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Our latest white paper, Who’s in the Stands? An In-Depth Look at Arena and Stadium Visits, uses location intelligence tools to uncover the demographic and psychographic characteristics of sporting events attendees – including Super Bowl fans. Below is a taste of our findings.
As the biggest game of the year, the Super Bowl usually brings a tourism boom to the host city. The heat map below depicts the origins of travelers to the past three Super Bowls (excluding Super Bowl LV in 2021 which was held under COVID restrictions). Year after year, the distribution of Super Bowl attendees is relatively similar to the country’s population distribution – which means, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the most densely populated regions are well-represented at the game.
But the data also reveals that many Super Bowl attendees travel from the regions where the competing teams are based, which indicates that die-hard fans are willing to make the trip to see their local team potentially win a championship. The map also shows that visitors from the Super Bowl’s host city and surrounding areas are heavily represented at the game, regardless of whether or not a local team is playing. It’s likely that a significant number of football fans who live nearby take advantage of the rare opportunity to see a Super Bowl close to home.
Super Bowl LVI in 2022, for example, was played at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, CA between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams. The event was heavily visited by fans from Southern California as the game was not only being played by the LA Rams, but also at their home stadium in Inglewood, CA. A greater contingent than previous years was also in attendance from Cincinnati, OH and its surrounding areas.
Many fans travel to the Super Bowl from the same regions every year, with the host city and the contending teams’ hometowns also providing significant factions of attendees. But analyzing Super Bowl crowds throughout the years also reveals an important demographic shift taking place among those traveling to the Super Bowl – the growing number of family-oriented visitors.
Since 2019, the True Trade Areas of the Super Bowl stadiums include increasingly greater shares of larger families. Last year’s Super Bowl LVI had an in-person audience that reflected a trade area in which 17.9% of residents came from families of five or more, up from 11.9% at the Super Bowl three years prior. Conversely, Super Bowl attendees in 2022 reflected a trade area in which 37.7% of residents were part of two-person households, a decrease from 47.8% in 2019.
The increase in attendees from areas with larger families could reflect the NFL’s initiatives to make football a more family-friendly sport, including rule and equipment changes aimed at increasing player safety and supporting youth football clubs. The trend towards an increase in attendees from larger families may also inform decisions about products to promote as well as amenities that will contribute to a family-friendly experience on game day.
Brands invest heavily in ads that air during the Super Bowl. But with the right insights, stadium advertising platforms have tremendous potential to reach target audiences in-person at the big game. While a large audience is part of the equation, in order to achieve maximum impact, an in-depth understanding of visitors is critical.
Key McDonald's Metrics
While focus and streamlined operations are key to restaurant growth strategies, we also continue to see evidence of the impact of innovation and nostalgia in driving visits. McDonald’s has had success with its past celebrity meal collaborations with Travis Scott and J Balvin, with our data indicating a mid-to-high teens lift in visits compared to the weeks prior to the promotion. However, McDonald’s "Adult Happy Meal" collaboration with streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market might be its most successful collaboration today, with data suggesting more than a 30% increase in in-store visitation trends compared to the weeks leading up to the promotion (below). We’ve discussed the impact of limited-time offers (LTO) in the QSR space earlier this year, but McDonald’s has set a new bar for the industry (beating out Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza launch in May).
Although QSR chains saw more resilient visitation trends than other restaurant categories for much of 2022, the gap between the QSR, fast casual, and full-service restaurant chains had narrowed in September as lower-income consumers continue to face inflationary headwinds from menu price hikes across the QSR space while higher-end consumers continue to dine out. Nevertheless, the impact of McDonald’s adult happy meal promotion is evident in not only the massive spike in visitation trends for the full QSR sector last week (below). While not everyone may love these promotions, they can be an extremely effective way to drive visitation growth.
We, the founding team, always loved data - ideating around it, engineering with it, understanding the world better with it.
But what captivated us most was imagining data products that can be used by tens of thousands of businesses across the world.
Among all the ideas and visions we bounced around before starting the company, one stood out for its simplicity and potential impact - building a ‘Physical Market Intelligence Platform’ to provide everyone in the offline world (a.k.a the ‘real world’) with aggregate insights for decision-making. Or in layman’s terms, “a dashboard to get instant insights for any place to understand its audience, surroundings, and competition”.
In 2016, the Placer founding team gathered in a basement and spent a weekend sketching out a plan to turn this idea into a massive world-class data company.
