Pound shop revolution hits the big supermarkets!

More than one-in-six products being sold in supermarkets are now priced at exactly £1 or £2, highlighting how the pound shop revolution has started to affect long established rivals.

Supermarkets, and also chemist chains, have started to rely on distinctive red stickers, and very clear £1 or £2 prices in a bid to attract shoppers on a budget, as well as those consumers fed up trying to work out complex deals.

The combined demand by pound shops and the Big Four has to be a driver of both scale and relative permanence of the £1 offer, until a prolonged bout of inflation morphs it into £2, the new £1…

Welcome back to the post-Jubilee realities, from the NamNews Team! 

World's biggest boxes of pasta on sale in Turkey

Given the Jubilee Weekend and the possibility of extra friends dropping in, why risk running out of the basics?

Simply pick up a half-tonne box of Barilla spaghetti now on sale in Turkey.

Too heavy and too big for the shopping trolley, delivery is included in the price, at Turkey's Migros Ticaret supermarket chain.

The mega box of penne pasta, sells for 999 Turkish lira ($560), for charity.

The boxes at 1-and-a-half meters high and well over a meter wide, are for sale at supermarkets in Istanbul, Edirne and the resort port city of Bodrum. All revenues from the sales of the massive cartons will go to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

As with some ‘one-off’ promotional ideas, what happens if the half tonne carton really takes off and becomes a ‘must stock’ line, complete with listing fees, availability KPIs and returns allowances…apart from becoming an irresistible challenge for the professional shop-lifter...

Have a giant Jubilee weekend, from the NamNews Team!

Talk about speed to market?

                                                                        pic: http://www.foodnewsie.com

A fruit so new it is yet to be named, but described as a pear disguised as an apple, is to go on sale next week at M&S.

A spokeman said the fruit -- dubbed a "papple" -- looks and tastes like an apple but has the skin and texture of a pear, and is a member of the pear family.

Dubbed T109, the new SKU  is grown in New Zealand and is a cross between European and Asian pear varieties, which resulted in a fruit similar to an apple, the retailer said.

Given the high degree of trade concentration of its native market, T109 should find the cut ‘n thrust of the UK and Irish retail scenes fairly familiar...

The bigger issue for M&S may  be the product description at HM Customs, that innovative lot who like to separate their apples and pears…i.e. the new name may be the least of M&S problems…

Meanwhile, have an actirest but fruitful weekend, from the NamNews Team!

Ferrari as collateral for €2k??

A Dublin property developer goes to his bank for a 10 day loan of €2k.

Following the opening stance, the bank manager offers the loan at 10%  annual, + a little extra for admin, i.e. €57, effectively 104% interest, and requests security.

The property developer offers his new €450k Ferrari parked outside, hands over the keys, takes the cash and leaves the bank. The bank manager parks the car in the bank's underground car park, and later jokes with the staff about the €450k car being used as security for €2k…

Ten days later the property developer returns, repays the €2k + €57 interest, picks up the keys and is about to drive off when the bank manager asks why he was prepared to use such an expensive asset as security…and received the reply 'Now where in Dublin could I get 10 days secure parking for €57?

Moral: The same deal can have different values for each party in a negotiated agreement…

Have a dealerious weekend, from the NamNews Team!

Whistle-blowing for beginners?

In the Queen’s speech tomorrow, the Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill will apparently give suppliers based in Britain and abroad the right to act as anonymous whistle-blowers.

Key aspects will include post-agreement negotiation, where retailers try to obtain further price reductions and change terms, having struck a deal, along with failure to pay within the time agreed.

Key issues:
The key issues are preservation of anonymity, itself no mean achievement on the part of government with a long record of losing and inadvertently releasing confidential details of members of the public, and gathering sufficient sustainable evidence to make a case against a major retailer.

Preserving anonymity:
The only safe route to anonymity for a supplier is to remove any reference to category or origin that would identify the whistle-blowing company. However, sufficient detail has to be included that will make it possible to categorise the complaint (here the government could help by listing a maximum of ten types of complaint, and 10 broad product categories) and invite submissions on these points).

Sustainability of evidence:
In the interests of sustainability of the evidence, perhaps the government should specify minimum conditions on whistleblowing submissions, in order to count as ‘evidence’. In practice, it is difficult under current competition legislation for suppliers to collaborate in drawing up such checklists, so it may be necessary for individual suggestions to be submitted to authorised third parties (i.e. legal firms).

The same firms might also find it useful to draw up minimal templates for submission of complaints?

Action:
Using these guidelines, a supplier with a grievance could prepare an anonymous hard copy, run it past the inhouse lawyers and commercial team/board, and post it in a plain envelope from a central London postbox.

Paranoia? If the government are really serious about this one, this is how they can attempt to over-ride the fear and impact of the consequences for suppliers that are found to have blown the whistle, naively...

Target to delist Kindle, fed-up ‘show-rooming’ for online...

Target, the US mass market discounter, communicated the decision to stores last week, and underlines growing antagonism between Amazon and bricks ‘n mortar retailers, which are threatened by the online retailer’s aggressive discounting, entry into new merchandise categories and attractive shipping service.
Target reported last November that the Kindle was the best-selling tablet in its stores on the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, typically the busiest shopping day of the year.
Target has in the past complained about the practice of “show-rooming”, a growing habit by shoppers to view a product in-store and then buy it from an online seller.
Apart from threatening the stability of routes to market for a number of key non-food categories, this move raises an important issue re the relationship between suppliers and specialist retailers.

