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Economic uncertainty ahead of the European Union membership referendum is impacting on high street footfall, Waterstones m.d. James Daunt has warned.
Speaking to The Bookseller, Daunt said: “There is lower footfall out there at the moment caused by uncertainty around ‘Brexit’. Everyone else is in the same boat and uncertainty is not good for the economy.”
Both the Remain and Leave campaigns officially kicked off on 15th April. Statistics released by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) confirmed that there was a worrying decline in high street footfall in the month of April: it was down 4.7% year on year, the deepest annual decline since February 2014.
Diane Wehrle, marketing and insights director at retail performance analyst firm Springboard, which supplied the figures to the BRC, said the “Brexit” debate was “undoubtedly” to blame for the drop in footfall. “The high street decline seen over recent months . . . can be attributable to the poor weather for this time of year, but with digital sales and retail parks also slowing down, it signifies something more is at play,” Wehrle said.
The reported drop-off in footfall comes despite Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market figures being up by more than 10% year on year in 2016 to date.
The looming referendum is helping booksellers post a spike in “Brexit” related book sales, meanwhile. Rebecca MacAlister, Oxford area manager for Blackwell’s, said: “We have displays in the shop representing both sides of the argument, which are selling well. Politics is a section we do well with all year round.”
Sales of “Brexit”-related titles have also been strong for Peter Donaldson, owner of Red Lion Books in Colchester. He said: “We have definitely been rolling under what we usually get this time of year over the past few weeks [in footfall terms], but on the other hand we have been selling lots more political books than usual.
“We have moved our politics section to a table at the front of the shop, even though we don’t usually get as much out of that section . . . those books have been selling really well.”
Mike Sansbury, manager of Grove Bookshop in Ilkley, which has also had “a quieter month than this time last year”, has also seen a boost in sales of EU- related titles. “We have sold lots of books off the back of [the ‘Brexit’ debate]. People are definitely wanting to be informed about it,” he said. “We’re stocking books from both sides and we’re selling them, too.”
British political journalist David Torrance’s EU Referendum 2016: A Guide for Voters (Luath Press), an impartial look at both sides of the debate, has been Grove Bookshop’s biggest seller among the political tranche, Sansbury said. The guide has sold 2,858 copies since 11th April, according to Nielsen BookScan, up 1,038% in comparison to Torrance’s comparable title last year, General Election 2015: A Guide for Voters in Scotland (Luath).
The big pro-”Brexit” seller, meanwhile, is Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan’s Why Vote Leave (Head of Zeus), which has sold 7,739 copies since 24th March, more than three times the number his 2011 anti-EU title, A Doomed Marriage: Britain and Europe, has achieved to date.
As previously reported by The Bookseller, titles in support of leaving the EU are dominating “Brexit” book sales, although Clement Knox, Waterstones non-fiction buyer, who is responsible for the retailer’s offer of politics titles, said: “The bestsellers [are] objective guides to the issues for voters. We expect interest in all referendum titles to continue to gain momentum as we approach [the vote], though inevitably there will be sharp drop-off once we are past the 23rd.”
A survey of trade figures conducted by The Bookseller in February, before the referendum date was confirmed, showed that 70.6% were against leaving the EU, with 27.2% planning to vote in favour of leaving and 2.2% undecided. At the time, trade figures such as Daunt, Bonnier Publishing c.e.o. Richard Johnson and Alma Books m.d. Alessandro Gallenzi said leaving the European Union would be a “disaster” for the book trade and for the country.
The Bookseller is conducting another survey of the book trade's views on the EU referendum. Please take a few minutes to complete it here.