What a sold out arena means for the business next door

An arena sells out and the number sounds enormous. Twenty thousand people, a few hundred yards away. The temptation is to prepare for a fraction of twenty thousand. The useful question is which fraction, and at what hours, because those two answers are what a rota and a stock order actually need.

The headline number is not your number

Start subtracting. A sizeable share arrive by car and park underneath the building, so they never touch your street. Another share arrive on public transport from the opposite direction to you. Many eat before they leave home, and many more eat inside, because arenas are in the food business too and they price accordingly.

What is left is the group who arrive early enough to want something, on foot, on your side of the building. For most businesses within a few blocks, that is a low single digit percentage of the headline. On a twenty thousand seat sell out, a low single digit percentage is still hundreds of people, which is a serious night. It is just not a fraction of twenty thousand.

Geography decides most of it

• Between the venue and the main transit stop is the best position there is. Everyone walks past you twice.
• Between the venue and the parking is a good pre show position and a poor post show one, because people leave quickly by car.
• On the far side of the venue from the transit stop, you get the locals and the people who planned to come to you, and very little passing trade.
• One block off the main walking route is a different business from one block on it, however close the two look on a map.

This is why a map matters more than a list. Knowing an event is a mile away tells you little; knowing which direction the crowd walks from tells you whether to order in.

Two waves, not one night

The pre show wave starts around two hours before doors and is the better of the two. Unhurried, higher spend per head, and it clears out on its own before the show starts. The post show wave arrives inside ten minutes of the last song, spends less per head, and is far more sensitive to a queue.

Between them is the quietest stretch of your week. That gap is the single most useful thing about knowing an event is on: it is two hours you can use for the prep, the restock and the staggered break that would otherwise eat into a rush.

Different events, different crowds

• Pro sports brings the biggest raw numbers, arrives earliest, and drinks the most. The best case for a bar and a mixed one for a restaurant, since a lot of it eats standing up.
• Stadium concerts skew later and younger, with a heavier post show wave and a pre show that starts closer to doors.
• Theatre and comedy brings smaller numbers with far higher spend per head, and a genuine pre theatre dinner window rather than a drinking one.
• Family shows are matinee weighted and leave early. Strong lunch trade, no evening at all.
• Community events bring the smallest numbers but the most reliable ones, because the counts are real registrations rather than estimates, and they often fall on nights nothing else is on.

Work out your own ratio

There is no published figure for how many arena visitors reach a given door, and anyone quoting one precisely is guessing. But you can measure yours in a fortnight. Note the nights something large is on nearby, note what you did against a normal night for that weekday, and divide by the crowd figure. Three or four of those and you have a ratio that is genuinely yours, which beats any benchmark.

Gigwake gives you the input half of that sum: every venue within 5 miles pinned on a map of your block, with a crowd range on every event and a note on what the range rests on.