Chief Execative of Waterstones, James Daunt, explains the impact of inflation on business and how booksellers are uniquely affected and protected from rising prices and decreasing spending.
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00:00Inflation hits us in many ways. The most important and most impactful on us is to the extent that it
00:06changes people's buying habits. Effectively, what happens to retail spending? How many people do we
00:11have in our stores? Books themselves have been relatively insulated from price inflation. We've
00:19had some, and in some parts of the book market, but books, relatively speaking, have gone up.
00:25Actually, my book selling career is 30 plus years, and book prices in that time have moved up
00:33well below inflation. In that respect, we're okay, but we're always looking at how people are
00:39spending money. Then, of course, our own cost base, what's happening to our wages and the like.
00:44Well, the impact is that it's very much more expensive to run shops. Therefore, you need
00:50your sales to be going up in order to be able to afford all of that. All your profits are going to
00:54go down. Ever has it been thus in retail. Retail is a very unforgiving environment. Those who fall
01:03on the wrong side of that are going to go out of business. That's why retailers do go out of
01:07business on a regular basis. We're lucky as a bookseller because books are doing really well
01:12at the moment. In the pandemic, there was a lot of increase in reading, and that's carried on
01:18post-pandemic. We've got massive bestsellers at the moment. The latest, Rebecca Yaros, we've got
01:24another of the Hunger Games coming out. We've got these big, big popular books exploding one after
01:30another after another. If you're a retailer that's benefiting from those tailwinds, then
01:36obviously life's pretty good. Life is good for publishers and good for booksellers at the moment.