Be Excellent To Each Other

In Australia they do things differently. North is hot, south is cold, Barbies are something to cook on and online retail is nothing but an elaborate con.

That’s the opinion of billionaire Australian retailer Gerry Harvey who founded one of Oz’s largest retail chains, Harvey Norman. He stated in an interview,

"Online people do not make any money,” Harvey also told SmartCompany. “The whole world was conned with online retailing. People say I’m a dinosaur, and I’ve had people coming to me with sites and saying, ‘Oh, look at this, they have 10,000 or 20,000 hits!’ – but it’s a con, a complete con.”

We’re guessing Gerry hasn’t even cracked those AOL Online floppies he got in the post 10 years ago. Maybe he hasn’t quite worked out the dial-up on his Pentium 75 so he wasn’t able to get online and check out the £4.74 billion sales in the UK alone during November.

Harvey Norman chalked up a classic quarterly performance with a -31.5% loss in pre-tax profit with their shares falling 13% on the 25th November in the biggest one-day fall in over 20 years.

It’s a big desert out there in Aussie land with a lot of sand to stick your head into.