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June marked the third consecutive month of year-over-year (YoY) visit growth across all three mall formats, and AI-powered audience analysis suggests these gains are coming from an increasingly diverse customer base. We dove into the foot traffic data to see what's driving mall performance heading into the second half of the year.
Visits to indoor malls, open-air shopping centers, and outlet malls all remained in positive YoY territory in June 2026, with indoor mall visits up 1.2%, open-air shopping center visits up 5.1%, and outlet mall visits up 1.0% compared to June 2025.
June's performance caps a strong first half of the year. Aside from a March dip, likely driven in part by calendar shifts and by the initial gas price shock, every month of 2026 has seen visit growth across all three formats – though open-air shopping centers continue to set the pace. The format has posted the strongest YoY visit growth every month this year and has hovered above 5.0% growth in both May and June, highlighting the enduring appeal of outdoor, convenience-driven retail as the weather warms up.
Analyzing malls' captured market audience makes the outlook for malls even more compelling heading into H2 2026. Much of the recent retail narrative has centered on a bifurcated consumer, with spending growth concentrated among higher-income households while more value-conscious consumers pull back. Mall audience data, however, suggests a different dynamic.
Across all three mall formats, the median household income (HHI) of the captured market declined modestly between June 2025 and June 2026. Combined with rising visit volumes, this suggests that malls are broadening their appeal and attracting a wider range of consumers, including more value-conscious shoppers – suggesting that malls are expanding their customer base rather than relying more heavily on affluent shoppers.The category's combination of retail, dining, entertainment, and one-stop convenience may be helping malls resonate with a broader audience in an environment where consumers remain selective about discretionary spending.
With all three formats posting YoY visit growth and audiences broadening, malls enter the back half of 2026 with real momentum. As retailers and mall operators plan for the critical back-to-school and holiday seasons, the challenge will be converting this wider, more diverse audience into loyal, repeat visitors.
For more data-driven retail insights, visit placer.ai/anchor.
Consumers are entering the back half of 2026 under real pressure. The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index registered 49.5 in June, the second-lowest reading in records going back to the 1970s and nearly 20% below where it sat a year earlier. According to Deloitte, roughly four in 10 Americans now exhibit deal-driven, cost-conscious habits, and close to seven in 10 retail executives view value-seeking as a structural change rather than a temporary one.
So when Amazon's Prime event ran June 23rd to 26th, alongside overlapping promotions from Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Kohl's, the week became more than a battle for retail traffic. It became a barometer. Who shows up when the deals land, when they show up, and where they steer their trips offers a real-time read on how a pressured, deliberate consumer is actually behaving. We analyzed foot traffic across the four major chains to find out.
Measured against each retailer's year-to-date day-of-week average, the four major retailers analyzed all saw visits climb during Prime Week. Best Buy and Kohl's led the pack on opening day, with visits running 18.1% and 18.4% above their respective baselines on June 23. Target wasn't far behind at 16.3%, while Walmart posted a steadier 4.7% increase. And all four chains continued seeing visit gains throughout the analyzed period.
A lift across all four chains, not just Amazon's direct competitors in one category, suggests a consumer who is responsive and cross-shopping. When promotions appear, the value-seeker turns out, and they spread those trips across whichever retailers are running deals.
Isolating the event from seasonality sharpens the picture. Comparing daily visits to the prior five weeks' day-of-week average controls for longer-term trends, which matters this year because Prime Day shifted to late June, much closer to Memorial Day and Father's Day than usual and against a higher recent traffic baseline. Even on that tougher benchmark, Best Buy stood out, with visits up 12.3% on June 23 and holding double digits through Thursday. Target saw a meaningful early-week lift, while Walmart sat just below its recent baseline and Kohl's slipped to -3.9% by Friday.
Best Buy's strength against recent weeks carries the most useful read on the consumer. Electronics are big-ticket and discretionary, the kind of spending a pressured shopper might be expected to defer. But the event-driven lift suggests that consumers have not stopped making sizable purchases – they have just made them event-dependent.
