Grand Final Friday – What does the data tell us about the Public Holiday?

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Grand Final Friday has always been a pretty big day on the AFL calendar. This year, though, the State Government have changed the day to become a formal public holiday. This has generated a fair amount of news, with a fair amount of negative sentiment. Of all the themes discussed, from should it be public holiday, to is this just a political play from the government, one of the subjects close to our hearts is “Is this a good or bad thing for business”?

Small business could be the ones who wear the cost of this. Employing people on a public holiday costs more. Penalty rates mean keeping the business open on Friday will be a burden that some business can’t manage. Larger business will just shut up shop. Equally, what will the impact be from a regional basis? Will people use this long weekend to head out of town and make it a mini holiday? Will the city become a ghost town, because of the day off?

Anecdotally, you’ll hear all sorts of opinions. Rather than talking about that, let’s look at the data we’ve got available.

How much of a topic is ‘Grand Final Public Holiday’?

Using Google Trends, we can see this is a topic that has really trended up. Here’s the data from Google, where ‘Grand Final Public Holiday’ is the search. We can see the media has really ramped this story up, and it’s obviously a hot topic.

MYOB BankFeeds – Understanding transaction data

In terms of other data sources, we at MYOB collect data to help businesses with their transactions, with a real time saving feature of automatic categorisations using Bank Transactions. It must be said, that this data is sampled; that is, this is not a direct 1 to 1 record of transactions. Equally, the method of getting this data is based on the description of the transaction.