In recent years, Best Buy has faced significant challenges – from intensifying e-commerce competition to a slower housing market weighing on major categories like appliances.

But the retailer hasn't been resting on its laurels, rolling out a range of initiatives aimed at unlocking value from its physical and digital assets, including an expanded online Marketplace to enhanced retail media offerings and a strategic partnership with IKEA.

So how are these efforts playing out on the ground? We dove into the data to explore the rationale behind these initiatives and see what foot traffic data can tell us about their impact and future potential.

IKEA Shop-in-Shop Drives Visits

One of the more visible ways Best Buy is making new use of its physical footprint is through its shop-in-shop partnership with IKEA, which launched in fall 2025 across 10 stores in Florida and Texas. 

The concept, designed to give customers an integrated way to upgrade their homes, pairs IKEA furnishings with Best Buy's kitchen and laundry offerings. By helping shoppers visualize complete home projects, the shop-in-shop creates natural cross-selling opportunities across complementary categories while providing an additional reason to visit segments that have faced persistent headwinds.

And foot traffic data suggests that the bet may be paying off. Through the first four months of 2026, Best Buy stores with IKEA shop-in-shops outperformed the national Best Buy fleet – as well as the chain's Texas and Florida benchmarks – every single month. And with Best Buy now opening consultation spaces inside IKEA stores in Frisco, Texas, and Tampa, Florida, the partnership between the two brands appears poised to deepen further.

Turning Pickup Runs Into Premium Ad Inventory

Best Buy is also unlocking additional value from its store fleet through an expanded physical retail media network. Beyond traditional in-store advertising placements, the company monetizes its growing volume of pickup visits through Curbside Cinema displays, giving brands access to shoppers during a brief but highly attentive moment when there are few competing distractions for their attention.

And the visit data shows just how significant that opportunity is. In Q1 2026, more than 20% of Best Buy visits lasted under ten minutes – well above the 14.2% logged across discretionary chains.  By serving short, brand-safe content during those windows, Best Buy is turning idle waiting time into measurable ad impressions, monetizing a moment most retailers let slip by unused.

Reaching Sports Fans In-Store

Best Buy is also experimenting with increasingly sophisticated in-store advertising activations. The retailer recently partnered with a sports streaming platform on an immersive store takeover, using exterior signage, digital displays, and branded experiences to engage shoppers at multiple touchpoints. The campaign built on a broader recognition that Best Buy's customer base skews heavily toward sports enthusiasts - with the retailer reporting that its shoppers are 26% more likely than average to be sports fans. And this affinity has helped drive partnerships with organizations such as the NFL while creating new opportunities for Best Buy Ads.

Placer data from four of Best Buy's most-visited locations in Q1 2026 shows that while sports fandom is a consistent thread across markets, the specific interests vary considerably. Brooklyn's Bay Parkway location, for example, draws especially high concentrations of NHL and baseball fans, while Holyoke, Massachusetts skews more heavily toward NFL enthusiasts. Each market has its own distinct mix. And in a retail media landscape where targeting precision is the primary selling point, these market-level differences are another opportunity Best Buy is well positioned to capture.

More Than a Place to Shop

As Best Buy seeks to become more than just a retailer, its stores are increasingly serving multiple functions at once – driving merchandise sales, supporting advertising initiatives, and helping brands connect with consumers. Given the early signs of traction behind these strategies, it may come as little surprise that incoming CEO Jason Bonfig plans to build on them as he pushes Best Buy further toward becoming "a retailer, media, advertising, and technology company."

For more data-driven retail insights, follow Placer.ai/anchor

The U.S. matches of the FIFA World Cup kicked off at Los Angeles Stadium (aka SoFi Stadium) in Inglewood, CA, on June 12, 2026 with the highly-anticipated USA vs. Paraguay matchup and a star-studded opening ceremony.

Across the Los Angeles area, watch parties and fan activations drew supporters eager to take part in the matchday atmosphere. Among them was the City of Inglewood's “The Wood Cup”, a street festival just a short walk from the stadium itself, which Inglewood Mayor James Butts called “a free alternative to attending the very expensive World Cup soccer match in person”.

With just a few city blocks separating the two events, we examined how their audiences of U.S-based fans differed and how this multi-layered engagement translated into broader economic benefits for the surrounding community.

The Opening Match Drew an Affluent Audience

Audience segmentation reveals that visitors to The World Cup U.S. opener skewed more affluent than visitors to The Wood Cup festival – a finding that aligns with the premium cost of attending a globally significant sporting event. According to Spatial.ai’s PersonaLive dataset, Ultra Wealthy Families represented the largest audience segment at the stadium, accounting for nearly 30% of visitors – a share on par with recent Super Bowls. As the tournament progresses to later-stage matches with even greater demand, this trend could become even more pronounced.