But stacking 2026 against the comparable 2025 Prime Week (July 8th to 11th) adds another layer to the story. Target was the standout performer here, with visits up 10.3% year-over-year (YoY) on opening day and gains every single day of the event. Kohl's also outpaced last year through most of the week, while Walmart held modestly positive ground throughout.
Best Buy tells the most complex story. Even as it posted the strongest event-driven lift relative to recent weeks, its visits ran 2% to 5% below last year's Prime Week – a reminder that a strong showing against a recent baseline doesn't always translate to year-over-year growth. These YoY declines suggest that while compelling promotions can still draw shoppers into stores, they have not fully offset softer demand for discretionary electronics.
Analyzing offline traffic to major retailers during Prime Day 2026 suggests that, although sentiment may be near record lows and value-seeking may now be a fixed habit, the appetite to spend is still there – although it has become more deliberate.
For more data-driven retail insights, visit placer.ai/anchor
Bed Bath & Beyond returned to physical retail in August 2025, when the first store to carry the name since the chain's 2023 liquidation opened in Brentwood, Tennessee. The format signaled how much the strategy had changed. At roughly 15,000 square feet, in a former Kirkland's, the location is a fraction of the 25,000-to-50,000-square-foot stores the brand operated before bankruptcy, reflecting a deliberate move toward smaller, neighborhood-format stores.
The format shift is just one element of a broader restructuring. The name now belongs to Beyond Inc. – since renamed Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. – which is reviving the legacy brand through two distinct acquisitions. The company is acquiring Kirkland's, the home-decor chain, and converting select stores into small-format Bed Bath & Beyond Home locations, and has also agreed to acquire The Container Store and co-brand its stores as "The Container Store / Bed Bath & Beyond."
But in a category that increasingly rewards discounters and sharply differentiated retailers, is there still room for a brand like Bed Bath & Beyond, and in what form?
It is easy to forget how dominant Bed Bath & Beyond once was. In 2019, already past its heyday, it still captured the single largest share of visits to home furnishing retailers in the country, acting as the broad, generalist default for the category.
A lot has changed since. Visits to brick-and-mortar home furnishing retailers fell roughly 27% from 2019 to 2025, and within that smaller pie the leaderboard reshuffled around Bed Bath & Beyond's absence. HomeGoods now sits at the front, reflecting where the category's momentum has gone – toward off-price and sharply differentiated retailers. At the same time, no single full-price, national retailer moved into the position Bed Bath & Beyond vacated, the broad home brand that shoppers across very different incomes and life stages defaulted to.
That open role is the opening a revived Bed Bath & Beyond is built around. The brand is betting that what failed was the format – a massive store carrying an exhaustive, full-price assortment behind a coupon, which is a format that off-price now beats on price and that specialists beat on focus. But the recognition itself, a name a wide range of shoppers still associate with outfitting a home, has remained strong, and the comeback may work if it claims the role without rebuilding the format. That is what the unusual structure is designed to do.
Share of Total Home Furnishing Visits by Chain — the 20 Largest Plus All Others — 2019 vs. 2025
Circle area is proportional to each year's total visits, which fell about 27% from 2019 to 2025. Slices show each chain's share of all home furnishing visits; the 20 largest chains are shown individually and the remainder is grouped as "Other." Bed Bath & Beyond liquidated all its stores in 2023 (its small 2025 relaunch was too recent to register here); Christmas Tree Shops (2023) and Conn's HomePlus (2024) closed all locations and have not returned. Source: Placer.ai.
