Universal’s Epic Universe opened in Orlando on Memorial Day Weekend to great fanfare by the press. Since then, the trade press has been less favorable, and so, we looked at Advan’s visitor and spend data to see how Epic is impacting sister Universal Orlando and the other destination theme parks in Orlando. What we see broadly is softness, despite the new park. While our data is preliminary because of the way we are cutting it (Thursday – Monday), the conclusion is supported by our measure of traffic to the Orlando airport (MCO), which shows a slightly better trend in May than the prior months, but nothing that would suggest that a new $8B theme park just opened in the market.

As we previewed in our story about Costco, May retail sales (as measured by the Census Bureau-adjusted) slowed from April’s pace as the tariff pull-forward lapsed and leisure activity quickened (again taking share from spending on goods). Additionally, weather for most of the month and country was absolutely horrid for seasonal sales. Building materials & garden supplies fell -1.1% in May from April +2.1% increase. Advan’s measure for NAICs #44422, which is 11K nursery, garden centers, and farm supply stores around the country, declined a similar amount.

Last week, one of our Advan Buysider names, Chewy , reported fiscal Q1 results, which once again demonstrated improving business momentum and unit economics. As a reminder, Chewy’s market share growth is accelerating due to the accruing benefit of more and more Autoship customers. (That share gain, plus Amazon’s, is further depressing foot traffic to pet specialty retailers.) Chewy’s higher volume in turn is allowing it to improve its fulfillment center (FC) utilization; this is key to improving its unit economics as they stood up too much capacity during the 2020 / ’21 pet boom, which became a drag on profits when the boom, busted.

Despite tremendous noise on trade and the economy, and our ongoing frozen housing market, Restoration Hardware’s fiscal Q1 results and outlook affirmed what Advan’s traffic and transaction data suggest, that is – demand remains undiminished for the high-end brand, as well as peer Arhaus. Written orders, which measures current demand, is no longer disclosed by Restoration Hardware (RH), and so the next quarter’s guidance is a proxy; guidance for fiscal Q2 revenue growth was +15% (on an adjusted-basis) which is above for the April-end period of +12%, or reflective of stronger demand.

Despite dismal sentiment about the low-end consumer and consumer confidence, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and Five Below blew past Wall Street expectations on comp-store sales, with both comp-ticket and comp-transactions driving a material improvement in the 2- and 3-year comp-store sales trend as shown in the table below. With Dollar General’s results, we wrote about the upside stemming from trade-in, share-of-stomach gains from the fast food channel, and better retail execution / fundamentals.

As was anticipated by Advan’s data, Costco reported another strong comp-store sales increase for May (+5.5%), but at a touch lower rate than the March / April trend of +7.2% / +8.6% (adjusted) which benefited from pull-forward on large ticket items which consumer purchased to get in front of prices increases resulting from tariffs. General merchandise comp sales, which is where the pull-forward happened, went from +10% in March / April to around +5%.

Dollar General results were stronger than expected, including Advan’s. Comp-sales increased by +2.4%, whereas we expected a +1.2% increase. Our estimate “miss” was a result of General closing an unusually large number (168) of dog stores. General typically closes 90 stores annually. Thus, this cycle was 7.5X greater, which adversely impacted foot traffic, but which also likely juiced the comp as the dogs were no longer a drag. General also only opened 156 new locations vs.

The second issue of The Advan Buysider is now available, featuring updates to the names from Issue #1, along with new themes on DVA, PII, and GWW. As a reminder, The Buysider is designed to provide timely, novel, and impactful insights on specific names and topics using Advan’s data. Download Issue 2 Watch the webinar

Fiscal Q1 comp-sales results for off-price retailers were softer across the board due to a moderation in traffic. Traffic per location was slightly up for Burlington and HomeGoods and slightly down for TJ Maxx and Ross Dress for Less (per Advan). Results for the traditional department stores were less bad. In sum, this demonstrates that the share transfer from traditional to off-price slowed. In our view, this is the result of the traditional department stores executing better, rather than off-price brands executing “less well.

AutoZone reported solid sales results, offset by some gross margin contraction. The commercial side particularly improved to again post a double-digit increase. CEO Phil Daniele has been in the job for just over a year and improving commercials was one of his key objectives. Daniele said, “While the macro environment and the uncertainty around tariffs have forced customers to be cautious with their spending, the consistency of our failure and maintenance businesses continued this past quarter.