Meanwhile, The Wood Cup street festival attracted a more diverse and less wealthy visitor base. Near-Urban Diverse Families made up the largest share of attendees by a wide margin, while City Hopefuls – lower-income urban households – also accounted for a significant portion of festival visitors. 

The Nearby Street Festival Was Dominated by Locals

Diving deeper into visitor travel patterns provides further insight into the stadium versus street festival audiences. Location intelligence shows that many stadium visitors came from throughout Southern California and beyond, while the street festival appears to have functioned as a primarily local gathering. The stadium saw a significantly larger share of visitors traveling more than 10 miles, with more than a third traveling over 250 miles, underscoring the event's broader regional draw and national appeal. On the other hand, nearly 70% of street festival attendees traveled less than 10 miles, highlighting the neighborhood orientation of the event.

This contrast reinforces the role of fan activations alongside major sporting events. While the stadium attracted affluent visitors who traveled significant distances, the street festival engaged a highly local audience unlikely to attend the match itself – playing an important role in broadening participation and capitalizing on World Cup excitement across the host city.

Matchday Festivities Delivered a Major Boost to Nearby Dining

One of the clearest ways that broad participation in a major sporting event benefits host communities is by driving traffic to nearby businesses from travelers and locals alike.

On the day of the 2026 World Cup U.S. opener, several restaurants near Los Angeles Stadium and The Wood Cup festival experienced visit boosts far exceeding typical levels. The Pollo Campero location on W. Century Boulevard experienced the largest foot traffic increase among the restaurants analyzed, with visits spiking 264.0% compared to the average Friday – a surge that may have been aided by the chain's World Cup-themed "Pollito Campeón" campaign. Other nearby establishments also posted significant gains, including Sizzler (+185.9%), Carl's Jr. (+128.9%), and El Pollo Loco (+105.3%).

These foot traffic gains illustrate the ripple effects of major sporting events and adjacent fan activations beyond the stadium and festival grounds.

A Blueprint for Host City Engagement

The World Cup’s opening match in the U.S. transformed Los Angeles into a hub of activity both inside and outside the stadium, creating pathways for fans of all types to participate in the event and driving significant traffic to nearby businesses. With additional fan zones planned across multiple host cities – and demand rising as the stakes increase – The World Cup’s impact could continue to grow.

For more data-driven event insights, visit Placer.ai/anchor.

We recently launched a podcast called Anchored – and if you're a frequent visitor of The Anchor, this one's for you. Anchored brings together the sharpest minds in retail, real estate, and consumer behavior for honest, in-depth conversations about where the industry is actually headed. 

Every episode is packed with ideas worth holding onto. Here are a few standout insights from our released episodes in Season 1:

Ep. 1, with Simeon Siegel from Guggenheim Partner

• There's a structural ceiling on brand growth which most companies mistake for a temporary setback. For example, North American apparel brands tend to hit saturation at around $3 to $4 billion in revenue – so companies need to either accept that plateau and operate a profitable business at that scale, pursue international expansion, or develop a portfolio of brands to grow past a single label's ceiling.
• The store has the best unit economics in retail, and most brands forgot that. In a store, the customer does the fulfillment themselves by picking the product off the shelf and carrying it home. In e-commerce, the brand absorbs every cost: pick, pack, ship, returns. Cutting out the physical store didn't remove the middleman so much as make brands the middleman – turning what should be a margin game into a volume game.

Watch: ‍The $4 Billion Ceiling: Why Great Retail Brands Stop Growing

Ep. 2, with Karyln Mattson from Leadership Advisors

• Brand consistency is the price of admission for premium apparel. If a consumer is going to pay more, there has to be a reason – and that reason has to show up the same way in every market, every store, every product. 
• Physical retail's original purpose was discovery, and most stores have lost that. The internet commoditized browsing, which means the store has to offer a superior sense of discovery and service to justify its existence. The brands winning right now are the ones actively engineering that experience, not just maintaining shelf space.

Watch: Why Retail Needs More Art and Less Science

Ep. 3, with Andrene dos Anjos from FGF Brands

• Internal structure is retail media's biggest obstacle. Who owns the budget, who owns the screens, and how teams are organized determines whether retail media thrives or stalls. The fragmentation in ownership, and measurement, is what keeps it from scaling as fast as it could.
• Every retailer is its own channel. A campaign that works at Walmart won't automatically translate to Kroger. The brands that win in retail media are the ones treating each network as distinct, with its own goals, tactics, and measurement approach, rather than repurposing a national campaign across all of them.

