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.

In contrast to the frequent press articles that Target’s foot traffic and sales were down mid-to-high single-digits due to consumer backlash over Target’s DEI policy changes, comp-transactions / traffic was down only -2.4%. Comp-sales for the stores were down -5.7%, which was partially offset by a +4.7% in digital sales (which is mainly store-delivery and curbside). As shown in the table below, February was the softest month per Advan traffic, and the period’s reported traffic* was largely in line with the Advan estimate.