Can we please clog up the roads with yet more traffic

 Flicking through the Evening Standard ES Magazine on Friday highlighted the level of brainless and selfishness that unfortunately pervades the capital.

The magazine has a regular Q&A section called 'My London' and this week it featured WBA World Heavyweight boxing champion David Haye who reckons if he was Mayor for the day he would abandon the congestion charge and "let people park everywhere they wanted to, all day long".

If only buses really could travel this fast in central London 

I know nothing about Haye and have no views on the man but my first thoughts were that his response was a result of him taking too many punches to the head. But on thinking about it, I seem to recall a number of other non-boxing Londoners having made the same thoughtless suggestion.

This not only highlights a lack of imagination but shows how little people consider the wider ramifications of car travel. If Haye's dream scenario was taken-up then the roads in central London would be even more clogged up. Yes, the congestion charge has its flaws but so do those people who choose only to enter the centre of the capital by car.

Cars and other vehicles are a pain to pedestrians and also to retailers in this over-populated area. Oxford Street is not even open to cars and yet it still gets very congested - with buses. And probably like cars, most of the journeys undertaken by these buses are as good as worthless.

According to stats from New West End Company, the buses on Oxford Street are only full early in the morning and in the early evening. Between 10am and 4:30pm they are largely empty. The NWEC found that most shoppers visit the street by tube and as such it has proposed that during these quieter hours there should be a 40 per cent reduction in the numbers of buses using the road.

What Haye and the other 'My London' subjects reckon to this proposal is immaterial because they no doubt wouldn't touch a bus with a bargepole - only a car for them and the many others who live in a cocoon largely devoid of responsibility for many of their actions.

My only thought now is that Mr Hayes doesn't know where I live.

Morrisons faces online dilemma

When Dalton Philips steps into the role of chief executive of Morrisons (having joined from Loblaw) on Monday he will soon be hit with questions about when he plans to lauch an online store. City analysts and the media all know that Morrisons stands alone in failing to capitalise on the internet.

Philips: ready to convince the board to launch online store?

What is less well known is that under predecessor Mark Bolland, Morrisons had a team working for some months on a strategy for the group's entry into selling non-food goods online. The relevant people from around the company and the various agencies Morrisons uses were all brought together to develop the idea.

They worked on deciding the categories (stationery, toys, cookware, entertainment, electronics and mobile phones) and after some months took the idea to the conceptual strategic discussion stage.

Various board presentations were undertaken and 12 months ago it was at the sign-off stage. But it was knocked on the head and the reason given was that the board did not want to go with non-food first online. The preference was to start with food as that fitted the broad strategy of Morrisons being the 'food specialist for everyone'.

They instead wanted to try and take the well regarded 'Market Street' in-store fresh food offer online. But this is a tough one compared with building a non-food internet offer where the barriers to entry are very low.

With the same Morrisons board in place it looks like Philips will have his work cut out to convince them to go with non-food first - even though a lot of the foundation work has already been done.

Morrisons has smaller average store size than major rivals

This is a big worry because Morrisons is hampered by having smaller sized stores than its rivals and so non-food represents a good opportunity for quick growth. In contrast, having to wait to get food off the ground first is much less appealing and the City will no doubt air its concerns to Philips and the board.

Another nail in retail's coffin?

The announcement this week of an investment of £2.5 million in online furniture selling business Made.com sounds like little for retailers to worry about. It's an online start-up and it's a trifling amount.

But this might be a mistake because the investors putting in the cash are Lastminute.com co-founder and mydeco.com  founder Brent Hoberman and the less well known John Hunt. Anybody who was around during the dotcom boom will know Hunt's name was linked to quite a few success stories.

The idea is that Made.com will cut out the wicked middleman - the retailer - and link designers with customers. And by so doing, it will be able to reduce prices on furniture by 50% to 80%.

This is what Hoberman reckons: "From an investment trend perspective we see an exciting transition from retailing to ‘metailing’ where consumers are in control, influencing which designs make it into production and with a more direct connection to the factory. Made.com is good news for talented designers."

Good news for designers and Made.com investors but maybe not so good for retailers? Before furniture retailers shut up shop it must be remembered that there have been few examples so far of retailers being completely cut out of the equation and manufacturers selling straight to consumers.

But Hoberman and Hunt are in the game of disruption and reckon the time is now right for change in an established market where they reckon the margins grabbed by retailers is too high.