| Retailer | 2019 visit share | 2025 visit share |
|---|---|---|
| Bed Bath & Beyond | 23.7% | 0.0% |
| HomeGoods | 19.3% | 38.3% |
| IKEA | 11.5% | 11.2% |
| At Home | 7.5% | 10.5% |
| World Market | 5.3% | 7.2% |
| Ashley | 4.4% | 5.1% |
| Kirkland's | 4.0% | 3.0% |
| Christmas Tree Shops | 3.7% | 0.0% |
| The Container Store | 1.8% | 1.6% |
| Rooms To Go Furniture Store | 1.7% | 1.8% |
| Bob's Discount Furniture | 1.4% | 2.7% |
| Pottery Barn | 1.1% | 1.2% |
| Crate and Barrel | 1.0% | 1.4% |
| Old Time Pottery | 1.0% | 0.6% |
| Conn's HomePlus | 1.0% | 0.0% |
| La-Z-Boy | 0.9% | 1.0% |
| Value City Furniture | 0.8% | 0.9% |
| Raymour & Flanigan Furniture Store | 0.7% | 0.9% |
| Homesense | 0.7% | 2.9% |
| Living Spaces | 0.7% | 1.1% |
| RH (Restoration Hardware) | 0.0% | 0.8% |
| Norwalk Furniture | 0.0% | 0.6% |
| Furniture Row | 0.0% | 0.5% |
| Other | 7.8% | 6.8% |
Rather than reopen its own stores, Bed Bath & Beyond is returning through two retailers it is absorbing, both of which have been losing visits year over year. The declines are not one shared problem but two different ones, and the logic of the comeback is that the Bed Bath & Beyond name addresses each.
The Container Store's difficulty is frequency, with a business organized around storage and home organization – a category shoppers turn to only in occasional project bursts, and affluent customers likely have few reasons to come back between closet overhauls and moves. Co-branding the stores as Bed Bath & Beyond is meant to widen that reason to visit, folding in the everyday kitchen, bath, and bedding categories the name is known for, and lifting trip frequency without pushing away the premium shopper the chain already has.
Meanwhile, Kirkland's is a broad home-and-decor generalist without a sharp identity, sitting in the same exposed middle that off-price and specialists have been pulling apart – its stores draw a mainstream suburban shopper but offer little specific reason to choose them. Converting them to Bed Bath & Beyond Home is meant to supply that reason, a more recognized name with broader pull than the Kirkland's banner generated on its own.
Beyond improving the assortment, Bed Bath & Beyond can also boost traffic to converted Kirkland stores and co-branded The Container Stores by bringing in an audience that each chain lacks.
The Container Store draws a narrow, premium audience organized around storage and home organization, while Kirkland's draws a broader, more middle-income suburban shopper for general home goods and decor. Analysing each chain's trade area composition as well as Bed Bath & Beyond's 2019 audience suggests that Bed Bath & Beyond can help each one reach the half of the market it currently misses: In its last pre-COVID year, Bed Bath & Beyond over-indexed both among the premium households The Container Store already draws and among the mainstream suburban families that have long anchored Kirkland's.
And for Bed Bath & Beyond, the arrangement supplies two store networks aimed at different shoppers, one more affluent, one more mainstream, reached through a single name both still recognize.
At the same time, the challenges should not be understated. A recognized name is the beginning of a value proposition rather than a substitute for one, and the proposition the brand carried into bankruptcy, an exhaustive assortment paired with a coupon, is the one that ultimately failed.
But two years after the chain closed, many consumers still think of Bed Bath & Beyond as a destination for home essentials, the kind of store associated with furnishing a first apartment, outfitting a dorm, or building a wedding registry. And familiarity has proven effective at generating first visits, as a range of revived retailers from Abercrombie to Polaroid suggests, but converting those visits into a habit is a separate question. Whether shoppers return will depend less on the name above the door than on what the reformatted stores actually offer.
For more data-driven insights, visit placer.ai/anchor
When Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May 2024, much of the blame landed on a single menu item: a $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp deal that proved far too popular for its own margins. The chain shuttered roughly 130 locations, was acquired by Fortress Investment Group, and brought in a new CEO to steady the brand.
So the decision to bring Endless Shrimp back in spring 2026 – this time as a limited-run promotion – wasn't an obvious one. We dove into the data to see how the relaunch is landing, and what it would take for Red Lobster's comeback to hold.
