Editorial: Safe hands for valued part of retail heritage

Anne Norman and David Norman. Photo / Sarah Ivey

News that the owners of Whitcoulls and Borders were in financial difficulty brought no end of obituaries from those eager to read the last rites over books and bookshops as we have known them.

But nobody told Anne and David Norman, an Auckland couple who keep out of the public eye while running a group of retailing operations in New Zealand and Australia reckoned to have given them a personal worth of $400 million.

Their faith in New Zealand's retail heritage has already helped the name Farmers survive. The Normans' purchase of Whitcoulls and Borders is gratifying not only for the future of one or both chains but also for the fact that a New Zealand asset has been bought back from foreign ownership for the best of reasons.

The shops have languished in the hands of the Australian REDGroup, though they did not appear to be the problem that sent the group into voluntary management in February. The group was in debt to private equity, and many such ventures were caught by the recession owing more than their assets were worth.

REDGroup had 260 stores in three countries and when redundancies were announced in March, none were in New Zealand's 60 Whitcoulls and five Borders shops.

In April, Whitcoulls' prospects looked even better when its 10 airport stores were sold to an Australian company that said it would keep them open under a new brand. And this month came word of the Norman family's interest.

The Normans' plans for the chains have yet to be seen, but there is no reason to think one or both will not remain a name that means books. They will be alert to the challenge from internet selling and consuming. General bookshops cannot stock the range of books available online and cannot retail them competitively.

Bookshops, like many other stores, have to work on the inherent attractions of physical, as distinct from virtual, experience. Handling a book, turning its pages, letting the eye and mind dwell on permanent print remain a more pleasant experience for many readers than ephemeral pages on a screen.

Likewise, browsing in a good bookshop - noting what the shop thinks worth display, examining a book and tasting a few pages - is a pleasure quite different from looking at the selections a search engine will put on a screen.

But that is so only if the physical retailer works hard to make shops inviting, interesting and comfortable. Whitcoulls lost ground on thisscore when rivals such as Borders arrived.

If the new owners are inclined to merge the chains, they face a choice of keeping the name Whitcoulls for heritage or Borders for the more interesting features that have made it well known.

Whatever their choice, they will make it with care. Both are steeped in New Zealand retailing. David Norman started his career in Auckland supermarkets; Anne Norman's grandfather founded Pascoe's jewellers in Ponsonby three years before Robert Laidlaw started the mail-order firm that became Farmers.

The Pascoes chain remains a Norman property, with Stewart Dawsons, Angus and Coote, Stevens and others.

The couple live quietly, buy quietly and seldom sell a shop. In a rare interview with the Herald for the Farmers centenary they said they did not take profit out of their companies. "We just let them grow."

The books look to be in good hands.