Whiteboarding without customers or tech debt is fun!!!
The more paper we stuck to that basement wall, the bigger the vision became! Everything is possible with the stroke of a pen…
But very quickly, we hit some glaring challenges:
The best way to approach a big challenge is breaking it down into smaller ones. So we worked hard to define Phase 1 - focusing on building a product that (1) was centered around the mobile location analytics dataset and (2) generated reports tailored for CRE and retail.
5 years and 5 funding rounds later, we’re FINALLY feeling “pretty good” about Phase 1: we launched a world-class mobile analytics product that’s used by over 1,000 customers, and thousands more are using our free products.
But it’s also been “frustrating” - we were always strapped for cash and resources. We’re yet to integrate most of the datasets we need; key reports for certain verticals remain in the product pipeline; and in terms of usability and workflow features, we still have a lot to do in order to create a truly comprehensive platform (vs “read only” status insights tool).
That’s why the $100M Series C funding we just announced is so momentous for me and the rest of the Placer team. It finally removes the shackles and equips us with the tools and materials we need for Phase 2 - rapidly building the full Placer.ai Market Intelligence Platform.
So let’s dive into what that means…
A Physical Market Intelligence Platform is a big data puzzle. Piecing it together - in a nutshell - consists of four phases:
A vast amount of interconnected data is required to create a truly accurate and complete picture of what’s going on at a location. This data falls into two broad categories:
Now consider all things you see going on in the world and imagine how POI and geospatial data can capture and quantify them…
Here’s a snippet:
We track dozens of data categories and thousands of datasets and vendors in order to identify new data that can help answer our customers’ questions.
This is 50% of our work and is a huge data challenge - but also great fun!
Through partnerships and our App Marketplace, we’ve recently integrated online reviews, credit card data, demographics, vehicle traffic volume, crime figures and planned construction into our platform. And we have lots more datasets in our pipeline: retail sales, property sales, financial data, leasing comparisons and climate data to name just a few.
If the data are the ingredients, then ingestion is the cooking. This includes complex data science processes:
Tagging data to POIs is a massive task. Placer’s POI database contains millions of entities: a commercial real estate asset in a customer’s portfolio; stores of a retailer’s chain or that hold a CPG brand’s products; a billboard used for out-of-home advertising; a downtown area being regenerated by a municipality or business improvement district. We geofence each one so data can be tagged to it.
But a much greater complexity than the volume of data-POI matching is the fact that our data structure is mutable - it changes. Stores, restaurants, strip malls and other POIs open, close, merge and move. Our physical environment is constantly changing. One of our platform’s standout attributes is that it always reflects historical change.
In practice, this means that, for each POI change, we not only adjust our data tagging but also re-tag 5 years of historical data to ensure any historical comparisons are “like with like”. This is a huge investment of resources on the part of our data science, devops and engineering teams - exponentially increasing our data management burden.
To complete the cooking metaphor, after selecting ingredients (datasets) and cooking them (data ingestion), we then lay out a buffet-style feast of solutions for our users:
The most basic level of the platform is converting the data into real-world constructs that can be understood by industry professionals: tables, charts, maps and other graphics displaying cross shopping, trade areas (below), cannibalization, risk analysis, visit frequency and so on.
A key tenet of the Market Intelligence Platform is the approach that insights like those are often not the answer to the questions that our customers are looking for. Rather, they are just part of the explanation behind the answer. That means providing a comprehensive suite of Solutions SUPPORTED by insights, not just a library of uncontextualized insights.
An excellent example of this is Void Analysis. A key question for retail real estate is “who is my ideal tenant?” While our platform offered important insights (such as retailers’ average monthly foot traffic and cannibalization) for reaching an answer, landlords were doing a lot of legwork. The Void Analysis tool we released late last year enables CRE professionals to instantly analyze thousands of potential tenants through automatically generated reports that include ranking according to our unique Relative Fit Score. This significantly improves the speed and scope of a search for new tenants.
We are now working on the many additional solutions like Void Analysis in our development pipeline - sales forecasting, site selection for retail chains, market selection, market change reports, product optimization for CPG to name a few.
To be truly useful, solutions must also be delivered in a way that fits various users’ workflows. A dashboard is a good start, but a full platform must offer a range of access points. This means data feeds, REST APIs, and other methods of programmatic access.