In the weeks before the Endless Shrimp relaunch, the average number of visits to each Red Lobster location was running below year-ago levels – down by as much as 8.7% year over year (YoY) the week of April 13, and lagging the broader full-service restaurant segment.
Then came April 20. During the first full week of the Ultimate Endless Shrimp promotion, Red Lobster's per-location visits flipped sharply positive and have stayed there since, peaking at 24.3% YoY the week of April 27 and holding double-digit gains into early June – though the magnitude of the boost has gently eased over time. Notably, this outperformance came while full-service restaurant traffic remained roughly flat YoY.
The traffic surge suggests that Red Lobster's brand equity remains strong. Even after bankruptcy, store closures, and years of operational challenges, the chain was able to generate a meaningful visitation lift by bringing back one of its most recognizable promotions.
But Endless Shrimp can only do so much – and the pressures facing the chain, from elevated seafood costs to a burdensome lease portfolio, will remain even after the promotion inevitably ends. As the company continues to rightsize and improve profitability, the key question is whether its investments in menu innovation and customer experience will be enough to garner lasting customer loyalty. Will Endless Shrimp have a better ending this time around?
Visit Placer.ai/anchor to find out.
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Anchored Ep 7: The Data-Driven Customer Era
Zora Sentat has spent her career at the intersection of data, marketing, and commerce. As Chief Commercial Officer at cubeiQ, she's seen how businesses are – and aren't – making the most of what they know about their customers.
In the latest episode of Anchored, Zora joined Ethan Chernofsky to discuss the state of the data landscape, where retail media is falling short, and why human expertise still matters in an increasingly automated world.
Here are 5 key takeaways from the conversation:
Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer – and this year it arrived amid mounting cost pressures. Gas prices were at their highest Memorial Day level since 2022, while domestic airfare had risen more than 20% year over year – although travelers who booked early were often able to secure better deals.
That makes the holiday weekend a useful bellwether for the summer season ahead. Which corners of the travel economy are thriving, and where are consumers pulling back as budgets tighten? We dove into the data to find out.
Visits to gas stations and convenience stores - a reasonable proxy for how much Americans are driving – fell 7.0% YoY over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, measured from Friday through Monday. The decline pushed visits below their 2021 level for the first time since the pandemic-era baseline.
The drop is even more striking when viewed against the holiday's typical pattern. Over the past four years, Memorial Day weekend has consistently generated roughly 2% to 3% more traffic than a typical weekend, measured against the average of the preceding six Friday-to-Monday periods. This year, that premium disappeared. Instead, visits ran 3.1% below the recent norm, marking the first time in at least four years that the unofficial start of summer drew fewer fuel-and-snack stops than an ordinary weekend.
This suggests that forecasts of record-setting Memorial Day travel may have overstated the strength of road-trip demand as fuel costs surged. But another possible explanation is that Americans still traveled, just not as far – an interpretation supported by the decline in travel distances across most hotel tiers (see below). Surging fuel costs may also have nudged some travelers who had planned to drive toward air travel instead.
Nationwide Gas Station Visits, Memorial Day Weekend 2026 (Fri–Mon)
Memorial Day weekend failed to lift gas-station traffic, with visits falling below even 2021’s pandemic-era levels.
And indeed, airport visits by domestic travelers in the lead up to the holiday were comparatively resilient, slipping just 0.5% YoY on the Thursday and Friday before Memorial Day.
Compared to airports' prior six-week baseline, demand heading into the holiday weekend actually increased. Airport visits during the Thursday-Friday travel rush ran 9.7% above the average of the previous six weeks, up from 8.2% in 2025 and 7.1% in 2024. That resilience was likely driven, at least in part, by travelers who secured lower fares by booking well in advance. And because air travelers tend to skew more affluent than road trippers, those who did book later may have been more willing to absorb higher travel costs despite the sticker shock.
