By now you should have received this.

Based on our experience with John Sands many people will want to jump on to it for the time saving. It is unclear whether Hallmark will do returns immediately, but the invoicing will be a good start.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/policy/labors-plain-pa…

More evidence is coming forward that plain packaging of cigarettes has failed as new sales figures for tobacco after the first year is showing sales are up.

As I stated here before it came in, it will cause a switch to cheaper brands. This is what has happened.

Since the legal price has gone up, I am confident that the illicit trade of tobacco in Australia is up a lot. Particularly, as its packaging is much nicer than the lawful plain packaging which is a shocker. As a result, today Australians are smoking slightly more.

I think that the people who advised and those that push this policy have some explaining to do. Large sums of money were spent on the conversion and 10, 000s of people were and still are forced to do a lot of extra work for what is now a zero or worse. They cannot argue that they did not get proper advice as many submissions were made before it went live, outlining these problems, the problem is they did not listen.

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4026465.htm

A couple of people referred me to this video on Media Watch on plain paper packaging. I think unfortunately the ABC is more about political correctness then news. So we were treated with conspiracy theories with organisations and people with agendas.

In so far as it related to the current problem of increasing sales of tobacco to their credit, they did accept that it was happening and then offered a political correct theory that tobacco sales were up because wholesalers are stocking up for months due to coming increase in price. They offered *NO* evidence to support this theory.

Those reporters clearly did not bother to check up on the facts as anyone who has anything to do with tobacco knows that its wholesale prices have been going up for years. That is why it is almost all taxes now. Why somehow this year everyone stocking up on tobacco because of a price rise?

Tell me many of you are reasonable sellers of tobacco, are you stocking more than usual?

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4026465.htm

A couple of people referred me to this video on Media Watch on plain paper packaging. I think unfortunately the ABC is more about political correctness then news. So we were treated with conspiracy theories with organisations and people with agendas.

In so far as it related to the current problem of increasing sales of tobacco to their credit, they did accept that it was happening and then offered a political correct theory that tobacco sales were up because wholesalers are stocking up for months due to coming increase in price. They offered *NO* evidence to support this theory.

Those reporters clearly did not bother to check up on the facts as anyone who has anything to do with tobacco knows that its wholesale prices have been going up for years. That is why it is almost all taxes now. Why somehow this year everyone stocking up on tobacco because of a price rise?

Tell me many of you are reasonable sellers of tobacco, are you stocking more than usual?

We are doing some work on measuring customer churn, and so I am doing some studies on people abandoning a queue.

Studies show that most people abandon the queue behaviors before joining the queue. They see a line and walk out.

These people are divided into three groups.

1) Too big

Many give up when they see the queue as too big. In Northern Europe, surveys show this behavior occurs significantly when in the queue has more than seven people, in America it starts occurring significantly at about five people and I suppose Australia being in between it would be six.

Still I would suggest people be conservative and if the queue is say five people its time to act.

2) Slow

If a queue is seen as too slow people tend to avoid that queue. If they are waiting a long time they will abandon the queue. Slow EFTpos are probably costing you money.

According to a British study, a quarter will wait a maximum of two minutes, 59 per cent said they would wait no longer than four minutes, and 73 per cent of shoppers say they would abandon their purchase if they had to queue for more than five minutes. An American study showed that 5 to 10 minutes is the maximum acceptable amount of time that they are prepared to wait in a queue.

It is suggested that if it starts getting too slow make a faster Express lane, maybe with all its problems consider an honesty box.

3) They see it as long.

This is a tough one and its not quite the same as (1) above.

If you look into the shop and see a long queue, some people tend to leave even though the queue is not long.

It is primarily considered to be a result of a faulty shop fit. A useful exercise is to look at your shop and try to picture what the queue would look like to a potential customer if it has six people in a queue. Maybe take some photos to review. Now do something to hid the queue size say put a shelf up to block the view.

Another example is say you have an ATM, it has a long queue, people tend to see its queue as your shop queue, and they leave.

I hope this helps.

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

For this and other supplier files please visit here

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

This and other catalogue files are available on our website.

The most important circulation figures for us is the ABC circulation figures, mainly because that is the one everyone associated with newsagencies uses. These will soon include digital sales. The existing information, however, for printed publications will be unchanged so nothing will be lost.

I think this is a step forward both as it will give us real undisputed figures to discuss what is happening on online rather than the vague comments being stated now and also as only sold digital copies will be counted. Currently I think many publishers have been overstating their digital sales. Now they need to abide by strict rules.

One question I do have, is in Australia it is very common a bundled sale of a product which comes with an online subscription for a year. It is that going to be counted? I suspect so, I am not so sure it should!

If you want to know more, click here. [Link removed]

The Artwrap catalogue file is now available for download

For this and other supplier files please visit here

Artwrap latest barcode listings is available now.

For this and other supplier files please go here for download. (Outdated file - decommissioned)

Artwrap latest barcode listings is available.

