ABC shops to close with loss of 300 jobs, Mark Scott says

Extract from The Guardian

Managing director announces ABC’s retail operations will move online because of public’s changing habits of buying music and visual content

Walking into an ABC Shop to pick up a stuffed Banana in Pyjama will soon be a thing of the past. Photograph: Kym Smith/AAP

Amanda Meade

Thursday 23 July 2015 09.49 AEST 

The ABC’s chain of retail shops, an Australian institution for 35 years, has been targeted for closure because the public’s appetite for books, CDs and DVDs has waned.
“They are not making money now,” ABC managing director Mark Scott said on ABC radio, confirming that 300 ABC retail staff would lose their jobs.
Scott said while millions of people visited ABC shops and ABC centres in major retail stores every year and the public “loves them”, the arrival of digital downloads and online shopping had “radically changed” shopping habits.
“We want to migrate them to shop online,” Scott said.

Mark Scott explains the closure of the ABC shops.

The shops are run through the ABC’s commercial arm and the revenue they generate has been funnelled back into programming.

This year the ABC started charging for archival programs on iView as well as selling DVDs though the online shop.
Scott said the shops would be phased out before they became unprofitable and the move was designed to stop “inevitable losses”.
The ABC’s commercial director, Robert Patterson, said the decision had not been taken lightly.
“However, this strategy will create a more cost-effective, nimble and flexible approach to servicing customers,” Patterson said.
“The ABC is confident that this new strategy will ensure continued audience engagement. Consumers will still be able to purchase much-loved content both online and in stores.”
ABC retail has 50 standalone stores and 78 ABC Centres in other retail outlets, as well as the online ABC shop, employing up to 300 people.
Each year, about 1,000 new consumer products are created, licensed or released by ABC commercial.
The ABC’s staff union said the profit margin on the products in the shops had fallen because most of the shows on the ABC were no longer made in-house, but outsourced to production companies who made the profits from the DVDs.
“The ABC has been outsourcing their internal production for the last decade and now there are more job losses on the table because of that,” the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) ABC section secretary, Sinddy Ealy, said.
“Like most retailers, ABC shops have been struggling with the impact of online shopping but that’s not the only reason ABC retail is struggling.
“This announcement has caught staff completely by surprise and we need to see a lot more information provided on this decision so that that staff know where they stand.”
Ealy said most of the staff in the shops were women and many had worked there for decades.
The head of ABC retail, Regina Hoekstra, said in a statement: “The welfare of our staff will be a primary focus over the next few months.”
The loss of 300 jobs comes after a $254m cut by the Coalition government to the ABC’s triennial budget forced it to shed 400 jobs, including 100 staff in the ABC’s news division.

The budget cuts, program changes and job losses earlier in the year were then overshadowed by a heated national debate over the appropriateness of Q&A allowing former terror suspect Zaky Mallah a platform to speak.
The ABC was roundly criticised by the government, including a directive from the prime minister, Tony Abbott, that “heads should roll” over the decision to allow Mallah to ask a question on live TV.
But Scott said it was time to move on from the Q&A row which he described as a two-day story which had stretched out to three weeks and had filled acres of newspaper pages.
The criticism of the ABC’s talk show was “only a moment” in the broadcaster’s 80-year history, Scott said, and there had been no permanent damage to the ABC’s independence.
The ABC board would consider a review of 40 episodes of Q&A by Ray Martin and Shaun Brown and decide whether to move the program from the television division to the news division, Scott said.
“It’s not about trying to satisfy the government,” Scott said. “This is a report that goes to the board ... as the board fulfils its responsibility to ensure editorial standards are high here at the ABC.”