A big Happy Christmas to all our members. Christmas seems to have crept up like it never has before .. last minute shopping, drinking and eating has left us all pretty exhausted.

Yes, we of course had to elf ourselves:

Have a great break (if you’re lucky enough to get one), we’re taking Christmas day off, otherwise we’ll be back on deck from Boxing Day (the 26th) straight through to next Christmas!

Cheers
Sarah, Simon, T’Mara and Andrew.

Wow .. this is big news. According to this ABC report, the receivers have been called into manage EzyDVD.

EzyDVD are one of our biggest online DVD retailers and have been operating for 9 years (since 1999). As well as their online operation, they have 26 company-owned bricks and mortar outlets, with another 36 franchised.

I guess it shows you how brutal the retail world is when dealing with commodity products like DVDs. There’s just not a lot of margin in it. Being online doesn’t insulate you from operational and distribution costs, rather it just shifts them from a high-street presence to a back-block warehouse. And when you move off the high street, although your online reach is in theory vast, visibility goes down and you’ll be lucky to match the throughput of a well established bricks and mortar footprint. The essence of it, if you believe Gerry Harvey, is that local retail is king. Online retail is a sideshow.

The ABC report a retail downturn has squeezed EzyDVD, which combined with existing debt and recent operating losses has pushed them over the edge. As Tim Pethick pointed out a while back, if you haven’t innovated before the market turns, watch out.

Perhaps EzyDVD’s woes are management based .. I thought their move into VOD (with ezydownload) was ill-conceived and their attempt at bringing retail to local video stores was completely ignored by all rental groups. Costly initiatives, whilst their core retail platform, their website, sat unchanged for way too long and remained completely un-integrated with their 62 bricks and mortar outlets. Perhaps it’s an issue of don’t forget your core focus.

In any case, commiseration to Jim Zavos and the EzyDVD team, it must be horrible to see your baby slip into receivership.

Update
Ouch! Apparently ezyDVD was $18 million in debt.

Even though we’re still a small store by conventional standards, we thought we’d stock up on The Dark Knight for the weekend (just gone) .. just in case. We do most of our buying through our buying group, but we stock up from local retailers on the Friday for our lead titles. From the retailers (eg JB, K-Mart), we buy more copies than we need, and can return them (unopened) for next week’s big titles (we can’t do this with our buying group). It’s a sign of the times .. through our group Dark Knight costs $29, and we can pickup copies from K-Mart for $25. New releases have truly become a commodity product that anyone can get from anywhere. Piracy runs rampant on these lead titles as well. It’s the art-house & independent stuff that give us the best margin, and our back-catalogue. More than ever, video stores have to look past the new releases, past the hits to make a decent buck.

But, the hits do burn brightly for a few weeks and The Dark Knight smashed all our records :-). We ended up with 23 copies in our system and all rented on Saturday night. Not bad! Check it out .. it’s a great movie.

But it’s ….. “the dream that came through a million years.. that lasted through all the tears…” Did you all know that my brothers (one of which you know) used my Xanadu record as a frisby!

What can I say but it’s taken a while and been worth the wait. The ice cream is here and is SO good. We have a freezer full of tubs of delicious hand made creamy goodness. Serendipity ice cream is Australian Made Australian Owned, a family company and ticks all the APPLEBOX boxes so we are thrilled.

What’s in the freezer?

Single serve tubs of

Serendipity recently won the Melbourne Fine Food Awards Trophy for Champion Ice cream! So come and try some delicious award winning ice cream in our award winning store

We slipped a bit on the November newsletter, but December is now out with an all new colour scheme. It’s very green! Have a read here.