We’ll also add to that a rich layer of data exploration tools such as GIS, templates, graph builders, pivot table functionality and advanced entity search. This will provide users with maximum flexibility in how they explore and visualize our data.
The lion’s share of the work is still ahead of us here - more widgets, third party integrations, report generators, scheduled intelligence reports and alerts, and much more.
The platform’s user interface must be fully customized to fit the needs of its different user types across verticals AND within companies (business users, data scientists, data analysts, third party users). An example of how we’ve begun to do this is a portfolio overview section for CRE analysts to rapidly scan properties’ performance metrics. Another is our COVID-19 Recovery Dashboard, particularly used by civic organizations to assess the impact of the pandemic on local economic areas.
As we presented “just data”, we quickly realized some customers were looking for humans to add a “research layer” and context around the data. So an analytical research team has become part of the product. They capture and present key market intelligence, respond to the latest industry trends and customer interests. “The Anchor”, a weekly CRE executive intelligence report launched last September, has now become an inbox staple for many of our customers.
To our current understanding, we’re just “5%” of the way to our Market Intelligence Platform vision. The remaining 95% will be built by scaling POI coverage, datasets, answering more questions and developing the other core components of the platform.
So our focus now is on ramping up the velocity of this development. And to do that, we need even more of the world’s best talent across the company.
So, during 2022, we will use our new capital to double the size of our engineering team and significantly expand the data at our disposal. In parallel, we will also channel more resources to supporting our customers and contributing to industry understanding through our analytical research department and educational content.
Placer.ai is committed to transforming the way real-world businesses make decisions. And we don’t want to waste any time going about it.
LOS ALTOS, CA (January 12, 2021)--Placer.ai, the leader in location analytics and foot traffic data, announced today the closing of a $100M Series C funding round at a $1B valuation. The round was led by Josh Buckley with participation from WndrCo, Lachy Groom, MMC Technology Ventures LLC, Fifth Wall Ventures, JBV Capital, and Array Ventures. The round also included the participation of leading commercial real estate investors and operators, including J.M. Schapiro (Continental Realty Corp), Eliot Bencuya and Jeff Karsh (Tryperion Partners), Daniel Klein (Klein Enterprises/Sundeck Capital), Majestic Realty, and others. The funding will be used to expand the company’s R&D capabilities to further increase the pace of innovation.
“Placer experienced significant growth during 2021 as a consensus formed across the market that accurate, reliable consumer behavior analytics is indispensable to brick and mortar decision-making,” said Noam Ben-Zvi, CEO and Co-Founder of Placer.ai. “Yet, location analytics is just the foundation for a much broader and more comprehensive vision. With this funding, we will accelerate the development of the Placer.ai platform, adding an unprecedented range of new data sets - such as vehicle traffic, planned construction, web traffic, purchase data, and much more - as well as more advanced solutions to empower any professional with a stake in the physical world to make better decisions, faster than ever before. ”
Since launching in November 2018, Placer.ai has been adopted by over 1,000 customers including industry leaders in commercial real estate and retail like JLL, Regency Centers, Taubman, Planet Fitness, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and Grocery Outlet. In the wake of COVID-driven upheaval, the company saw widespread adoption among a series of new categories, among them hedge funds and CPG leaders including Tyson Foods and Reckitt Benckiser.
"Placer provides instant, simple and actionable insights to questions we've been asking as operators for over 30 years. The pace of innovation, the unique trust that the company has developed, and the massive market demand all point to the magnitude and scale of what this team can achieve,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founding Partner of WndrCo.
"We have long felt like the disruption Placer can bring is massive, but the market demand has far exceeded our initial expectations," said Josh Buckley. “We see a powerful opportunity to continue partnering with Placer to improve the way decisions are made in the physical world, fundamentally improving the way these businesses and organizations operate."
Try Placer.ai for free here.
About Placer.ai:
Placer.ai is the most advanced foot traffic analytics platform allowing anyone with a stake in the physical world to instantly generate insights into any property for a deeper understanding of the factors that drive success. Placer.ai is the first platform that fully empowers professionals in retail, commercial real estate, hospitality, economic development, and more to truly understand and maximize their offline activities. Find more information here: https://placer.ai/
LOS ALTOS, CA (April 27, 2021) --Placer.ai, the leader in location analytics and foot traffic data, announced today the close of a $50M Series B funding round. The round was led by Josh Buckley, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra, with participation from Fifth Wall, JBV Capital and Aleph VC. The funding will be used to grow the company’s R&D, expand sales and marketing teams, introduce additional reports and data sets, and grow the recently announced marketplace.