Major Airport Visits During Lead-Up to Memorial Day Weekend (Thu–Fri)
Although airport traffic remained flat YoY, the pre-holiday surge was more pronounced against a backdrop of softer recent demand, with visits running 9.7% above the prior six Thursday–Friday average.
Hotels, meanwhile, saw declines in domestic traveler visitation across all tiers as some travelers likely looked for ways to reduce lodging costs, whether by staying with friends and family, choosing lower-cost accommodations, or taking shorter trips.
But the pullback was far from uniform. Economy hotels took the hardest hit, with visits down 7.2% YoY – the steepest decline of any segment. Midscale, upper-midscale, and upscale properties landed in the middle, posting declines between 4.3% and 5.0%. At the top end of the market, the softness was more limited: Upper-upscale hotels slipped just 2.2%, while luxury hotels declined 2.7%.
The same K-shaped pattern showed up in how far guests were willing to travel. The share of hotel visitors coming from more than 100 miles away declined across nearly every tier – most sharply at the lower end of the market. Only luxury hotels saw their share of long-distance guests actually increase by 1.2 percentage points – showing that affluent domestic travelers were still traveling the distance.
Memorial Day Weekend (Fri–Mon): May 22–25 ’26 vs. May 23–26 ’25, U.S.
Hotel Visits, Year-over-Year Change
Visits slipped across every hotel class, but the high end held up best – and luxury was the only segment to draw a larger share of guests from 100+ miles away.
Percentage Point Change* in Share of Visitors From 100+ Miles Away, 2026 vs. 2025
*A percentage-point change is the difference between the two years’ shares – e.g., Luxury rising from 51.3% to 52.5% is a 1.2-point gain.
The unofficial start of summer revealed a widening split in how Americans allocate their travel spending. Driving-related stops and budget hotels bore the brunt of the pullback, while air travel and higher-end lodging continued to hold steady.
Whether this divide narrows or widens will depend largely on the path of gas prices and consumer confidence. As fuel costs ease, will budget-conscious travelers return to the road in greater numbers? Will air travel rebound, and will hotel visitation follow?
For more data-driven consumer and travel insights, visit Placer.ai/anchor.
This report leverages location intelligence data to analyze the auto dealership market in the United States. By looking at visit trends to branded showrooms, used car lots, and mixed inventory dealerships – and analyzing the types of visitors that visit each category – this white paper sheds light on the state of car dealership space in 2023.
Prior to the pandemic and throughout most of 2020, visits to both car brand and used-only dealerships followed relatively similar trends. But the two categories began to diverge in early 2021.
Visits to car brand dealerships briefly returned to pre-pandemic levels in mid-2021, but traffic fell consistently in the second half of the year as supply-chain issues drove consistent price increases. So despite the brief mid-year bump, 2021 ended with overall new car sales – as well as overall foot traffic to car brand dealerships – below 2019 levels. Visits continued falling in 2022 as low inventory and high prices hampered growth.
Meanwhile, although the price for used cars rose even more (the average price for a new and used car was up 12.1% and 27.1% YoY, respectively, in September 2021), used cars still remained, on average, more affordable than new ones. So with rising demand for alternatives to public transportation – and with new cars now beyond the reach of many consumers – the used car market took off and visits to used car dealerships skyrocketed for much of 2021 and into 2022. But in the second half of last year, as gas prices remained elevated – tacking an additional cost onto operating a vehicle – visits to used car dealerships began falling dramatically.
Now, the price of both used and new cars has finally begun falling slightly. Foot traffic data indicates that the price drops appear to be impacting the two markets differently. So far this year, sales and visits to dealerships of pre-owned vehicles have slowed, while new car sales grew – perhaps due to the more significant pent-up demand in the new car market. The ongoing inflation, which has had a stronger impact on lower-income households, may also be somewhat inhibiting used-car dealership visit growth. At the same time, foot traffic to used car dealerships did remain close to or slightly above 2019 levels for most of 2023, while visits to branded dealerships were significantly lower year-over-four-years.