Specialist shops viability
Essentially, as you know, the purpose of specialist shops in categories such as toys, bookselling, consumer-electronics and home entertainment is to meet a fundamental consumer-shopper need to physically experience the product. When specialists’ retail prices are so out of line with alternative formats, it is inevitable that having ‘pressed the buttons’ on a piece of electronic equipment in a specialist outlet, the shopper will invariably make a purchase online at a significant discount. There is no legal way of ensuring fulfilment of the sale by the specialist retailer unless via a price differential that is so low that purchasing elsewhere is not worth the trouble.

Even the mass retailers are under pressure from Amazon 
It has to be expected that as bricks ‘n mortar specialist shops cannot compete with online providers they need help in optimising their business model. The major multiples have reached market dominance by taking state-of-art retailing to new highs, in effect becoming expert shopkeepers.  In fact, these major multiple retailers have set global standards in state-of-art retailing that have redefined shop-keeping, and these standards need to be met by specialist retailers in order to survive.

Role of the supplier in helping the survival of specialist retailers
In practice, suppliers need to be retail business consultants to specialist and independent shops, helping them to adapt state-of-art retailing techniques and practices to their operations.  However, as the cost of this level of service would rarely be covered by the size of the resulting order, suppliers need to change their approach to calculating the profitability of some customer types. Because specialist and sometimes independent customers are ‘educating’ the consumer and ‘show-rooming’ the product, they are in fact performing an advertising function for the brand. They therefore need compensation by way of additional margin and help in becoming more effective shopkeepers.

Budgeting tip to help specialist retailers
Should we not therefore charge say 50% of the cost of servicing them to the advertising budget, and continue to call if the remaining cost is covered by size of average order?
Otherwise find a new way of show-rooming your brand and re-engaging the consumer….

Meanwhile, have a long, experiential weekend, from the NamNews Team! 

Argos: the writing is on the wall-chart…?

Home Retail Group's shares were down 13% yesterday, partly because of uncertainty about its ability to revive the current Argos model, combined with a decision to forgo the payment of a final dividend, and especially a fall of 9% in like-for-like sales at Argos….

As you know, investors rely on a combination of rise in share price and dividend in order to compare alternative investments. Faced with a two-thirds fall in share price, a company would normally offer a generous dividend to compensate and retain  shareholders.
But not when the company has already used available capital of £150m to buy back its shares, all to no avail…..

The Guardian’s Nils Pratley gives a number of reasons for Home Retail to be cautious in 2010-2011: the group's return on capital had fallen for three years in a row, along with operating profits, as had Argos' like-for-like sales, and a chart that says it all....

Future of the catalogue-showroom format?
Another Guardian article quotes retail analyst Nick Bubb as saying that the catalogue-showroom format had "died a painful death" everywhere else in the world barring the UK. "In the US, the discount stores such as Walmart and the online giants like Amazon destroyed long ago the convenience and range advantage of the catalogue showroom. Is it only a matter of time before the same pressures prevail in the UK?"

It is obvious that Argos is in trouble because of its categories moving online, and increasing competition from other “click and collect” services. Faced with this scenario, it would be logical to radically cut the capital base ( i.e. close 50%+ of the stores). Instead the company plan to close but 10 stores in the coming year.

On balance, Argos needs to radically reform its business model, and suppliers with a heavy dependence on the company  need to conduct several what-ifs on possible options for their categories in these unprecedented times, fairly quickly…

Buyer-seller corruption, a potential hot-potato for all?

Yesterday’s court case involving large-scale corrupt payments to a potato buyer raises important issues for suppliers and retailers. Given the potential impact on share prices of both parties, coupled with ever stringent corporate and government monitoring in these unprecedented times, it is surprising that anyone is nowadays prepared to take the risk of being a party to corrupt inducements to buy. In other words, it needs just one person with a conscience, or a grievance, to lift the lid….

However, given that the current plaintiff was arrested in 2008, with the case having now arrived in court, it could be said that parties on each side of the seller-buyer relationship harbouring any doubts re. their version of the selling-buying process have had adequate time to reflect on the implications and take appropriate action.

The distinction between gifts and bribery
If buying decisions were made solely on objective, rational criteria, a computer would probably do a better job. Instead, given that the basic offer satisfies the key objective criteria, then a host of emotional criteria/influences/needs come into play.

Emotional needs in buying 
These include needs for avoiding effort, self-esteem, (pride, self-importance, power), to imitate, to acquire money (via saving vs. making, for the company) need for possession (icing-on-cake), investigate (data), create (new), sense of duty, and especially a need for security (avoiding fear). These can include meals out, or even a bottle of whisky at Christmas.

It needs to be emphasised that such attempts to satisfy the emotional needs of a buyer are not corruption, they are merely ‘icing on the cake’ by way of celebrating a done deal, a deal which ticks all the rational, objective boxes.

Bribery defined
Bribery is quite clearly an overt inducement to the buyer to over-ride the logic of a buying decision where a supplier’s competitor is patently offering a better deal on a like-with-like basis. In other words, the supplier’s offering is equal with that of the competitor except for the additional £10k on the price to fund the bribe.

This point, the first of many, was brought out yesterday in court by the prosecution: "A peculiar feature of the corruption was that it was self-funding. [The supplier was] not paying for it, [the retailer was] paying for the corruption of their own buyer and this was achieved by overcharging [the retailer]".

Action for NAMs and KAMs
The answer for NAMs/KAM’s is always to attempt to revert to the base deal and check that it satisfies objective buying criteria (the buyer’s job needs), like-with-like, before focusing on the buyer’s emotional needs. In practice some of this process occurs simultaneously, but it remains vital that the supplier’s basic offering is defensible and transparent, always, and with 20/20 hindsight…..its the nature of the job, folks.