Sam Smiths Boots out Branded Snacks

Esoteric brewer and pub owner Sam Smiths has finally removed the last branded products from its boozers with all its bagged snacks now entirely own-label.

This might not sound like earth shattering news but it makes Sam Smiths a rarity in the market as I doubt many other pub operators or retailers would have the (cheese) balls to strip out all branded products from their outlets.

Anybody fancy an unbranded Sam Smiths snack?

For most operators these are the crutches they rely on. But not Sam Smiths. The Yorkshire brewer is well known for ploughing its own furrow and this latest move has seen all its branded crisps, nuts and those cheese snack things replaced by a range of unbranded products.

In keeping with its unflashy style it hasn't spent oodles on thinking up a brand name. As you can see from the photo above, it's crisps are called 'Potato Crisps' and its cheese snack things are snappily called 'Cheese Flavoured Snack Biscuits'.

Whatever you think of the names, having given the products a try in Sam Smiths' Champion pub in central London, they taste pretty good.

Olympics are Massive Opportunity for Retailers

It might be more than two years away but retailers should at least be looking to get their heads around the 2012 Olympic Games because it represents a one-off opportunity to bag a chunky amount of extra sales.

Attending this week's 2012 Opportunites for Retailers conference was an interesting experience if only for the statistics it threw up. Just consider the nine million tickets due to be sold, the one million additional visitors to London, the 220 countries broadcasting the event, andd the 4.7 billion expected TV viewers.

Gratuitous use of the Olympic rings logo

What this boils down to in terms of additional sales up for grabs during the Games itself is £3 billiion, which could multiply up to £10 billion when you take into account the pre and post event activity. This is big stuff and represents an opportunity for retailers if they can work out ways to link their businesses to the Games.

But there is a big beware here - and it concerns the use of Olympic 'marks' such as the five rings logo and the weird London 2012 Olympic logo thingy. The Olympic movement takes these things very seriously. Clearly you cannot use the rings (shown above, just in case you hadn't seen them before) without being a sponsor. But there are many more images and word combos that are also out of bounds.

Courtesy of a big time retailer I've kindly been sent some of the brand restrictions that are imposed on merchants. It runs to some pages but here's a flavour.

The following expressions are prohibited:

Any two of the words in list A OR any word in list A with one or more of the words in list B below:
A
- Games
- Two Thousand and Twelve
- 2012
- Twenty Twelve

B
- London
- Medals
- Sponsors
- Summer
- Gold
- Silver
- bronze

So it would seem the use of 'Bronze 2012' is out, which is bad news for any sculptors looking to advertise their bronze artwork for sale in 2012. Clearly if you don't want to lash out loads of cash to be a sponsor then you have to be a little creative. But such are the opportunities thrown up by the Olympics that it must be well worth committing some time to getting those creative juices flowing.

Yet another retail survey reveals nothing

Surveys, don't you just love 'em. Don't ask me what is going through consumers' minds when they answer the various surveys and questionnaires thrust in front of them. To use an old IT phrase, the general rule with most seems to be 'rubbish in, rubbish out'.

The latest to roll off the dubious-surveys press is from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), which reveals that more than 60% of shoppers (reported on Internet Retailing) are less likely to return goods bought online than those they purchased in a store. Really.

This will be a great surprise to the many fashion and accessories retailers who sell online because one of their biggest headaches is dealing with the high level of returns - that are significantly higher than those in-store. Part of the reason for this is glaringly obvious - they have tried on various sizes in-store and bought the one that fits so the need to return it is surely zero.

While it might be the case that people say they are more likely to return goods into store than online the reality is that most of these people will undoubtedly be actually returning more goods bought online. That's the nature of the online beast versus the store-based model. We all know that, so what exactly is this survey telling us.

I suspect it is just a sop for highighting the fact that consumers don't know their rights in relation to buying goods online. Maybe I'm just being a tad cynlical here. But then maybe I'm no different to the people who answered the survey and are clearly showing cynicism to being asked more questions by more organisations and are giving duff answers. Or maybe, with my sarcastic hat on this time, the questions were skewed to achieve specific responses.

Uncertainty at Games Workshop Group

It seemed rather strange that Games Workshop Group should have ruled itself out of the competition to win the 'Turnaround of the Year' category in the annual Plc awards run by the FT, having been shortlisted.

The thing to conclude from this is that its management did not want to win because it did not believe the company would have justified the classification of having been turned-around. This suggests the judges made a mistake in shortlisting the company.

I don't believe this to be the case. The judges of such a high profile awards are surely no fools. A more plausible conclusion to read from this unusual situation is that there are surprises on the cards for Games Workshop Group shareholders and that these are unlikely to be good surprises. Management did not therefore want the embarassment of winning such an award.

Unless of course I have simply missed something blindingly obvious.

Retailers' appetite for smaller stores grows

For many years the focus in retail has been skewed to ever larger stores located out-of-town and many operators have been unwilling to dirty their hands operating smaller units on, god forbid, the high street.

Some retailers like Asda have publicly stated their aversion to opening smaller, convenience type stores, in town centres because they deliver pitiful returns compared with hypermarkets.

This may be true to some extent but retailers like Tesco and Sainsbury's have been a little more enlightened and have for some time recognised that smaller units can still be a great driver of growth when the rest of the estate is producing sluggish numbers. They also help expose non-core shoppers to your brand.

Despite the scepticism by some, there is no doubt that interest is definitely picking up in smaller formats. This is down to a combination of lower property prices on the high street, and the growth of online shopping, which is reducing the need for certain retailers to sell their entire stocks in physical stores.

Over the last few weeks we have heard numerous operators highlight plans to push ahead with opening smaller format stores including even former sceptic Asda. But please don't call them convenience stores within earshot of Asda chief executive Andy Bond who clearly doesn't want to be seen to be undertaking a U-turn on his policy of avoiding such stores.

Among the other retailers advocating a shift towards convenience is Waitrose that is to shortly open its first smaller store that will be a mere 3,000 sq ft compared with the 70,000 sq ft for its full supermarket format.

Waitrose convenience stores coming to a high street near you

Not to be outdone, Sainsbury's is also putting its foot on the small store accelerator. Speaking at the recent Retail Week Conference Sainsbury's property director John Rogers highlighted how the company is "driven by the opportunity in the property market...with the high street suffering it's our opportunity to step on the pace in convenience and bring life back to the high street".

This will see the grocer open 150 convenience stores by March 2011 including some as small as 3,000 sq ft, which is significantly more petite than its previous smallest convenience format that measured 7,000 sq ft.

A more suprising entrant into the smaller store arena is DIY chain Focus that is in the next few months due to open a 12,000 sq ft unit described by chief executive Bill Grimey as an "urban in-fill store". This will be the first of its kind for the company and Grimsey reckons it will produce the same returns as a 30,000 sq ft store.

Based on this forecast he believes there is the possibility of opening 100 such smaller urban in-fill stores. Grimsey is clearly another man who prefers it if you don't call them convenience stores. But whatever moniker you choose, this trend towards smaller units has to be a good sign for the many run-down high streets and town centres that litter the country.

Who'd be a buyer of online retailer Figleaves?

For a company that has a ‘For Sale’ sign atop its virtual store, the chief executive of Figleaves wasn’t really selling the business particularly well to the audience at the Retail Week Conference.


Julia Reynolds was keen to stress that anybody can sell other people’s brands, which is largely what Figleaves does, and this made the threat from competitors very real. She also pointed out that the company’s customers have been saying they prefer to purchase across channels, which is not what Figleaves does as it is a pure play business – flogging goods only online.

These appear to be serious downers for a business that last month appointed GP Bullhound to advise it following the receipt of several offers for the business as reported in the Sunday Times. These apparently put a valuation of £40 million on the company but little has since been said about who these potential suitors might be.

Figleaves lingerie for sale, but to who?

One thing is for sure, if they do exist then they will have to be a store-based retailer who can bolt on the Figleaves business thereby providing the cross-channel proposition that Reynolds espouses. With Reynolds admitting that anybody can sell other brands online then it is questionable who Figleaves would provide value to - certainly £40 million of value would surely need the company to have some serious differentiation to the rest of the competition.

Reynolds has sought to bring this to the business through the development of own-brand goods, although this remains an immature part of the business. This is an area she knows well having built up the clothing brands of Tesco, with the 'Florence and Fred' brand her own creation. She has also undoubtedly improved the fortunes of Figleaves as it had made a loss of £4.2 milliion in the year before she joined the business whereas it is now, according to Reynolds, at breakeven.

It will be interesting to find out how the sales process is progressing and I am hoping to have a little chat with GP Bullhound at some point in the near future. If they ultimately tell me nothing then they should at least brush up Reynolds' selling skills.