Do not believe the latest government trade figures - not if you are a farm shop anyway!

I have just come back from the annual conference for farm shops run by FARMA.  In my opinion, it is one of the best get-togethers of independent retailers during the year.  That’s why I always go, not only to spend some time with some of our top customers, but also to learn more about our favourite customer group – farm shops.

This year was no exception; one of the main thrusts of the conference was the need to embrace social media. How times are changing – it is only a few years ago that many orders from farm shops used to arrive in our office faxed through on scrappy bits of paper in tiny handwriting! One customer who is only just starting to use e-mail, came back talking about twittering and face-booking in order to drive more customers to his farm shop.  How refreshing! A timely reminder to get our act together at Cotswold Fayre on social media as well – we will!

However, the best part of the conference as always was the fact that a load of retailers are together in one place talking, drinking and dancing in some cases until the small hours of the morning means that ideas are swapped, people are excited about what can happen in their shop, and come back buzzing with new ideas.

How timely it was that the negative governments trading figures for October-December came through on my phone during a seminar from a farm shop owner who has grown her business from nothing to £1.2 million in just one year.  Nice juxtaposition!  Sure, some farm shops really struggled in that disastrous week before Christmas with mounds of snow blocking access to their shops, but many were reporting excellent figures for January, and only a few mentioned that they had Christmas products left in the shop that they were still trying to flog!

Yet again, I am on the warpath against the doom-mongers.  It seems that I have to counteract negativity in almost every meeting I have, and I am off to Germany tomorrow, no doubt to fight off the doom and gloom merchants from all over Europe there!  I questioned one of them a little more to try and understand more of their reasons for thinking we were in for a bad year.  He first cited the news reports.  Well we all know that newspapers love to dwell on the negative, and if there isn’t any national or worldwide disaster to write about they will turn to finding a less than positive story from the economy.

The second reason he gave was the redundancies happening this year throughout the public sector.  Perhaps he was forgetting that the vast majority of civil servants and public sector workers are amongst the lowest paid in the UK.  I doubt very much that they make up a high percentage of our customer base in delicatessens, farm shops and food halls.  If you don’t believe me send a tweet offering them a free coffee and see how many turn up!