News

ACS (the Association of Convenience Store) has welcomed new guidance from the Retail Alcohol Standards Group (RASG) which aims to help retailers tackle the proxy purchasing of alcohol, which is where an adult purchases alcohol on behalf of a child.

ACS has responded to the Scottish Government’s consultation on a deposit return scheme for Scotland, reiterating concerns about the potential impact of a scheme on retailers.

You can’t ignore the debate on plastics and the environmental impact of the bottles and bags that are too often discarded into the countryside, waterways and oceans. One of my rules in working out how ACS should address policy challenges is to first step back and ask, “is this a real issue, are the people who are concerned about it justified in demanding action?” In this case, the answer to these questions is definitely “yes” (let me know if you disagree, but the evidence looks pretty compelling to me) so we should think about what local shops can do to help tackle this problem. Of course,

ACS (the Association of Convenience Stores) has responded to new report from Imperial College London, raising concerns about calls for a new tobacco licensing system.

The Imperial College report cites NHS figures which claim that the majority of child smokers said it was easy to buy cigarettes in shops. However, just 4% of 11-15 year olds in the sample had attempted to buy cigarettes in a shop in the last year, and of those, around two thirds were refused the sale of cigarettes at least once.

Tynemouth MP Alan Campbell has visited a G & E Murgatroyd Spar store in Monkseaton to discuss policy issues for the convenience sector. G & E Murgatroyd is the company owned division of James Hall, employing over 1,400 people across 113 convenience stores in the North of England.

Spar Monkseaton offers a diverse grocery offer, in store bakery, bill payment services and free-to-use ATM. The store has seen significant growth in its fresh produce sales over the year with James Hall winning ‘The Shopper’s Favourite Fresh Convenience Retailer’ for 2018 at the HIM Awards.

ACS is urging retailers to write to their Police and Crime Commissioners, highlighting the problems that crime cause in their store and calling on them to pledge to ensure that police forces take shop theft and abuse of staff seriously.

The pledges that PCCs are being asked to sign up to include: 

The following content was provided by ACS Club Member Fri-Jado: For more information about becoming a member please call 01252 515001. 

Uxbridge based provider of foodservice and food retailing solutions, Fri-Jado UK Limited, has installed food displays at a Costcutter store in Truro. The serve assisted counters were specified by equipment concept specialist, Aryzta Food Solutions, who designed a 20 sq m delicatessen and food to go department as part of a refurbishment of the convenience outlet.

Tim Shipman is confirmed to speak at the ACS Heart of Community Conference on Tuesday 16th October in the heart of Westminster, 1 Birdcage Walk.

Political Editor of The Sunday Times, Tim has been a national newspaper journalist for nearly 20 years, reporting on British and American politics and international relations. 

The conference will bring together retailers from across the country to address the policy issues that really matter for the sector, focusing on tackling retail crime, acting on the environment and the future of work in the sector.

Hopefully you’ve seen our 2018 Local Shop Report, launched (appropriately, perhaps) at the National Space Centre in Leicester.  There’s loads of data in the report, some of it from our own research, and some kindly provided by our friends at HIM, IGD, William Reed and Experian.  You can go through the information that’s most relevant to your business, but I want to think a bit more deeply about the information related to people working in convenience stores, in the context of the debate in politics at the moment about employment in the UK, where rates of

Harrow East MP Bob Blackman has taken part in a visit with local retailer Kunal Patel at his store Canon’s Park Newsagent, discussing concerns around the introduction of a deposit return scheme and the ongoing challenge of business rates and retail crime. 

During the visit, Kunal showed Mr Blackman around his store, highlighting the problems with introducing a deposit return scheme in a business without any spare space, either behind the till for a manual system or elsewhere in the store for the installation of a large reverse vending solution.