Julia Gillard has given in on Restaurant awards now for Retailing?

However it is time to review Australia’s Retail Trading Hours and Supporting Retail Awards!

The RETAiL Alert Group has been pushing for some delay in the proposed retail awards penalty rate changes for the last few months.

Now the retail food retailers have won a reprieve now for general retailing.

It is important that the Minister gets the message that an Award shift at this time will cause retail unemployment amongst second income working females who support mortgage payments.

In these difficult times the small retail sector in particular needs time to adjust to the proposed Award restructuring.

• As part of our argument is that there needs to be a thorough overhaul trading hours and awards not just awards.

• Harmonised retail trading hours and awards delivered by the COAG Tenancy Reform Group with widened powers.

In recent months we have asked three of the current industry associations to provide their take on this subject.

A response was received from the ARA, for which we thank them; we will update our readers when responses are received from the other retail sector associations.

The ARA talked well to the issues facing chains and smaller retailers in their Fair Work Bill 2008 submission but the trading hours matter, being not the scope of their submission was not covered.

The RETAiL Alert Group is hearing that retailers’ want a comprehensive review of what consumers want in Retail Trading Hours; it makes sense to make those decisions in tandem with issues contained in the proposed Fair Work Bill 2008 legislation.

• Trading Hours have to be cost effective for all retailers’ not just the majors and the shopping centres who simply pass the opening operating costs directly onto retail tenants.

As we have said repeatedly instead of just concentrating on proposed new employment conditions the time has come to get Harmonisation in Trading Hours and appropriate ‘Award’ rates and conditions to suit the needs of the majority of Australian retail consumers Nationally not on a State by State, area by area basis.

Hopefully this will be one of the main Retail Harmonisation Legislation targets of the proposed new Federated Retail Sector Industry Association.

• The sleeper is to define retail trading hours which suit the majority of consumers, but have a light footprint on environmental costs of consumer travel and the costs of running energy and resource hungry Shopping Centres.

We asked for input from large retailers’, chains, SME retailer; Shopping Centres, Union and Government Department readers for a future article on Australian Retail Sector Trading Hours.

It was raised that Payroll Tax should be on the table in any discussion on retail staff renumeration but most agreed that it is patently clear that Australian consumers want more flexibility in shopping hours nationally to suit changing life style patterns.

Again readers want trading hours to match the needs of their customers but have old, new and proposed ‘retail award’ structures matching the new trading hours.

What ever is proposed must be fair to all retailers’ large and small without the major chains having an ability to strike retail team renumeration packages with the SDA simply because of their market strength.

We expect the SDA through Joe de Bruyn to have strong views on this aspect of the debate and would welcome the current views of the SDA on the subject.

Working customers are time poor with many couples and partners working full or part time to support mortgages and living costs.

From a national perspective the seven day trading hours are confusing with all States doing their own thing and even some States varying from region to region, readers indicated that this should one of the top items on Retail Legislation Harmonisation.

• To recap many retail customers often eat out during the week, go to the Movies; but cannot shop at the same time?

• There are varying late night trading hours as a legacy of when weekend trade ceased at noon on a Saturday; this stopped eons ago.

• Late nights vary from Thursday to Friday depending on the region and with the introduction of extended hours on Saturday and Sunday.

• They add little to the general merchandise stores trading performance. 

• There seemed to be no argument that free standing supermarkets should be allowed to trade when they like.

• Supermarkets cocooned in discrete lock off areas with separate operating costs should also be able to trade 24 hours.

• The same applies to Shopping Centre Entertainment and Eating / Restaurant precincts.

Retailers’ indicated that even in tough times they are finding it hard to keep and retain shop staff and management due to poor spread renumeration pay for long working hours, particularly at weekends. 

The questions we poses as starter thoughts based on current retailer input seemed to be fairly on the money being;

• Allow General and Bulky Goods Retail Trading Hours 10:00am to 7:00pm seven days.
• Allow Supermarket Trading Hours 24 Hours seven days.
• An hourly rate which is common for Monday through Friday with a limit on hours worked before a loading applies.
• An hourly rate which compensates for Saturday and Sunday trading with a limit on hours worked before a loading applies.

There were other views expressed that as a retail service sector industry should there is a need for penalty rates at all.

An OK thought but on feed back would not fly in the real world.

The thought is that if a retailer wishes to attract the best staff and management then market rules should apply with either over award payments or some other incentive to attract the appropriate skill level.

With regard to the week-end hourly rate; we would ask the few ‘red neck’ retailers’ to clearly recognise the substantial and growing difficulty in getting experienced team members to work on week-ends.

It was agreed that Shopping Centres do play a key role through mandating core trading hours as a lease condition however core hours but with varied late night trading days it is confusing with few retailers’ covering wages and out going costs in the last hour or two of trading; varied late night trading is out of date and not efficient retailing when retailers’ are trying to cut costs.

OK the current economic slow down will stem the slide but when the good times return the retail experience shop floor slide will continue if no changes are made; the losers consumers, retailers and the environment.

We look forward to receiving further input from retail industry sector association and receiving more reader comments; email Australian Retail Trading Hours and Awards 2009.

It is proposed that we will leave this topic open for regular updates; the growing view being that change is necessary to match trading hours to suit consumer demand to minimise retailer costs nationally in tough times.

Tony Standley

Principal
The RETAiL Alert Group (Australia)

Mobile +61 (0)41 924 0497
e-mail info@adsass.com.au
Fax +61 (0)2 9987 0633
Website http://www.retailalert.com.au