Five Below Keeps the Crowds Coming in Q2 2026

Momentum at the Milestone

Five Below opened its 2,000th store in July, after an H1 in which a $5 bao-bun squishy turned the value retailer into a cultural destination.

But location analytics suggest the chain's traffic story runs much deeper than one viral dumpling craze – and with summer underway, the company's visit data remains impressively firm.

Every Store Is Pulling More Weight

For much of last year, Five Below's visit growth leaned heavily on new real estate. In Q1 2025, overall visits were up 8.2% year over year while average visits per location declined 4.6% – the chain was adding stores faster than it was adding shoppers.

One year later, however, per-location traffic is catching up fast. In Q1 2026, overall visits jumped 26.2% YoY while average visits per location surged 20.4%, and in Q2 2026 the pattern held, with overall visits up 19.8% and per-location visits up 15.9%.

To some extent, the shift is due to a deliberate slowing of expansion to focus on site quality and grand-opening execution. And the strategy appears to be working, with new stores opening strong and existing stores drawing steadily bigger crowds. The company's last reported results told a similar story from the register's side of the counter: Five Below reported comparable sales growth of 22.7%, with comparable transactions up 19%.

The Dumpling Hype Cooled… But the Crowds Kept Coming

Five Below's Q1 2026 traffic surge was likely due at least in part to consumers craving the Mystery Squishy Dumpling, the blind-box collectible that CNBC crowned the heir to Labubu back in March.

But while interest in the dumplings began to fade heading into summer, the craze hasn’t run out of steam yet: Toymaker RMS recently named an exclusive licensing agent after selling more than 40 million units worldwide. Meanwhile, newer trends such as Pokémon trading card releases are stepping in to keep the registers busy – management noted that trading cards have proved an especially durable traffic driver. And the company also continues to lean into a broader “chase-and-amplify” strategy, using social listening and a deliberately wide assortment across categories like beauty, lounge and licensed exclusives to spot emerging trends early and scale into the next viral moment.

Full Steam Ahead

Viral moments come and go, but Five Below's 2026 traffic data points to something sturdier: 2,000 stores, each one busier than it was a year ago, posting double-digit visit growth every single month of 2026 so far.

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