Just the other day I was scrolling through an antique vendors’ Facebook group and I came across this comment, attached to a vendor’s post asking if anyone new any stores in their area with open spaces — because their current store was closing down:

As far as I can tell, that’s the ‘vibe’ of 2023 in a nutshell: the economy is terrible, everybody says so. Inflation, war in the Middle East & Eastern Europe, a recession “any day now”, etc.

I wanted to find out if that Facebook commenter’s feeling was true, though: is 2023 a bad time for antique stores & vendor malls? So I pulled together some statistics from stores using Quail, and ran the numbers:

That chart shows the monthly sales for the average antique store, since January 1st, 2020. Each color shows a different year, so you can see how — for example — August and September have been very consistent year-over-year.

The drop-off in 2023 for November and December is because I’m writing this on November 10th, 2023 — so we don’t have sales data for the days that haven’t happened yet!

A couple of things jump out at me from this chart. First off, it’s fascinating (yes, yes, I have a problem!) how clear the pandemic and lockdown(s) show up: a slower-than-usual winter in 2020, followed by a just crushingly bad April 2020 (👋🏻, lockdown) and then a “v-shaped” recovery. As far as vendor malls go, the pandemic ended in August 2020 and things have been completely back to normal ever since.

Beyond that, though, it looks to me like 2021 was sort of an outlier year. And 2022/2023 have been…well, they’ve been pretty good, and pretty normal. The average store isn’t doing quite as well as they were in 2021 (probably because in early 2021 folks were making up for shopping time lost to the pandemic!), but they’re also doing about as well as they were last year.

My takeaway? Maybe this is a bad economy, maybe it isn’t – but if you’re an antique store or vendor mall, you’re (on average) doing about as well this year as you were last year, and about on par with how than you were the year before. It’s a good economy for antique stores! Or at least, not a bad economy.

That’s certainly interesting, but let’s take a look at a the same data in a different light:

That chart shows the average price per item sold, broken down in the same way. This chart is a little less interesting than the first, but it does show one really clear thing: the year-over-year trend is items selling for less, not more (inflation? What inflation?). That may be part of the reason for the ‘bad economy vibe’ – vendors are selling fewer high-priced items and more ‘smalls’, which definitely feels like a bit of a bummer.

Oh, and the other thing in that chart: the crazy-high $47 average price for items in April 2020? Yep, that’s the pandemic again; with most stores closed for the whole month and just doing Facebook Marketplace or curbside pickup, the number of small items sold fell almost to zero. It’s not worth doing curbside pickup for a $17 sale, I guess!

Finally, let’s look at the flip side of that chart, and see how the number of items sold per month has changed over time:

Ah-ha! The trend here is even more clear: stores are, on average, selling more items every month in 2023 (with the exception of October, barely). Pairing that with the previous view, I’d say that overall stores are doing about as well in dollar terms as past years, but selling a larger number of smaller-ticket items.

Not a real big insight, it’s true. But what’s notable in all of this is the dog that didn’t bark: there’s no obvious recession, and no big drop in antique store and vendor mall sales over the past year. There’s a small drop, but mostly just coming down from the weird high that was 2021! In our view the vibe that this is a bad economy for antique malls is just that…nothing but a feeling.