pay the taxes along the way.

The growers want cash. More money in chop-chop for them than legal sales. All you need to do is put a few bags aside.

One thing is for sure chop-chop will be a problem for quite a while.

Last week, I went to a HWT Industry Data and Technology Workshop. These conferences in general I find both extremely interesting and physically draining as they tend to start at 8:15am (note in my experience, only conferences where newsagents go, start so early) and finish pretty early in the morning when at 3:00am you decide to leave the party.

Another issue is that as soon as the waiters discover that HWT was picking up the tab at a restaurant, the drink waiters tend to circle me like a vulture and as it was a nice place with good alcohol its would be hard for even the strong willed, which is certainly not me to say no.

Anyway the themes at the conference was subagents and subscriber data and technology and then how to better use technology to distribute newspapers.

Subagent data

Its clear that HWT intends to enforce their contracts which states that they should get the daily supply, sales and return figures for the newsagency and all its subagents. This means that a newsagents shop has to be added into the subagents systems as another subagent. They also want a lot of extra details on each of the subagents.

They put up a very good argument, I thought, for why they want this information when they quoted from a huge industry survey that they did, that showed some pretty bad statistics. One was that many people reported that they went to buy a paper and there was not a paper in the shop. 1/3 then bought no newspaper. That is a lot of lost sales.

HWT blame it on poor subagent handling by some newsagents. What they want to do now is address the issue! To do that, they want historical data from newsagents to help make an extensive computer model that will be used to help calculate the subagents orders. They have hired themselves an expert from England (The wise man from the North) whose profession is now, doing exactly that in England, Italy and a few other countries. Soon HWT intend to issue suggested orders for the subagents. Now let us say HWT suggested ten papers be given to a subagent, say you thought it was a bit much and only dropped off eight. You would be a bit of a hero is the next day you found they only sold six but what happens to you, if the guy sells out and complains! So although HWT strenuously deny it, my prediction is that soon this "suggested order" will become the "order" as newsagents slowly stop calculating subagent orders.

Subscriber data

This has been an issue since day one when the newspaper companies and newsagents started reporting differences in the information supplied. Yet again as in previous conferences everyone expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of subscriber data. Newsagents and HWT reported major problems matching up the customers in their systems. HWT were however more then willing to make changes here. Tentatively, we decided to adopt the Australian Post standards with their delivery points as a standard. Exactly how we are going to do this I am not sure, but what we don't want is for every newsagent to have to buy a copy of the Australia post delivery points data. What is more practical is for HWT to buy one licence, then the newsagents send the data to HWT to process. HWT then processes it and send it back to newsagents to put into their system.

Specifications

After the mess that I felt had occurred before with the magazine companies and us, when I felt that we had been dumped halfway though the project and left with a pile of unpaid bills, one point that I pressed which everyone quickly agreed too was that we require before we can proceed an *exact* specifications. One persons comments here I liked very much was when he stated "without a specification, we have nothing to discuss, afterwards we will have plenty".

Easypay

The other issue is that HWT want to promote a new system of customer payments called Easypay. Its an account system for buying newspaper products. Its been tried overseas quite successfully. There are many good points to this system, one that I am sure many of my clients will like is that they may not be changed any fees as they are now with credit/debit cards.

Technology

All this involves data transmission which is where today technology changes are extremely rapid. So it was inevitable that our DOS system would come up. As usual, many delegates in the newsagency industry, expressed major dissatisfaction with our policy of both supporting DOS and our policy of supporting old computers systems such as the 386s. I noticed Rayma Creswell from the ANF was prepared to get into the act when Gerard Attwood from Sorronto Newsagency made butted in, with his comments that some DOS systems out there are fairly extensive. I was pleased that none of the HWT representatives made any comments to join them.

At that point, it was taken off the agenda for a later off-workshop discussions although the HWT director, made it quite clear that he expected a certain technological standard from their agents. Then he quoted an example of P3s which is about 3 years old technology. I thought to myself "Oh, oh - here is comes" but nothing happened.

So later off several of us went for an all out discussion with the HWT director to discuss the DOS systems. The HWT director, obviously had no time to desire talk to us on this issue then although he did state that they may consider a partial certification for DOS depending on what exactly were their requirements. I suppose it really depends on what the expert wants. My understanding of HWT position is that they can demand that their agents to provide this data, how the newsagents does it, is the newsagents problem.

Conclusion

It was an interesting conference. Magpies like me always like to come. I had a great time and learned a lot.

Have you had a chance to check out some of the help files now on offer in the help section of your Posbrowser.

We've had had lots of positive feed back about the changes and we'd like to thank you for your comments.

If you haven't tried it yet just go to Help at the top of your Posbrowser and click on Help Topics. You can also press F1 while your in the register screen for the same set of information. Even if you are not stuck with anything, you could surf the documents to see if there is a topic or function that might be useful to you that you are yet to understand or never even knew about.

Any feedback, good or bad, is appreciated as the Help file will always be an ongoing project to make staff training and management of Posbrowser as simple as possible.