As of last night, October is officially an “up” month which makes 4 of the last 5 months with increases. No rock star stuff, just a few points here and there. It looks like Oct will be 8-9% up which is where September was too. Even better, labor was down 3K compared to last year.
It was a LONG slide in this resort town. Beginning with Oct 2008, every month from then through May of this year was a comp decline. Overall the decline was 35% from the peak. Starting with June all months have been up except August which was down 3.8%. We have a long way to go to get back to where we were in 2006/2007 and early 2008 but things are looking up right now!
Not only are we up for October, but unless we have to close today or tomorrow we will have our 3rd best month ever :shock: I was not expecting that at the beginning of the month.
Thats great news! I opened at a very, very bad time, but having said that, its been nothing but UP since the opening. If other markets are starting to trend back, then next year should be great.
October will never be a good month in a ski town… October and May duke it out each year for worst month honors. We do more in a good week during the “season” than we do in either month… but Up is up. I’ll take it. BTW, we were up for the month as a whole before the “extra” weekend kicked in. The rest is Gravy.
Once every 823 years the Month of October has 5 complete weekends.
:roll:
I bet you read that on the internet…it must be true!
I KNOW!!! (holding head down in shame…) I DO AS MUCH FACT CHECKING AS FOX NEWS! ROFL.
I happened to be chatting when my gf chimed in the ‘fact’ and I typed before I looked. My bad, as soon as I did, I looked at Google to see the ‘spread’. Sorry 'bout that, good call.
This year, October was actually tougher for me with the arrangement of days than last year. We picked up a Sunday and dropped a Thursday, but my average Thursday is about 25% more than my average Sunday. All the more reason I’m happy to have an “up” one.
The entire assortment of days has been tough for the past two years for us: New Years on a Friday and Saturday, July 4th on a Saturday and Sunday (mostly celebrated on Saturday), Halloween on Saturday and Sunday (mostly celebrated on Saturday), Christmas Eve and Christmas days on Friday and Saturday.
For a mostly dine-in establishment the above is very bad - anything that keeps people home, out watching fireworks, trick-or-treating, etc, on a weekend destroys our week. Guestimating of course, but the way those days fell probably cost us $30,000 in sales each year for the past two years.
Most of the holidays are nothing special for us. Halloween and 4th of July are good examples. If anything, they tend to be smaller than whatever day of the week they fall on since people are going out for fireworks or our downtown tick or treat. Christmas and Thanksgiving we are closed. New Years Eve and New Years Day are huge though.
Looking forward to a good November. With Pizza Hut closing in our town a week ago, we should pick up some business although I would guess more of that trade will go to Dominos since the price and quality equation is about the same there.
Steve
Was you increase based on last year or pre GFC?
We are up around 10% on last year but still down about 1% on pre GFC. We were lucky that here in Australia we didn’t have the fall out as the rest of the world mainly due to the strong mining sector in our state (90% of the national average) but we still did have a downturn. We were lucky in our store that our decline was in single didgits and nothing like what you experienced, but many poor operators did suffer well into double didgit declines.
None the less it is good seeing plus growth figures - it helps the morale immensely.
Hope you have a great season this winter.
In that case, we are no-where near “up”. Our increase is only in relation to 2009. We are still 20-30% down from our 2007-2008 peak numbers. That decline is in line with the over all sales tax revenue decline in our community during that period.
According to IRS reporting data, our county has lost over 2000 jobs. That may not sound like much, but we only had 15,000 to begin with so that means that close to 15% of all the jobs that we had here are gone. Many of the people that held those jobs are gone too.
We went from an unemployment rate that hovered around 2-3% for years to a level much higher than that today. It is an expensive place to live even when you have work.
The most important thing is that you are chipping it back, even if it is slowly, slowly.
I think it will be years before many of us see the sales levels and groths experienced before the crunch so we are now all cutting the cloth to suit the current market.
When I look back to prior the 2008 cruch we were gettin year over year increases of 20% plus and this is now realised as unsubstaniable growth - we were living in “fairy story” world.