Ann: Intention to Make Takeover Bid, page-132

"I tell you what, if the TRS sales are not "good" over the Xmas period ... its through no fault of the staff."

Absolutely agree on that sentiment!

The job they have done presenting stores and with rostering, training, stock management, etc has been absolutely first class over the last few years as well as doing a great job with controlling costs.

The part where we have constantly fallen down is not getting the products right and anecdotally we have lost many customers completely as discovered in one of my recent "housewife tests" (no it's not taking a housewife for a "test drive", mind out of the gutter please CrazyP!).

Many housewives say they no longer even look at TRS as they had lost any relevance and had no good deals, this may have changed but they are not willing to even set foot in there anymore, on the one hand that's a disaster, on the other it's an opportunity.

There needs to be a reason to get their feet through those doors as they NEVER leave empty handed no matter what they entered for, it's almost impossible to walk out of TRS without at least a few items you had no idea you needed but it just doesn't happen until you pass through the front doors in the first place.

There is now a logistical and stock management advantage that can be leveraged to bring people through the door with targeted products, larger products that are harder to ship and store making it impossible for the mum and pop discount shops to compete, still leaves us head to head with Kmart but there is room for 2-3 good players at least.

Not sure we are going to get good news for Christmas sales, bidder seems intent on staying put with the offer meaning they have absolute confidence of a poor result, if it's a bad result a large chunk of the company will be snapped up on that day, obviously a good result would just embarrass the bidders and force them to raise their offer.