Since launching in November 2019, Placer.ai has been adopted by over 500 customers including industry leaders in Commercial Real Estate and Retail like JLL, Brixmor, Taubman, Planet Fitness, and Dollar General. Yet, the recent upheaval caused by COVID led to widespread adoption among a series of new categories including Hedge Funds and CPG leaders.
“As a business deeply rooted in offline retail, we expected COVID to present a unique challenge. Yet, adoption actually increased as a result of our ability to introduce certainty into such an uncertain environment. The result has been a clearer and deeper understanding by the market of the absolute imperative of location data to improve the decision-making process,” said Placer.ai CEO and Co-Founder Noam Ben-Zvi.
“But our current offering is just the beginning, and we are fully focused on expanding the capabilities both through the development of a range of new features and tools, and the integration of a wide range of data sets through our marketplace. Placer.ai is rapidly becoming the market intelligence platform for anyone with a stake in the physical world.”
In the last year, Placer.ai continued to expand its presence in core markets like Commercial Real Estate, Retail, Municipal governments, and Hospitality while advancing into new segments like CPG and Hedge Funds. The result has been growing market adoption and an increasingly large and diverse reach.
"Fifth Wall has some of the largest owners and operators of real estate as our limited partners and several were customers of Placer.ai, giving us a unique perspective on the company’s growth and potential. We saw firsthand the impact that the data is already having in reimagining the way business is done in retail and real estate broadly,” said Kevin Campos, Partner on the Retail & Consumer Investment team at Fifth Wall. “Yet, what’s even more exciting is that we’re still only seeing a piece of the puzzle and know that there are so many other sectors where the data can be applied. We’re thrilled to help grow and execute this vision alongside this exceptional team.”
"Placer allows businesses that operate offline to make data-driven decisions, fundamentally improving the way they operate. This is the same type of tooling that online businesses have used to grow, moving from hunches to definitive answers," said Josh Buckley. “I'm excited to be partnering with the company's next phase of growth and product development."
“Our journey with Placer.ai started at the very beginning as one of the company's first beta customers. Seeing the disruptive power of the product up close, the speed at which the company developed new features, and the tremendous traction they achieved in the marketplace led us to invest less than a year later and in every round since," said Sandy Sigal, CEO of NewMark Merrill Companies, an owner and developer of over 80 shopping centers and Chairman of BrightStreet Ventures, their venture capital arm. "Several years later, the customer growth, their ongoing product development, and the continuing value they have brought to our organization has only deepened our conviction and makes continued support a no-brainer for us."
Learn more about Placer.ai.
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1) Broad-based growth: All four grocery formats grew year-over-year in Q2 2025, with traditional grocers posting their first rebound since early 2024.
2) Value grocers slow: After leading during the 2022–24 trade-down wave, value grocer growth has decelerated as that shift matures.
3) Fresh formats surge: Now the fastest-growing segment, fueled by affluent shoppers seeking health, wellness, and convenience.
4) Bifurcation widens: Growth concentrated at both the low-income (value) and high-income (fresh) ends, highlighting polarized spending.
5) Shopping missions diverge: Short trips are rising, supporting fresh formats, while traditional grocers retain loyal stock-up customers and value chains capture fill-in trips through private labels.
6) Traditional grocers adapt: H-E-B and Harris Teeter outperformed by tailoring strategies to their core geographies and demographics.Bifurcation of Consumer Spending Help Fresh Format Lead Grocery Growth
Grocery traffic across all four major categories – value grocers, fresh format, traditional grocery, ethnic grocers – was up year over year in Q2 2025 as shoppers continue to engage with a wide range of grocery formats. Traditional grocery posted its first YoY traffic increase since Q1 2024, while ethnic grocers maintained their steady pattern of modest but consistent gains.
Value grocers, which dominated growth through most of 2024 as shoppers prioritized affordability, continued to expand but have now ceded leadership to fresh-format grocers. Rising food costs between 2022 and 2024 drove many consumers to chains like Aldi and Lidl, but much of this “trade-down” movement has already occurred. Although price sensitivity still shapes consumer choices – keeping the value segment on an upward trajectory – its growth momentum has slowed, making it less of a driver for the overall sector.
