Gilets jaunes protests hit French bookshops as sales fall

Bookshops were just one sector of the French economy to suffer from the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests across France on five consecutive Saturdays between 17th November and 15th December. 

As the violence—or fears of violence—escalated, more shops and metro or underground stations remained closed in Paris on those days. The result was that year-on-year physical and online book sales continued to fall as the weeks went by, according to the 200 independent members of the observatory run by the French Booksellers Association (Syndicat de la Librairie Française, SLF).

After a 7% upturn in the first week of November, sales declined by 3.8%, 4.6%, 2.7%, 5% and 2.9% in the following four weeks, Observatory figures show. The weekends of 1st, 8th and 15th December were particularly disastrous, with drops of 8.3%, 13.9% and 16.8%.

The market research firm GfK, whose data is based on takings at the till of 5,000 retail outlets of all types, said that book sales adjusted for inflation for the first three weeks of the demonstrations and riots dropped by 9.5%, 8.4%, and 3.2%, the trade publication Livres Hebdo reported.

Amazon could be a winner from the outburst of discontent. An anonymous source told the French economic daily Les Echos that the online giant’s online sales rose 30% during the weekend of 8th-9th December.