Ann: DSK 1H FY22 Announcement, page-71

The good news with a business like dusk is that you don't have to wait for the report - you can go watch the stores themselves and see what sort of turnover they are generating.

The company also discloses useful metrics like average transaction value and breaks down expenses like occupancy and employee benefits to the point where you can get a good idea of operating costs of individual stores and whether or not a store is profitable, and by how much.

It does take a fair bit of watching across several stores to build up a large enough sample size to draw conclusions and properly model, but well worth doing to get a good picture ahead of the market, in my opinion.

From what I have seen, sales are constant and healthy, even in the supposed quieter times of the day. I have only seen one really quiet store, and that was in Rhodes. I only had a few minutes to watch and the mall itself was very quite at that time. The store itself was very well positioned though, right next to the main entrance to the Ikea. So you would think there would be a lot of foot traffic in peak times. I may have to return at a slightly busier time.

Obviously you cannot get any visibility of their online business in this way, so I discount it completely from this analysis and consider any income from online sales as a bonus.

The notion that rents rise outright when interest rates rise seems to be unfounded to me. I'd have no doubts that rent yields would rise, but this would be more a reflection of falling market values of the underlying property rather than rents themselves increasing. I have not read of Westfield or any other retail mall operator having plans to raise rents.

As for other rising consumer prices, you cannot know for sure, but the demographics of dusk's clientele largely seem rather price inelastic to me. Make of that what you will.