Melmerby and Fellside Village Shop LTD.

A new shop opens

The shop opened for trade on 1 July 2005.  Initially only groceries and newspapers were sold, but other services subsequently came on stream.  Local artisans and craftspeople sell their goods in the shop. The Library Links service provided by Cumbria Libraries, which allows customers to borrow books through the shop acts as a further customer draw.  The recently opened off-licence facility, designed as a ‘wine cave’, has proven popular for its wide selection of beverages. All in all the business is going very well, meeting and even exceeding the targets in the business plan, and additional developments are planned.

One important key to the success of Melmerby’s shop is its relationship with the Penrith Co-op, which allows the village co-operative to take stock from the shelves of the Penrith Co-op in the exact quantities needed by the village shop.  Members’ discounts mean that these items are then sold at Melmerby at a margin that is only a couple of percent higher than at Penrith.  The Melmerby Co-operative benefits from this relationship in several important ways: it has access to a wide and diverse product range – about 3000 lines – far in excess of that available to most small shops.  It can handle this range of items in small numbers, so cutting down on wastage products exceeding their sell-by date, and on the need to have storage space on-site, and also because the arrangement reduces cash-flow demands for stock bought up front.  In effect the Penrith Co-op is the village shop’s cash-and-carry; but the Penrith Co-op benefits as well, through the dividend of three per cent of the value of goods sold at Melmerby that it receives from the Wholesale Co-operative Society.  The Penrith Co-operative Society is a small Society with only five shops.  Like many other retailers, it is itself facing pressure from large retailers, currently due to a redevelopment in Penrith town centre.  The arrangement thus benefits this co-operative as well, and helps it meet its objectives and reach parts of its core market and membership.

The only real problem now facing the shop in the longer term is the short nature of its current lease: it only has three years to run before it is reviewed.  For a village shop, location is of paramount importance:  it needs to be near the heart of a village, with parking spaces, and in appropriate premises.  The ideal solution would be for the Melmerby Village Shop to own its own premises, saving rent and securing the future of the shop as a community asset in the long-term.