Happy Birthday bookstore! We passed our fourth anniversary on August 1. We usually celebrate on November 1, which is when we put up the new signs and became an actual thing in the world.
Year by year
My favourite single measure of commercial performance is total revenue for the previous 52 weeks. This is what it looks like by week up until October 12 2020. (There is no significance to the differing blues. Excel seems to get confused with so many bars).
Things have come a long way up:
Total revenue in our first 52 weeks (the week of August 1, 2016 to July 24, 2017) was just under $65k excluding GST.
Total revenue for the same period in our fourth year (August 5, 2019 to July 27, 2020) was just under $121k.
On that measure, we have increased revenue by 86 per cent in four years. Good news, especially since the most recent 52 weeks included the first lockdown, when we were closed to in-store customers.
You can also see that the pace of improvement has slowed.
In our second year we leapt from about $65k in revenue to around $100k.
We ended our third year at about $115k.
Now our fourth is done at just over $120k.
This is weekly data, so it does move around a bit. A successful quarterly clearance sale, or a big Books by the Metre delivery (our service that provides books in bulk for interior decoration) can create jumps. A year later, if our sale was less successful or we didn't have a big order come through in the same week, the bar goes down. And, of course, lockdown has generated both some big declines and some big bounce-backs in the last few months.
Total spending each year now equates to about $125k, so we continue to come up short against the happy milestone of actually covering our costs. But the gap is not as enormous as it used to be, and overall revenue continues to grow faster than costs, so we can be optimistic that we will get there eventually.
I mean, 2020, you what now
This has been an unusual year for second-hand booksellers, as well as for everyone else of course.
The Ponsonby Business Association put out some figures recently showing retail spending in Ponsonby. Our situation mirrors the wider neighbourhood, with a sharp fall in sales during lockdowns in April and August, a fast bounce back afterwards, and a particularly good few weeks in July. You can see this mirrored in the graph above.
One puzzling thing that we are seeing in the figures is that customers are, on average, spending more now than they were before.
The graph below shows spending per customer for each month of 2019 compared with 2020 so far. You can see that revenue per customer has been higher through most of 2020, but the orange lines have gotten even further ahead of the blue lines after March.
There are some caveats. August 2020 is a counter-example, where 2019 had a very high basket value and August 2020 did not measure up. And April 2020 had a very high basket value, but we only had twelve sales in the month, all online, and we made less than $400 in the month in total.
Overall, though, there is some cause to think that people are spending between $2 and $4 more each. The extra spending isn't explained by the number of books that people buy. That has stayed pretty constant at an average of a bit over two per customer. So it must be that people are buying more expensive books. Time will tell if this continues. Why it might be happening also remains a mystery at the time of writing.