Fresh-format grocers have now taken the lead, posting the strongest YoY traffic gains of any category in 2025. This segment, anchored by players like Sprouts, appeals to the highest-income households of the four categories, signaling a growing influence of affluent shoppers on the competitive grocery landscape. Despite accounting for just 7.0% of total grocery visits in H1 2025, the segment’s rapid gains point to a broader shift: premium brands emphasizing health and wellness are emerging as the primary engine of growth in the grocery sector.
The fact that value grocers and fresh-format grocers – segments with the lowest and highest median household incomes among their customer bases – are the two categories driving the most growth underscores how the bifurcation of consumer spending is playing out in the grocery space as well. On one end, price-sensitive shoppers continue to seek out affordable options, while on the other, affluent consumers are fueling demand for premium, health-oriented formats. This dual-track growth pattern highlights how widening economic divides are reshaping competitive dynamics in grocery retail.
1) Broad-based growth: All four grocery categories posted YoY traffic gains in Q2 2025.
2) Traditional grocery rebound: First YoY increase since Q1 2024.
3) Ethnic grocers: Continued steady but modest upward trend.
4) Value grocers: Still growing, but slowing after most trade-down activity already occurred (2022–24).
5) Fresh formats: Now the fastest-growing segment, driven by affluent shoppers and interest in health & wellness.
6) Market shift: Premium, health-oriented brands are becoming the new growth driver in grocery.
7) Bifurcation of spending: Growth at both value and fresh-format grocers highlights a polarization in consumer spending patterns that is reshaping grocery competition.
Over the past two years, short grocery trips (under 10 minutes) have grown far more quickly than longer visits. While they still make up less than one-quarter of all U.S. grocery trips, their steady expansion suggests this behavioral shift is here to stay and that its full impact on the industry has yet to be realized.
One format particularly aligned with this trend is the fresh-format grocer, where average dwell times are shorter than in other categories. Yet despite benefiting from the rise of convenience-driven shopping, fresh formats attract the smallest share of loyal visitors (4+ times per month). This indicates they are rarely used for a primary weekly shop. Instead, they capture supplemental trips from consumers looking for specific needs – unique items, high-quality produce, or a prepared meal – who also value the ability to get in and out quickly.
In contrast, leading traditional grocers like H-E-B and Kroger thrive on a classic supermarket model built around frequent, comprehensive shopping trips. With the highest share of loyal visitors (38.5% and 27.6% respectively), they command a reliable customer base coming for full grocery runs and taking time to fill their carts.
Value grocers follow a different, but equally effective playbook. Positioned as primary “fill-in” stores, they sit between traditional and fresh formats in both dwell time and visit frequency. Many rely on limited assortments and a heavy emphasis on private-label goods, encouraging shoppers to build larger baskets around basics and store brands. Still, the data suggests consumers reserve their main grocery hauls for traditional supermarkets with broader selections, while using value grocers to stretch budgets and stock up on essentials.
1) Short trips surge: Under-10-minute visits have grown fastest, signaling a lasting behavioral shift.
2) Fresh formats thrive on convenience: Small footprints, prepared foods, and specialty items align with quick missions.
3) Traditional grocers retain loyalty: Traditional grocers such as H-E-B and Kroger attract frequent, comprehensive stock-up trips.
4) Value grocers fill the middle ground: Limited assortments and private label drive larger baskets, but main hauls remain with traditional supermarkets.
5) Fresh formats as supplements: Fresh format grocers such as The Fresh Market capture quick, specialized trips rather than weekly shops.
While broad market trends favor value and fresh-format grocers, certain traditional grocers are proving that a tailored strategy is a powerful tool for success. In the first half of 2025, H-E-B and Harris Teeter significantly outperformed their category's modest 0.6% average year-over-year visit growth, posting impressive gains of 5.6% and 2.8%, respectively. Their success demonstrates that even in a polarizing environment, there is ample room for traditional formats to thrive by deeply understanding and catering to a specific target audience.
These two brands achieve their success with distinctly different, yet equally focused, demographic strategies. H-E-B, a Texas powerhouse, leans heavily into major metropolitan areas like Austin and San Antonio. This urban focus is clear, with 32.6% of its visitors coming from urban centers and their peripheries, far above the category average. Conversely, Harris Teeter has cultivated a strong following in suburban and satellite cities in the South Atlantic region, drawing a massive 78.3% of its traffic from these areas. This deliberate targeting shows that knowing your customer's geography and lifestyle remains a winning formula for growth.
