The second week of the Easter fortnight 2016 saw a peak in sales leading to the GTN Bestsellers Index of All Item Sales being up 8% on last year as a warm sunny spell allowed people to make the most of the first school holiday week.
Now we have data for the complete fortnight the GTN Bestsellers team have been able to look back at Easter sales since 2009 to see if there are any useful indicators that could be fed into discussions about the fixing of Easter in the future.
We looked at the week-on-week uplift of the first Easter week each year, the total sales of the holiday fortnight as a percentage of the year’s total sales and then the post Easter week change in sales. ‘Early’ Easter weeks are shaded in purple, ‘Late’ Easter weeks in yellow.
Our analysis indicates that the First Easter week uplift and the post Easter week sales are more driven by the weather than timing of the Bank Holiday. Even when Easter butted up against the May Bank Holiday in 2011 and 2016 sales dropped off.
The Easter data that does have some correlation with the date of the holiday is the sales over the Easter fortnight as a percentage of the year’s total sales. Apart from when Easter was in Week 16 in 2014 the importance of sales as part of the whole year increases. From a lowly 3.47% in 2013 when Easter was in Week 13 to a very significant 7.16% last year when it was in Week 15.
From a GTN Bestsellers point of view, the best date for the Easter fortnight is weeks 15 and 16 ( that would have meant Easter Sunday being April 17th this year.) Easter can then really shape the sales totals for the year, and it’s not right on top of the May Day Bank Holiday. Of course the weather would need to be great too, but that just needs some more research for another day.
How are you using your Easter sales performance to project your sales for the rest of the year? Our data could be used to predict year end sales of between 40% up and 2% down year on year. What factors will you be overlaying to make sense to owners, investors and set sensible targets for managers? Do e-mail us with your comments: trevor.pfeiffer@tgcmc.co.uk
GTN Bestsellers Top 50 sales volumes compared to the same week last year:
