Its very easy to cruise along on the happy happy waves of busyness and good sales. The more testing times in retail are when the poor sale days arrive, as arrive they inevitably do. Having passed through the quieter months leading up to Christmas, post New Year, a three week break, then our reopening in mid February to the storms that battered our sales further into submission over half term. I've found the Winter months this year emotionally much more testing and tougher than previously. I think the pandemic has left me more mentally and emotionally fatigued than I realised.
So, here we are, at the beginning of March. Spring? Well, its not quite here, is it?. Though we are planning ahead for improving trade as we get nearer to Easter, and the official beginning of 'the tourist season'. It is a bit like waiting for a new dawn. Something that appears to move further and further away the more closely you observe the sky portents and read the runes of winter's embers. Anxiety, your name is expectation.
The Ides of March are here. Though these were not originally seen as ominous, that's a legacy of Shakespearean melodrama. The ides are fortuitous days leading up to the first full moon in a month. This March the first full moon falls on the 18th, two days before the Spring Equinox. Trade, however, at the beginning of March has been in a very palpable doldrum. The Courtyard is an eerily becalmed place, two thirds of its shops not open on some days. In three years of our business we've not yet had a full month of March sales. With everything else that's been going on, March still remains an unexplored retail continent. How it is now, well, maybe this is what March is normally like.
But just to muddy the predictive waters. Out there in the surrounding cosmos there are the rough cut omens of tougher times. Fuel cost hikes, on the normally expensive anyway North Norfolk coast, are here. In Sheringham its at £153.9* and climbing, and already 155.9 in Holt and that's just this weeks price increases. Its harder to maintain optimism when the twin pincer movements of a huge cost of living squeeze and a Russian invasion on the eastern fringes of Europe goosestep over the horizon. Though Sheringham is unlikely ever to be under total siege bombardment, there is a feeling of folk hunkering down for one.
Over our first three years we have done exceptionally well establishing a business in the midst of some really dreadful unsupportive conditions. Plagued as we have been by a variety of external political, economic and health crises. Just as we get over one, here comes another we haven't yet tried - War. Lets just say that my flag at present is flying low and weary.
After years of working in retail I've had to become better at the practice of maintaining a wider perspective. One day or weeks bad takings means nothing. If its happening to everyone, its not you that is doing something wrong. But any sense of balance I may try to hold has its limits. I am after all human, and a very restless insomniac. For at night is where the more troubled negative thought patterns, that I attempt to foreswear during the day, tend to leak out.
We have plans for the business for the year ahead. Ideas that the pandemic put on hold. So we're hoping to try out a few craft events and pop up shops during the summer. Jnanasalin has recently changed our website over to a different e-commerce provider. After that, there is a product photography update and a more streamlined online product range. A website is never a complete facsimile of its high street shop. Focused single product promotions appear to be how selling via the internet tends to operate.
The challenge for us in 2022 will be in keeping the plates of shop, fairs and website spinning. The tendency in previous years with just the shop and website, has been for the website to drop to the bottom of the to do list. But in the coming year, it may be that a whole lot of effort on all these fronts may enable us to survive, even if we end up just standing still sale's wise. But this is getting far too far ahead of the curve of conditions. And into the realm of predictive texting. and you know how infuriatingly unhelpful that can be. Let's just wait and see what actually happens shall we?
*5th March £154.9
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