Although generally in newsagencies when we look at the magazine department we use quantities unlike most other departments where we look at total sales, I am not so sure this is right.
I decided to look at magazines that deal with house improvements. So using our system I created an instant category for them. I then examine them for July/September quarter 2008 and compare that to July/September quarter 2009.
What I first noticed is the dominant magazine in this category is AUST HOUSE & GARDEN which had 57% of this category. Here are the raw figures.
This category did well over this period for this newsagent. By quantity sales grew by 33%, revenue growth was a respectable 19.8%. As you can see, there were major variations in quantity sales by titles. This you can often see in benchmarking when the quantities of sales are low. You might see it better in the graph below
You can also see dramatic changes in total sales because of changes in prices of magazines.
Now I leave it to you to decide what would be the meaningful result by quantity or total for you?