1) Traditional grocers can still be competitive: H-E-B (+5.6% YoY) and Harris Teeter (+2.8% YoY) outpaced the category average of +0.6% in H1 2025.
2) H-E-B’s strategy: Strong urban focus, with 32.6% of traffic from major metro areas like Austin and San Antonio.
3) Harris Teeter’s strategy: Suburban and satellite city focus, with 78.3% of traffic from South Atlantic suburbs.
1. The hypergrowth of Costco, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General between 2019 and 2025 has fundamentally changed the brick-and-mortar retail landscape.
2. Overall visits to Target and Walmart have remained essentially stable even as traffic to the new retail giants skyrocketed – so the increased competition is not necessarily coming at legacy giants' expense. Instead, each retail giant is filling a different need, and success now requires excelling at specific shopping missions rather than broad market dominance.
3. Cross-shopping has become the new normal, with Walmart and Target maintaining their popularity even as their relative visit shares decline, creating opportunities for complementary rather than purely competitive strategies.
4. Dollar stores are rapidly graduating from "fill-in" destinations to primary shopping locations, signaling a fundamental shift in how Americans approach everyday retail.
5. Walmart still enjoys the highest visit frequency, but the other four chains – and especially Dollar General – are gaining ground in this realm.
6. Geographic and demographic specialization is becoming the key differentiator, as each chain carves out distinct niches rather than competing head-to-head across all markets and customer segments.
Evolving shopper priorities, economic pressures, and new competitors are reshaping how and where Americans buy everyday goods. And as value-focused players gain ground, legacy retail powerhouses are adapting their strategies in a bid to maintain their visit share. In this new consumer reality, shoppers no longer stick to one lane, creating a complex ecosystem where loyalty, geography, and cross-visitation patterns – not just market share – define who is truly winning.
This report explores the latest retail traffic data for Walmart, Target, Costco, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General to decode what consumers want from retail giants in 2025. By analyzing visit patterns, loyalty trends, and cross-shopping shifts, we reveal how fast-growing chains are winning over consumers and uncover the strategies helping legacy players stay competitive in today's value-driven retail landscape.
In 2019, Walmart and Target were the two major behemoths in the brick-and-mortar retail space. And while traffic to these chains remains close to 2019 levels, overall visits to Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Costco have increased 36.6% to 45.9% in the past six years. Much of the growth was driven by aggressive store expansions, but average visits per location stayed constant (in the case of Dollar Tree) or grew as well (in the case of Dollar General and Costco). This means that these chains are successfully filling new stores with visitors – consumers who in the past may have gone to Walmart or Target for at least some of the items now purchased at wholesale clubs and dollar stores.
This substantial increase in visits to Costco, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree has altered the competitive landscape in which Walmart and Target operate. In 2019, 55.9% of combined visits to the five retailers went to Walmart. Now, Walmart’s relative visit share is less than 50%. Target received the second-highest share of visits to the five retailers in 2019, with 15.9% of combined traffic to the chains. But Between January and July 2025, Dollar General received more visits than Target – even though the discount store had received just 12.1% of combined visits in 2019.
Some of the growth of the new retail giants could be attributed to well-timed expansion. But the success of these chains is also due to the extreme value orientation of U.S. consumers in recent years. Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Costco each offer a unique value proposition, giving today's increasingly budget-conscious shoppers more options.
Walmart’s strategy of "everyday low prices" and its strongholds in rural and semi-rural areas reflect its emphasis on serving broad, value-focused households – often catering to essential, non-discretionary shopping.
Dollar General serves an even larger share of rural and semi-rural shoppers than Walmart, following its strategy of bringing a curated selection of everyday basics to underserved communities. The retailer's packaging is typically smaller than Walmart's, which allows Dollar General to price each item very affordably – and its geographic concentration in rural and semi-rural areas also highlights its direct competition to Walmart.
By contrast, Target and Costco both compete for consumer attention in suburban and small city settings, where shopper profiles tilt more toward families seeking one-stop-shopping and broader discretionary offerings. But Costco's audience skews slightly more affluent – the retailer attracts consumers who can afford the membership fees and bulk purchasing requirements – and its visit growth may be partially driven by higher income Target shoppers now shopping at Costco.