The situation remains dynamic – with some reports of prices creeping back up – so the auto dealership landscape may well continue to shift going into 2024.
With car prices soaring, the demand for pre-owned vehicles has grown substantially. Analyzing the trade area composition of leading dealerships that sell used cars reveals the wide spectrum of consumers in this market.
Dealerships carrying a mixed inventory of both new and used vehicles seem to attract relatively high-income consumers. Using the STI: Popstats 2022 data set to analyze the trade areas of Penske Automotive, AutoNation, and Lithia Auto Stores – which all sell used and new cars – reveals that the HHI in the three dealerships’ trade areas is higher than the nationwide median. Differences did emerge within the trade areas of the mixed inventory car dealerships, but the range was relatively narrow – between $77.5K to $84.5K trade area median HHI.
Meanwhile, the dealerships selling exclusively used cars – DriveTime, Carvana, and CarMax – exhibited a much wider range of trade area median HHIs. CarMax, the largest used-only car dealership in the United States, had a yearly median HHI of $75.9K in its trade area – just slightly below the median HHI for mixed inventory dealerships Lithia Auto Stores and AutoNation and above the nationwide median of $69.5K. Carvana, a used car dealership that operates according to a Buy Online, Pick Up in Store (BOPIS) model, served an audience with a median HHI of $69.1K – more or less in-line with the nationwide median. And DriveTime’s trade areas have a median HHI of $57.6K – significantly below the nationwide median.
The variance in HHI among the audiences of the different used-only car dealerships may reflect the wide variety of offerings within the used-car market – from virtually new luxury vehicles to basic sedans with 150k+ miles on the odometer.
Visits to car brands nationwide between January and September 2023 dipped 0.9% YoY, although several outliers reveal the potential for success in the space even during times of economic headwinds.
Visits to Tesla’s dealerships have skyrocketed recently, perhaps thanks to the company’s frequent price cuts over the past year – between September 2022 and 2023, the average price for a new Tesla fell by 24.7%. And with the company’s network of Superchargers gearing up to serve non-Tesla Electric Vehicles (EVs), Tesla is finding room for growth beyond its already successful core EV manufacturing business and positioning itself for a strong 2024.
Japan-based Mazda used the pandemic as an opportunity to strengthen its standing among U.S. consumers, and the company is now reaping the fruits of its labor as visits rise YoY. Porsche, the winner of U.S New & World Report Best Luxury Car Brand for 2023, also outperformed the wider car dealership sector. Kia – owned in part by Hyundai – and Hyundai both saw their foot traffic increase YoY as well, thanks in part to the popularity of their SUV models.
Analyzing dealerships on a national level can help car manufacturers make macro-level decisions on marketing, product design, and brick-and-mortar fleet configurations. But diving deeper into the unique characteristics of each dealership’s trade area on a state level reveals differences that can serve brands looking to optimize their offerings for their local audience.
For example, analyzing the share of households with children in the trade areas of four car brand dealership chains in four different states reveals significant variation across the regional markets.
Nationwide, Tesla served a larger share of households with children than Kia, Ford, or Land Rover. But focusing on California shows that in the Golden State, Kia’s trade area population included the largest share of this segment than the other three brands, while Land Rover led this segment in Illinois. Meanwhile, Ford served the smallest share of households with children on a nationwide basis – but although the trend held in Illinois and Pennsylvania, California Ford dealerships served more households with children than either Tesla or Land Rover.
Leveraging location intelligence to analyze car dealerships adds a layer of consumer insights to industry provided sales numbers. Visit patterns and audience demographics reveal how foot traffic to used-car lots, mixed inventory dealerships, and manufacturers’ showrooms change over time and who visits these businesses on a national or regional level. These insights allow auto industry stakeholders to assess current demand, predict future trends, and keep a finger on the pulse of car-purchasing habits in the United States.