For this and other supplier files please go (Outdated file - decommissioned) for download.

I was asked today if any of our clients have had an issue with XChangeIT over sales data. As far as I know, not one.

Not surprised as we have had our system audited  and the quality is perfect

If you do have any problems with XChangeIT over this, please let us know.

The current newspaper circulation figures are here.

Newspapers went down 3.8% in this quarter compared to last year. This is worse than I expected. Part of the reason is unlike last quarter. Fairfax went down more than others.

Like the last quarter, there was no difference between weekdays, Saturday or Sunday all went down the same. Victoria and South Australia did not do as badly as the rest of Australia.

Based on these figure, I estimate the drop in newspapers' sales in December will be 2.4% down compared to this quarter, and about 5% down on last year.

Today is the final day of the Brisbane Market Fair! This wraps up newsagencies conferences and fairs for 2011. Basically, our technology just stole the 2011 season.

Here are our posters for our integration from our software to yourlocalnewsagent.com.au something we just released. GNS was so amazed by what we came up with that they hang up our posters in their stands. I doubt that anyone else could have done something like this.

GROUP NEWSAGENCY SUPPLIES & POS SOLUTIONS

We are pleased to announce another industry first...

PosBrowser is now able to integrate with yourlocalnewsagent.com.au websites! {site is now removed]

Right now, PosBrowser customers can upload pricing directly from their POS system to their local newsagent website.

This integration greatly simplifies management of prices between the store and website! Newsagents can be assured that the pricing on their website accurately reflects their instore pricing!

PosBrowser is so flexible, that it will allow uploading of Retail, Sale, Business or Business Sale prices to your website!

POS Solutions will continue to work with GNS closely on the YourLocalNewsagent.com.au project, and even more integration will be available in the near future!!

Newspapers went down April to June 2011 quarter compared to last year same time by 4.2%. Unlike the last quarter, there was no difference between weekdays, Saturday or Sunday. Fairfax did only slightly better than News Corp. The only point that was noticeable was that Queensland went down much more than everywhere else.

Since these figures are not being shown in benchmarking in newsagencies, most of these loses must have been in places that have direct supply like supermarkets.

I decided to do modelling to see what equation, I could fit to these figures and came up with this.

Formula: f(Mar-11,Dec-10,Sep-10,Jun-10) = 4480.56*sin(7.48779*Mar-11 - 0.129757) + 1.00354*powc(Mar-11*Jun-10, 0.499298) + 294.342/sin(-0.831681*Mar-11) - 2475.95*sin(545.416*Mar-11) - 1646.58

Based on this we can expect overall a 2.7% decline next quarter from this quarter.

One of my clients emailed me asking me about newsagencies in Europe and how they compare with Australian newsagencies. If you search this blog you will find some discussions by me on this topic in some of my earlier trips.

Basically Dutch newsagents sell a range of products, including marijuana. German newsagencies are mixed business of tobacco, alcohol and newspapers. They are often referred to this by name. Swiss are very similar to the German, although often they are more modern shops and have lotto as well.

The French newsagencies are extremely similar to Australia. I have a study that we did when we looked into exporting our software to France. When I get from holidays, I will publish some details.

One big difference with all European newsagencies is magazines. These countries tend to have larger populations than Australia, so they often have excellent mass market magazines, but because they lack the numbers of the English speaking world which is according to the Wikipedia between 500 million–1.8 billion, they have a smaller range. As a result European newsagents do not need the space Australian newsagents do for magazines.

Another difference is the retail price seems to be to be cheaper on an equivalent product making it easier to sell but the newsagents gets from the European publishers smaller margins than Australian publishers give to their newsagents.

We still have several unanswered questions that we wanted to be answered by the newspaper publishers, but unfortunately, we cannot wait longer. That is why the current set of written information sheets has some flexibility in the wording for managing newspaper deliveries. It should not be like this but what can anyone do. These information sheets were just emailed out. Updates are available on our software blog now.

Hi All

Please be advised that Australian Tennis – January 2011 issue and Australian Tennis Poster Magazine on sale yesterday, have the same barcode and barcode extension but at different price points.

In order to minimise customer complaints the publisher has decided to decrease the RRP of the Poster Magazine to $7.50 to match the January issue of Australian Tennis cover price. This ensures that no customer is over or under charged for either magazine and also ensure that newsagents are not left out of pocket.

We also advise agents to produce their own Barcode stickers where possible for the Australian Tennis Poster Magazine and blank out the one printed on the cover.

We will send out a flyer to the affected agents.

Thank you

Daniel Tisi
Supply Chain Project Manager
Network Services (a division of ACP Magazines)
Level 21 Civic Tower | 66-68 Goulburn Street | SYDNEY NSW 2000
tel: +61 2 9282 8873 | fax: +61 2 9288 9136

These results have been publically released by B&T; today and are available here. Check out how well food, health and the renovation magazines have done.