John Shepherd, Partridges: “2023: a sad and beautiful year”

That was the year that was. 2022 turned out to be a memorable year for all the right and wrong reasons.

And “last year was obviously crazy” is a phrase we have now heard for three years running. It has been widely uttered by suppliers, staff, myself and one person I heard on the radio just recently.

We know why 2020 was crazy and the repercussions of that made 2021 crazy too. But 2022 introduced a new experience of pleasant surprise and disappointing reality in terms of running a speciality food store.

Take our shop sales for example. Every month from May onwards saw a double-digit uplift in sales – apart from November which was a fraction below 10%. This looks like good news. But it had not a lot to do with expertise on our part or customer satisfaction but a lot to do with food price inflation.

There were other unusually uplifting parts to the year and unusually depressing parts of this curate’s egg of a year too. Firstly the weather from May onwards was highly conducive to speciality food and drink. Bearing out Shepherd’s famous theorem and highly intellectual insight, “when the weather’s hot, we sell a lot”.

Overlooking the pressing concerns about climate change, and for the first year possibly ever, we did not have to cancel or reduce the size of the Duke of York Square fine food market due to high winds or heavy rains, and with additional seating available the Square became something of a destination throughout the year.

However, at the same time costs were rising alarmingly, particularly the aforementioned food prices, and the additional hiring and staffing expenses managed to dampen the spirits despite the absence of rain.

Then there were events. The Platinum Jubilee delivered our busiest ever day on June 3rd with sales up 26% for the month, but also probably our most sombre day occurred on September 19th with the Queen’s funeral. In July sales were up 46% on the previous year and August 26%.

Customer counts were similarly positive throughout the year. June was a massive 74% up thanks to the Platinum Jubilee again, July 43% up and August 30% up.

The most distinctive achievement of all this was that the third quarter, a traditionally difficult quarter, actually contributed positively to the rest of the year’s performance. Which has never really happened before. Yet any uplifting short-term outlooks were suppressed by thoughts of the economic travails of the country and the war in Ukraine.

To sum it all up, in 2023 customers spent more and kept coming back, but the volumes they bought were less and the future looked very gloomy as we entered the Christmas season.

I remember in a film called Down by Law, from 1986, the great actor and director Roberto Benigni spoke the words, “It is a sad and beautiful world”. I never really understood what he meant in context and in fact it turned out to be a misquote. But it has resonated with people down the years and clattered around the internet quite a bit. Perhaps the craziness of what happened in 2022 can be best summed up as being a part of what proved to be a sad but, at times, beautiful year.