Watch: From Hype to Hybrid: The Evolution of Retail Media

Ep. 4, with Andrew Lipsman from Media, Ads + Commerce

• The physical store is massively undermonetized. Hundreds of millions of shoppers walk stores every week, and almost none of that audience is being monetized. Lipsman sees a path to $20B in in-store retail media over the next decade.
• Retail media is becoming the backbone of all advertising. Retail data increasingly powers targeting and measurement across display, social, CTV, and more, making it a core layer of the advertising ecosystem. 

Watch: The In-Store Mega Channel

Ep. 5, with Stephanie McMahan from Coca Cola Company

• Discovery is physical retail's greatest strength – and it’s often overlooked. Shoppers say the store is their #1 place to find new products, but retail professionals consistently rank it near the bottom. That gap is costing brands.
• Personalization is the next frontier, and it starts with first-party data. The era of guessing what consumers want is coming to an end – real behavioral data tells brands what shoppers actually do. And the winners will use it without being creepy about it.

Watch: Convenience Meets Connection

Ep. 6, with Barrie Scardina, Growth-Oriented Senior Retail Executive

• Retail spending is bifurcating. The economy is K-shaped: Roughly 10% of affluent consumers are driving about 50% of overall retail spending. And recent sales growth is coming from price and product mix, not more foot traffic.
• The store has to evolve from transactional to experiential. The winners are turning physical spaces into experiential platforms for hospitality, events, or knowledgeable brand ambassadors – and reimagining shopping centers as mixed-use town centers curated with community data.

Watch: The New Retail Recipe

The common thread: the physical store is worth far more than most brands realize. Listen to Anchored to hear why – and explore more retail insights at Placer.ai/anchor. 

Game On!

The 2026 World Cup kicked off on June 11th – and so, it turns out, did one of Chipotle's biggest traffic days of the year. To mark the occasion, the fast-casual chain offered a buy-one-get-one entrée deal to anyone who walked in wearing a soccer jersey after 3 p.m. local time.

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And the promotion delivered a World-Cup-worthy visit spike. Nationwide foot traffic on June 11 ran 55.5% above Chipotle's 2026 year-to-date daily average – edging out the chain’s March tattoo BOGO, which ran 48.8% above the daily average. A jersey, it would seem, is an easier ask than a tattoo – even a fake one. And unlike the tattoo promotion, which was only available from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., the World Cup offer ran through closing, giving customers a much larger window to participate. 

The afternoon launch also concentrated demand later in the day. Because the promotion began at 3 p.m., visits between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. ran 88.0% above the year-to-date average for those hours, significantly outpacing the all-day lift.

The Final Score

Chipotle's World Cup BOGO is a reminder of how much a well-timed, low-friction promotion can move foot traffic – especially one tied to a cultural moment as big as the World Cup. The jersey requirement kept the barrier to entry low, the 3 p.m. start funneled demand into the dinner daypart, and the brand's everyday regulars likely did the rest.

For more data-driven dining insights, visit Placer.ai/anchor.

Darden Restaurants will report year-end results on June 25, closing the books on a fiscal year in which the Olive Garden parent raised its guidance even as much of casual dining contended with cautious consumers. What's powering the outperformance – and which of Darden's banners are doing the heavy lifting? We dove into the data to find out.

Leaving the Category Behind

Visits to Darden's brands climbed 2.4% year over year (YoY) in Q1 2026 (January through March), even as traffic to the wider full-service restaurant category fell 1.3%.

And the gap doesn't just reflect Darden's expanding fleet. Average visits per location rose 0.5% YoY across the company's brands while declining 0.5% for the category as a whole – suggesting Darden is driving incremental demand at existing restaurants, not just adding new ones. The pattern echoes the results posted by the company last quarter, when blended same-restaurant sales beat the casual dining benchmark by 540 basis points.

Steak and Breadsticks

So what is fueling Darden’s success?

Among the company’s two largest brands, LongHorn Steakhouse has been the clear pacesetter, posting YoY same-store visit growth in every month of 2026 so far. The brand is likely benefiting from America's protein obsession, with meat demand climbing as high-protein diets go mainstream. And with grocery-store beef prices elevated, a steakhouse dinner may feel like particularly good value – especially as Darden has deliberately kept LongHorn's menu pricing below inflation while continuing to invest in food quality. That pricing gap may begin to narrow, however, as management has indicated that menu price increases are expected to move closer to inflation levels this quarter.