Dollar Tree, meanwhile, showcases a uniquely balanced real estate strategy. The chain's primary strength lies in suburban and small cities but it maintains a solid footing in both rural and urban areas. The chain also offers a unique value proposition, with a smaller store format and a fixed $1.25 price point on most items. So while the retailer isn't consistently cheaper than Walmart or Dollar General across all products, its convenience and predictability are helping it cement its role as a go-to chain for quick shopping trips or small quantities of discretionary items. And its versatile, three-pronged geographic footprint allows it to compete across diverse markets: Dollar Tree can serve as a convenient, quick-trip alternative to big-box retailers in the suburbs while also providing essential value in both rural and dense urban communities.
As each chain carves out distinct geographic and demographic niches, success increasingly depends on being the best option for particular shopping missions (bulk buying, quick trips, essential needs) rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
Still, despite – or perhaps due to – the increased competition, shoppers are increasingly spreading their visits across multiple retailers: Cross-shopping between major chains rose significantly between 2019 and 2025. And Walmart remains the most popular brick-and-mortar retailer, consistently ranking as the most popular cross-shopping destination for visitors of every other chain, followed by Target.
This creates an interesting paradox when viewed alongside the overall visit share shift. Even as Walmart and Target's total share of visits has declined, their importance as a secondary stop has actually grown. This suggests that the legacy retail giants' dip in market share isn't due to shoppers abandoning them. Instead, consumers are expanding their shopping routines by visiting other growing chains in addition to their regular trips to Walmart and Target, effectively diluting the giants' share of a larger, more fragmented retail landscape.
Cross-visitation to Costco from Walmart, Target, and Dollar Tree also grew between 2019 and 2025, suggesting that Costco is attracting a more varied audience to its stores.
But the most significant jumps in cross-visitation went to Dollar Tree and Dollar General, with cross-visitation to these chains from Target, Walmart, and Costco doubling or tripling over the past six years. This suggests that these brands are rapidly graduating from “fill-in” fare to primary shopping destinations for millions of households.
The dramatic rise in cross-visitation to dollar stores signals an opportunity for all retailers to identify and capitalize on specific shopping missions while building complementary partnerships rather than viewing every chain as direct competition.
Walmart’s status as the go-to destination for essential, non-discretionary spending is clearly reflected in its exceptional loyalty rates – nearly half its visitors return at least three times per month on average -between January to July 2025, a figure virtually unchanged since 2019. This steady high-frequency visitation underscores how necessity-driven shopping anchors customer routines and keeps Walmart atop the retail loyalty ranks.
But the data also reveals that other retail giants – and Dollar General in particular – are steadily gaining ground. Dollar General's increased visit frequency is largely fueled by its strategic emphasis on adding fresh produce and other grocery items, making it a viable everyday stop for more households and positioning it to compete more directly with Walmart.
Target also demonstrates a notable uptick in loyal visitors, with its share of frequent shoppers visiting at least three times a month rising from 20.1% to 23.6% between 2019 and 2025. This growth may suggest that its strategic initiatives – like the popular Drive Up service, same-day delivery options, and an appealing mix of essentials and exclusive brands – are successfully converting some casual shoppers into repeat customers.
Costco stands out for a different reason: while overall visits increased, loyalty rates remained essentially unchanged. This speaks to Costco’s unique position as a membership-based outlet for targeted bulk and premium-value purchases, where the shopping behavior of new visitors tends to follow the same patterns as those of its already-loyal core. As a result, trip frequency – rooted largely in planned stock-ups – remains remarkably consistent even as the warehouse giant grows foot traffic overall.
Dollar Tree currently has the smallest share of repeat visitors but is improving this metric. As it successfully encourages more frequent trips and narrows the loyalty gap with its larger rivals, it's poised to become an increasing source of competition for both Target and Costco.
The increase in repeat visits and cross-shopping across the five retail giants showcases consumers' current appetite for value-oriented mass merchants and discount chains. And although the retail giants landscape may be more fragmented, the data also reveals that the pie itself has grown significantly – so the increased competition does not necessarily need to come at the expense of legacy retail giants.
The retail landscape of 2025 demands a fundamental shift from zero-sum competition to strategic complementarity, where success lies in owning specific shopping missions rather than fighting for total market dominance. Retailers that forego attempting to compete on every front and instead clearly communicate their mission-specific value propositions – whether that's emergency runs, bulk essentials, or family shopping experiences – may come out on top.
