Vendor Types, Attendance, Experience and Sales 2019–2021: Evidence From Five Rural Oregon Farmers Markets

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Abstract
Farmers markets provide a direct‐to‐consumer marketing path for farmers and small businesses, facilitating customer discovery and product refinement. This paper explores farmers markets as a business incubator, with a focus on beginning vendors and resilience to a shock, namely, COVID‐19 market restrictions. We investigate how vendor sales vary by the type of products a vendor sells (farm products, processed food, and crafts/art), their attendance, market experience and the presence of COVID‐19 restrictions. We use a unique dataset of 9,371 sales observations from 399 vendors at five small to medium‐sized farmers markets in rural Oregon from 2019 to 2021. We estimate that beginning vendors have, on average, 11% lower sales than established vendors, holding other factors constant. Vendors’ sales, on average, were higher with higher market attendance. Results suggest that farm product vendors have higher sales than processed food and craft and art vendors, larger crowds encourage higher sales, and rainfall lowers sales, all else equal. Individual market day average vendor sales were, on average, 8.9% higher during days with COVID‐19 market restrictions than during days without restrictions, which was likely driven by experienced farm vendors.

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