After five years of occasional insights and explorations of the joys of secondhand bookstoring, I think the time has come to retire this blog.
We know much more than when we started, holy, so naive, in August 2016. I expected a fast turnaround and it was slow. Basic questions like what sells and how quickly and which computer systems we should use were mysteries (now resolved, mostly). I had a lot to learn about the relentless labour of dealing with physical things, so goals, readily named and planned, took rather longer to bring into the physical world. (Indeed, some of them still lie before us). And of course, in the last couple of years a pandemic has run roughshod over all of our ideas about what should be and when.
I am going to claim success though, as well as a huge amount of joy from the doing, in this first phase.
Here is my favourite measure, our revenue in the last 52 weeks from 2016 until recently. The graph in effect compares revenue each week with the same week the year before, so when the line goes up, that means we did better than the same week the year before, and when the line goes down, it means we did worse. Breakeven revenue these days is about $135k (it is much higher than it used to be for reasons that I have explained previously).
You can see that we roughly doubled revenue between our first year (to July 2017) and our fourth year (to July 2020). Amazing. It was relatively quick to get to $100k and relatively slower to get to $120k (hence my point above about a turnaround taking longer than expected).
The big jump in April 2021 just reflects the fact that the year before was the first lockdown, so that leap is partly about making up for the slump the year before.
Taking that into account, you can see that, before the recent big dip (more on this next), we had hit breakeven. Let me tell you that it is a much more pleasant place. One can be less concerned with calculating when we will next run out of money, and more interested in thinking about how to continue to process and sell more books, and what else is possible with the glorious platform that a commercially sustainable store presents.
What a pandemic wrought
The next graph shows revenue per week for the two years to January 2022.
You can see clearly in this graph the impact of Auckland's lockdowns on bookstore revenue:
The first one, in March and April 2020 was not too long, with revenue back to normal within seven weeks, and with sales stronger than usual in the weeks afterwards, which you can just sort of see if you squint or you can take my word for. (The big spikes each quarter are the weeks we had our clearance sales except the most recent spike, which is one big book sale for someone fitting out a bar that came through two weeks before Christmas.)
The second lockdown was the short one in August 2020, with revenue affected really only for three weeks, followed by that glorious long period with few restrictions. (There was another brief lockdown in the first week of March 2021, but that hardly appears in the chart).
Then of course came the long period of restrictions in August to October 2021. Revenue has now recovered, after 13 weeks or so of muted trading, December was our best ever (a slow start was compensated for by that enormous sale), and recent weeks have been strong overall. But it is going to take a while for those weeks that we were closed or mostly closed to work their way out of the annual figures.
A kindly and far-sighted landlord helped with the rent and the generous taxpayer covered our wage bill, so the cash impact of these periods without revenue was much less dramatic than the graph suggests. Which is a long way of saying that we aren't broke yet.
Whatever next
The main work of the bookstore continues to be getting in, processing and then finding customers for as many books as possible each day, each week and each month. It is mostly a recycling game that we are in, with about 80 per cent of books coming in by donation. We have built a lot more storage recently by converting the old bathroom to a storeroom, but there has been a particularly large inflow of books just recently too (lockdown no doubt played a role as well as our ongoing efforts to attract people with books to dispose of). This pile gives us a lot to work with in terms of boosting the number of new-to-us books on shelves. As we [know very well], new arrivals sell faster. We'll need to continue to work to increase the number of books we process within the limits created by donations, storage, staffing and systems.
I am also looking forward to getting back to monthly events, once is possible to schedule them again with reasonable confidence. We have had 52 so far, often monthly, often poetry and sometimes music. We know that they are good for revenue and creating another small stage for culture is an important part of the whole bookstore project.
I am keen also to return to the quarterly clearance sale. You can see how good it is for revenue above. But we didn't have one in October and we have skipped the one planned for the first quarter of 2022 as well. I hope that they will be back with us in April.
And I continue to think about other complementary uses for the space when it is not being used to sell books. The backyard in particular seems like an open opportunity. A coffee stand continues to be on my mind. And I have had lots of suggestions over the years for potential events, including in the evening. I think some very small-scale experiments with a pop-up bar in the backyard for a few hours in the late afternoon could be worthwhile too. Perhaps next summer.
For now, thanks to all those customers, staff, curators, performers, friends and fellow investors who have helped get us over the first and hardest of hurdles. Let us see what the next five years hold. Surely continued joys and even greater successes lie before us.