Olive Garden's performance, by contrast, has been more volatile. Some of the brand’s YoY visit fluctuations likely reflect calendar effects – March 2026 had one fewer Saturday than March 2025, while May benefited from an extra Sunday. But the flagship is also doing plenty right. Its springtime Buy One, Take One promotion and lighter-portion menu options have helped sharpen its value message, likely contributing to May's return to growth. And the brand delivered when it mattered most: On Mother's Day – one of the biggest dining-out occasions of the year – average visits per location to Olive Garden jumped 4.1% YoY, even as full-service restaurant visits rose just 2.2%.

Momentum at the High End

Elsewhere in Darden's casual dining portfolio, Chuy’s slipped in four of the first five months of 2026, underscoring the challenges facing full-service Tex-Mex operators amid intense competition from fast-casual alternatives. Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, meanwhile – the company's deepest value brand – generated same-store visit growth in four of the first five months of 2026, including a 3.1% increase in May. While some of that performance likely reflects easier comparisons, it also underscores the continued appeal of clearly differentiated value-oriented dining.

Darden's strongest momentum, however, is coming from the upper end of its portfolio. After entering fiscal 2026 with same-restaurant sales declining amid soft business travel, Darden’s fine-dining segment swung to 2.1% growth by last quarter on private dining gains and Ruth's Chris Steak House's three-course fixed-price menu. And visit data suggests this recovery continued into the spring, with May benefiting from a strong Mother’s Day across the segment: Average visits per location to The Capital Grille surged 16.7% YoY on the holiday, while Ruth’s Chris and Eddie V’s posted gains of 7.9% and 5.9%, respectively.

Upscale casual Yard House also performed well – strength management has credited to the brand's "socially energized bar" and distinctive menu, which position it as a social gathering destination rather than just another dinner stop.

Winning at the Edges

Darden's results highlight the advantage of a diversified portfolio built around distinct consumer occasions and value propositions. Cheddar's owns everyday affordability, LongHorn serves a juicy steak at an accessible price point, Yard House anchors a night out, and the fine dining banners serve as go-to destinations for life’s celebrations. Olive Garden, meanwhile, competes in the most crowded part of the casual dining market, and its more uneven performance reflects that. But the flagship's value plays – and its standout Mother's Day – suggest it is finding its footing in the middle, too.

Can Darden's distinct brand positioning continue to drive outperformance as 2026 unfolds?

Check back with Placer.ai/anchor for the latest traffic insights.

On a national level, retail foot traffic held notably steady in May 2026. However, even relatively small fluctuations at the state level tell a story of two external pressures – a sharp run-up at the pump and a destructive mid-May storm outbreak – shaping consumer behavior.

Traffic Reflects a Cautious Consumer

The chart below shows year-over-year (YoY) visits to overall retail by state in May 2026. And while performance varied somewhat by state,all changes remained within the narrow range of ±2 percentage points. Nationwide, overall retail sat relatively flat at 0.3% YoY – stability that suggests that consumers are closely managing their budgets amid a challenging economic backdrop. 

Still, even modest year-over-year swings in foot traffic highlight the influence of two state-level pressures: ongoing gas price increases and adverse weather conditions.

Retail Traffic and the Path of Fuel Inflation

Gas prices continued to climb sharply in May 2026, and the map above suggests a relationship between YoY price hikes at the pump and retail visitation patterns. Regions that experienced the largest YoY increases in gas prices, such as the Midwest and Ohio – where prices climbed by over 45% and 50%, respectively – were often those that saw retail foot traffic soften. This could at least partly reflect consumers adjusting their spending to offset higher fuel costs. 

Meanwhile, the regions with the lowest average gas price, the Gulf Coast and Lower Atlantic, or the West Coast – which experienced the smallest YoY price increase of (only) about 30% – for the most part posted positive YoY retail foot traffic. This trend held even as average gas prices along the West Coast reached over $5.5 per gallon – the highest in the country – suggesting that changes in gas prices had a greater impact on consumer traffic patterns than the absolute price level itself. 

Severe Weather Weighed on Consumer Mobility

But fuel costs were only part of the retail foot traffic story in May 2026. Across the Midwest and parts of the Mid-Atlantic, a multi-day severe weather outbreak brought tornadoes, large hail, and flash flooding to the region. The same weather system also contributed to wildfire activity across southwestern Kansas and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle. 

As the map above shows, the band of declining retail visits running through the Midwest, Ohio Valley, and Mid-Atlantic – closely tracking the path of these storms. This alignment suggests that severe weather amplified existing economic headwinds and gas price sensitivity, limiting consumer movement in affected markets.

May In a Nutshell

May's retail traffic patterns suggest overall consumer caution with regional nuance influenced by varying degrees of gas price pressures and local weather events.

What will retail foot traffic look like in the weeks ahead? Visit Placer.ai/anchor to find out.

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