Home improvement was one of the more successful sectors throughout the pandemic. With lockdowns keeping people at home, many found the time to tackle DIY projects sending visits to home improvement retailers to all-time highs, significantly outperforming pre-pandemic numbers. Now, as lockdowns begin to fade into our memories and with inflation and gas prices causing people to think twice before opening their wallets, we checked in to see how the sector is faring.
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is the latest reincarnation of consumer borrowing and has quickly dominated the conscience of the consumer, the media, concerned regulators and incumbent mobile/electronic payment platforms and wallets. Here, I briefly trace the origins of consumer debt for context and then bring the narrative forward to a current review of the BNPL landscape and what Fable’s consumer spend data is telling us about BNPL consumers and their usage, its popularity, the effect it is having on established payment providers and what this might mean for the future.
With inflation in both the US and UK forcing shoppers to trade down for cheaper goods in certain categories, is discount apparel retailer Primark seeing a tailwind from shoppers looking for cheaper apparel choices? In today’s Insight Flash, we look into Primark’s spend growth versus its broader industry and subindustry, trends in average basket, and which brands are most likely to be cross-shopped. In Primark’s core UK market, spend growth on a three-year basis outpaced the broader industry and subindustry pre-pandemic.
Competition for non-niche streaming video subscription apps is growing, but not just in terms of the number of players - in terms of actual performance. The fastest growing SVOD (subscription video on-demand) apps, by way of in-app purchase revenue, are Peacock TV, Paramount+ and discovery+. Over the past 12 months, they've grown by 133%, 107% and 25%, respectively.
Put lightly, the last few years have been volatile in the brick-and-mortar retail sector. Yet, Walmart and Target, two of the industry’s heavyweights have consistently overperformed. This included a strong showing in the spring of 2022 that came as COVID’s effects were dissipating, creating the sense that retail could finally enjoy a period of extended normalcy. Yet, that period barely had time to take off before rising gas prices and inflation began to impact consumer behaviors and spending.
As inflation continues to rise, many consumers are reportedly turning to discount stores for household essentials. Our competitive analysis of major discount retailers—including Five Below (NASDAQ: FIVE), Dollar General (NYSE: DG), Dollar Tree, Inc (NASDAQ: DLTR), and 99 Cents Only Stores—found that Five Below had the highest average transaction value, but Dollar General had the highest quarterly transactions per customer and quarter-over-quarter customer retention in the second quarter of 2022.
Two years after the first lockdowns, the return to office question still lingers. Cities and companies are anxious for office occupancy to return to pre-pandemic levels. The majority of workers, however, still prefer to work from home, whether fully remote or hybrid. As we enter the second half of the year, and as the shock of economic shifts brought on by inflation and gas prices levels out, we took a look at recent foot traffic data to offices to see how the sector is performing.
The Home Depot is climbing the ranks of Retail apps. For two quarters in a row, Home Depot gained twice as many new installs than direct competitor, Lowe's. It's was also the 11th most-downloaded Shopping app in the U.S. in Q2 2022, up from #20 a year ago. On average between the two home improvement competitors, Home Depot has pulled in 100% more monthly downloads since January. A paid App Store Optimization (ASO) keyword strategy appears to be a key driver to Home Depot’s comfortable margin ahead of Lowe's this year.
U.S. job growth soared in July, as the pandemic-impacted categories of leisure and hospitality bounced back to meet consumers’ continued demand for out-of-the-house experiences. But inflation continues to cut into spending power, with food inflation in particular remaining stubbornly high. We dove into retail foot traffic data to understand how the current dynamics are impacting key consumer-facing industries.
With gas prices surging over the last year, electric vehicles are looking more and more like an attractive alternative. But auto manufacturers aren’t the only ones to benefit from their increasing popularity – companies operating charging stations are also primed to take off. In today’s Insight Flash, we compare the success of three top charging station brands, looking at overall growth, changes in average ticket, and popularity by geography.
