Sales stopped everywhere at once, and nobody would say why

01Lived

I had a thing about large shopping centres taking trade away from communities. A few years earlier, in the US, I had seen what the big malls did to independent stores, and one of my clients was the family behind one of the big new British shopping centres, so I had watched it from both sides. In response I built a product called Shopper's Guide, and it was a clever little machine. Local shops bought a page in the booklet, each page carried a small discount coupon, and every booklet had a unique number printed on it, which entered its holder into a prize draw. Copies were delivered free through every letterbox in the area, and the winning numbers were published only in the participating local stores, so to find out whether you had won, you had to walk back onto the high street and into the shops. We sold it to particular kinds of places: villages rather than cities, market towns rather than big towns, local high streets. It was good, it was successful, and we got quite a few areas going. This was the late ’80s, and I was thinking about opening more, maybe even franchising it. There were three salespeople altogether, including me. Then we started getting pushed back. Areas that had sold no longer sold, and nobody would give us a straight reason. It turned out the large newspaper groups had been suggesting to the local trade that their future was better positioned with the local newspapers than with Shopper's Guide. I was the one leading the company; the others were in it for a bit of a ride, a bit of fun. And I was too young to start fighting the David and Goliath thing, and I just didn't think it was my fight.