Data I am currently reviewing for capital city shopping centre based newsagencies indicates that afternoon customers are more likely to spend more in a sale than morning customers. Indeed, the later in the day the more they are likely to spend.
In several instances, I have seen late afternoon sales worth, on average, 50% more than early morning sales.
This data will vary newsagency by newsagency. Get it for your store and it could be gold. Most point of sale systems can produce it in seconds. They can cut time based sales in a range of useful ways.
Thinking about this further and recalling customer behaviour in that last hour or so, it is clear that at this time of the day we are the convenience store for our customers. They tend to take less time choosing their purchase and that works in our favour.
Digging deeper into the dataset from a small sample group, I can see that afternoon shoppers are twice as likely to, for example, purchase multiple greeting cards in a sale. If you knew that for your newsagency would it change how you manage the business. I bet it would!
I started looking at this data again recently to help a newsagent out in balancing the roster. It turned out that they had their people working at the wrong times for maximum benefit – based on the customer behaviour shown in their sales by time data.
i agree , thats why we close 1 hour after everyone close
We have also seen a shift towards better afternoon sales, we seem to have less tradies and people going to work in the morning but more and more that call in after school/work on the way home. Sales are the same if not a little better overall but the times are later.
i am the oposite busy at 5 am and not much happening at 5 pm . most mornings i have a line up at 5:10