The Hong Kong food and restaurant industry is a monopoly whereby several companies own the majority of the businesses. As such, this makes it difficult to not walk into a restaurant chain in Hong Kong when you dine out. Similarly, on food delivery platforms, choices are limited to several big restaurant chains. Which restaurant chain is winning over the food delivery apps? According to Measurable AI’s transactional e-receipt data, McDonalds, KFC, TamJai, and Cafe de carol are some top restaurant chains on food delivery platforms Foodpanda(ETR: DHER) and Deliveroo(LON: ROO). Let’s look deeper into their market share on each platform.
The Dodge Momentum Index (DMI) increased 2.9% in July to 178.7 from the revised June figure of 173.6. The Momentum Index, issued by Dodge Construction Network, is a monthly measure of the initial report for nonresidential building projects in planning. The index is shown to lead construction spending for nonresidential buildings by a full year. In July, the commercial component of the Momentum Index rose 5.5%, while the institutional component fell 2.0%.
When we last looked at the Placer.ai Mall Indexes, a clear decline was taking place, driven heavily by high gas prices and continued inflation. Yet, at that time there was also an expectation that July could be even worse, in particular because of continued economic headwinds and in comparison to a very productive July 2021. Yet, the result was far more positive than expected.
Amazon held its annual Prime Day event on the 12/13th July this year. In an environment where online spending has continued to decline from the highs reached in 2020 and 2021 and the current cost-of- living crisis is biting hard, we were curious to know whether this squeeze on incomes might have dulled the consumer love affair with Amazon in 2022. However, our data shows that the number of Amazon transactions during the week that this year’s Prime Days took place, rose nearly 12% compared to 2021.
A heat wave at the end of July led to scorching temperatures across the US. As consumers cranked up their air conditioners and iced their beverages, did any businesses benefit from the warmer weather? In today’s Insight Flash, we take advantage of our partnership with WeatherOptics to examine the impact in two markets on the East and West Coast, and to deep dive into how the heat wave progressed for movie theatres, a seemingly cool haven for those looking to keep their AC bills down.
Subway has made headlines for both its store closures and creative menu updates, so we decided to dive into recent foot traffic data to understand how these changes are impacting Subway visits nationwide. Rightsizing has been classically seen as a softer terminology to discuss store closures. But there is a significant trend of rightsizing that is more focused on optimization. Foot traffic data shows that Subway’s overall visits are down year-over-three-year (Yo3Y) while Yo3Y visits per venue are nearing or exceeding 2019 levels.
With our latest location data, we analyzed foot traffic for three leading theater chains – AMC Theaters, Regal Cinemas, and Cinemark – to see how the movie theater recovery is progressing and to understand how inflation and changes in media consumption are impacting the behaviors of moviegoers. Year-over-three-year (Yo3Y) data for the first half of 2022 shows that visits to the three leading movie theater chains are steadily rising to pre-pandemic levels.
What do the COVID-19 pandemic, a looming recession, rising interest rates and global conflicts have in common? They all impact nearly every aspect of life, including how brands spend their ad dollars. While the lasting impact of these events remains to be seen, we are starting to see how advertisers are responding to the shifting sands. Hint: Most of them are spending less. Still, there are opportunities to convince them to open their wallets. Recently, MediaRadar looked at a sampling of advertising on over 215 digital content companies like BBC News, ABC, and USA Today.
In October 2021, Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta to reflect its focus on building the “metaverse” – an immersive virtual environment that could redefine social interactions online. Many believe the metaverse is the next big thing in tech. In collaboration with Bloomberg, we took a look at the recent hiring trend in the world of metaverse to see which companies have been riding the recent hype.
We dove into foot traffic trends for Popeyes, KFC, and Taco Bell to see how menu changes impact visits. Although the data presented here does not include all drive-thru and pick-up orders – and so does not represent the totality of the brands’ foot traffic – these metrics still show how a single popular item can significantly boost traffic across a QSR brand.
