Festivals bring mixed results for city retailers - Kevin Buckle
When the dust finally settled at the end of last week and everybody, from those performing in the Festival to the city centre retailers, spoke about how things had been, I was a little surprised at the amount of negativity.
Performers definitely felt the last week of the Festival had been different this year, with lower attendance figures than earlier weeks when many had expected the last week to be the best.
While the timing has been blamed by some, given things started a little later than usual and clashed with the schools returning, I suspect there was more to it than just the timing.
There does appear to be as many people as ever now in Edinburgh in August, but I think the difference is many are not here for the Festivals and are just on holiday, or as is the case for many of Avalanche’s customers, for the gigs.
I really wasn’t sure if we would even beat last year’s August takings figure, as while we are now in a new, bigger shop filled with even more stock, there was definitely a great increase to those takings from fans of AC/DC and Oasis being in town.
And while this year was still good for the shop, I didn’t expect Bon Jovi to give us quite the same boost as AC/DC and wonderful as it was to have The Cure in Edinburgh with Slowdive and Mogwai, it was never going to match Oasis playing three gigs stretched over five days.
As things turned out, our takings were up by five per cent in August, which is lower than the increase we are aiming for for the year, but given the huge figure we were trying to beat, I was more than happy to see we had achieved an increase at all.
I’m not sure what effect the partial closure of Princes Street had, especially with the trams not running, but certainly other shops, maybe closer to the fire damaged building, were talking about some days only being half what they would expect to take.
The footfall figure for the Waverley Market was down 6.7 per cent for that last week in August, but personally it didn’t feel any quieter in the shop, probably for all the obvious reasons, given the gigs.
I do feel sorry for many of the city centre pubs and restaurants that have been struggling for some time now and I’ve not really heard much so far about how this year’s Festival was for them.
Certainly when I spoke to customers in Edinburgh for the gigs there was little interest in going to a small comedy show when I was asked what they should do, with most just wanting to find a nice pub to eat some food.
So hopefully that offers a glimmer of hope to those pubs, though I think the difference these days is that they were only planning to spend a couple of hours in the pub rather than a night out.
For Avalanche our next target is to improve on the takings for last Christmas, which were again excellent after our move in the November. So I’ll certainly be very happy with any increase that manages to reach double digits.