Five pieces of advice I ignored in 2020

I say it a lot, but I’ll say it again – the fresh produce space is stuck in the 1980s.

So many wholesalers and retailers think that advertising in the newspaper and having a big bloke up the front shouting prices at customers passing by is the way to market fruit and veg in the 21st century.

It isn’t.

We live in a technological, always on, social media world.

None of that cuts it any more.

I get no shortage of advice from people telling me how I should run Alexanders.

In 2020, when things were tougher, I ignored it all.

I ignored it all and sales on baskets went from an average of $18 to $25 and beyond. Here's what 'experts' told me over and over last year:

Open longer hours

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this one, I’d be out of the fruit game for good! So many people told me to open seven days a week and longer hours. I didn’t. Alexanders runs three and a half days a week. We don’t need to be physically open; our social media presence is 24/7. We’re engaging with our customers even when our doors aren’t open. They know we're about "Fruit, Family, and Fun." That's how it should be.

Expand product lines

Alexanders Fruit Market is a fruit market, not a supermarket. We concentrate on what we know so we can deliver the best. During COVID-19, we noticed young families are getting excited about fruit and veg. They want to know more. Where is it from? What are the varieties? What does it taste like? There wasn’t that interest level a few years ago. Consolidating our knowledge rather than diluting it helped us increase sales.

Screw your suppliers

It’s a dog-eat-dog place in the market. Even though we have rivalries and let’s say, disagreements, from time to time, we’re all friendly and talk over coffee. Screwing my suppliers for a short-term special makes no sense in a long-term strategy. I want to work with suppliers, giving their brand a platform. Fresh produce is in competition with long-life grocery, confectionery, junk food – screwing suppliers is cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

Bigger discounts

I don’t have to tell you that margins in fresh produce are razor thin as they are. By my calculations, spending $10,000 to buy a product and another $5,000 in logistics, marketing, wages, storage, etc. and making $10,500 is a waste of $4,500. That’s not good business. Through education and branding our sales are better than ever. People want to eat healthy; people enjoy eating healthy, and kids are looking for it. It's a no brainer; you just have to market and target; brand and educate. Can you put a price on health? You sort of can – and a lot of people are willing to pay a little extra for it.

Make deliveries

We’ve had to put up a bot on Facebook to tell people we don’t make deliveries, we get asked so often. We never have, and we never will. That’s partly because we wanted to make Alexanders a destination during the lockdown. There wasn’t much going on during lockdown – but Alexanders was a place where people could come and feel less anxious. We put on soothing music, used pleasing scents in our cleaners, wore masks and gloves all the time. Through social media, people knew who we were and what we were about before they even stepped in the store. It’s powerful.

What pieces of advice did you ignore in 2020? Did it work for your business?