Is Your Antique Booth Actually Making Money? How to Run the Numbers

A booth that sells $600 a month feels like a success. Whether it is depends on numbers most vendors never put in one place: rent, commission, what the goods cost, the supplies, and the driving. Here is how to work out what a booth actually earns you — and how to tell when one has stopped being worth keeping.

What a booth really costs

Vendors think of booth cost as rent. Rent is the beginning of the list:

• Rent. The fixed monthly number.
• Commission. A percentage of every sale, taken before your check. Easy to forget precisely because you never hand it over.
• Cost of goods. What you paid for the things that sold.
• Supplies. Tags, hooks, shelf liner, cleaning products, display pieces.
• Mileage. Every restock run, every re-tag trip, every check collection.
• Your time. Not deductible, but if you are deciding whether a booth is worth keeping, hours matter.

The arithmetic

Take a month. Say the booth sold $600 with a 10% commission, rent is $250, the goods that sold cost you $140, you spent $30 on supplies, and you made four trips totalling 60 miles.

• Gross sales: $600
• Less commission (10%): −$60 → $540 reaches you
• Less cost of goods: −$140 → $400
• Less rent: −$250 → $150
• Less supplies: −$30 → $120
• Less mileage (60 miles at whatever your rate is): call it around $40 → roughly $80

A $600 month is an $80 month. That is not a disaster — it is profit, and the inventory that did not sell is still yours. But it is a very different number from the one in your head, and it changes what you would do about a rent increase.

Find your break-even

The most useful single number a booth vendor can know: how much you have to sell each month before the booth is worth having.

Take your fixed monthly costs — rent plus typical supplies and driving. Work out your typical gross margin after commission and cost of goods; for many booth vendors somewhere around half of the sale price ends up as margin, though yours may be very different and it is worth calculating rather than assuming. Divide the fixed costs by that margin.

Rent and running costs of $320 against a 50% margin means about $640 of sales a month just to stand still. Now you have a number you can compare against, every month, in about ten seconds.

The two numbers that predict trouble

Monthly profit tells you where you have been. Two others tell you where you are going:

Sell-through — what fraction of what you have actually sells in a period. Falling sell-through with steady sales usually means you are adding stock faster than the booth can move it, and rent is being paid to store it.

Days on the floor — how long things sit before selling. When your average creeps up, the booth is telling you something about your pricing or your buying before it shows up in the monthly total. Items past ninety days are usually a pricing decision you have been avoiding.

If you run more than one booth

Track them separately or you will never know which is which. It is extremely common for one strong location to carry a weak one for a year or more, with the vendor seeing only the combined figure and concluding that both are fine.

Per-booth totals answer questions you cannot otherwise ask: whether the second location earns its rent, whether a category sells in one mall and not the other, whether the drive to the farther one is paid for by what it returns.

When to give a booth up

Not on one bad month — seasonality is real and January is not July. The signals worth acting on:

• Three or four consecutive months below break-even, in a season that should be normal
• Sell-through falling while you keep adding inventory
• A rent increase that pushes break-even past what the booth has ever done
• An hourly rate, once you count the driving and restocking, you would not accept from anyone else

The vendors who do well at this are not the ones who never have a bad booth. They are the ones who notice within a season instead of a year, because they were looking at a number rather than a feeling.