I’m happy with our February trading numbers. In a year on year comparison and adjusting the 2012 numbers for the extra day, we did okay, good in fact.
While magazines, overall, are down 2% for us, women’s weeklies are up 1% – significantly against trend. Diaries are up 99% off a good base for Feb. Plush is up 174% ($4K+ for the month) and Gifts are up 275%. Basket depth for us is up 11% – showing wonderful growth in shopper efficiency.
While Valentine’s Day was an excellent season, the rest of the month has been terrific with moves we have made paying off in some of the new money areas for traditional newsagencies.
Yes retail is tough and the newsagency channel is doing it tough, newsagents working as retailers, chasing change and standing for something in their businesses are, overall, doing well. This makes a newsagency good investment as every newsagency has these opportunities.
Hard to believe that as well as gifts, cards and lotteries being up so are our magazines, Darrell Lea (which we no longer have a display of) and NEWSPAPERS are also up on 2012 figures.
This prompted me to look at our sales for 2 periods, the same as above and also for Oct through to Feb. I chose Oct to Feb because we closed on Sundays at the beginning of Oct 2012. I must say I was very very pleasantly surprised. I am up in Gifts, Mags, Ink, Lotto and Stationary but down in Papers and Instant Scratchies (both popular Sunday items). I am down a little in cards and must say a little disappointed given the large growth in Gifts that we have. The most pleaseing aspect is that I now work 6 days a week and have Sundays off with no negative impact on my business…….now if the rain would just stop for a while i could get out to do some fishing…..