So. September. That was…a thing.

I’m afraid we don’t have a lot to announce this month – we’ve spent most of September heads-down working on a big new idea to help vendors. On that note, actually: if you or any of your vendors track your own inventory, get in touch! We’d love to give you a sneak preview — and a discount on — the next big thing we’re working on.

In the meantime, I thought I’d pause and take another look at how antiquing has recovered or changed in our brave new COVID era. We last did this back in June, when it looked like we were just coming out of lockdown and we thought that things…might…be heading back to normal. It’s been three months since then, and I thought we might have enough data to look back at 2020 and compare it against 2019.

So how’s antiquing doing?

The entire rest of the world notwithstanding, it actually looks like antiquing is doing great. Take a look at this chart showing the average weekly sales of stores using Quail over the past two years:

What are we looking at here? Well, 2019 looks like what you’d expect – a slow January followed by steady sales through the year and a fast run-up from mid-October through to the end of the year. We’ve seen this every year in Quail, and anecdotally this is what lots of store owners tell us sales usually feel like.

The first two months of 2020 followed this same pattern, then you get the terrifying dip in sales over COVID lockdown – at the worst week, March 30 through April 5, sales were down 70% for the average store. In dollar terms, that’s just shy of $3000 per week that just…wasn’t selling. Once everyone started to come out of lockdown, though, sales took off – and they’ve stayed strong ever since, with stores on average selling more than 50% vs. what they sold in the same week in 2019.

This is even clearer when we look at the average value of transactions – during lockdown, quite a few stores started doing curbside or online sales, which drove the average price of items sold up as we all focused on selling big-ticket items like furniture. What’s interesting, though, is that the average value of a transaction – how much the average paying customer spends – has also stayed about 50% higher vs. 2019:

So what does that all mean? Well, we can’t speak to the larger economy – we’re antiquers, not economists – but it’s looking like now is a great time to be running (or opening!) an antique store or vendor mall, despite everything else that’s going on in the world. It may be getting dark out there, but from behind our registers things are looking pretty rosy.