Malls around the US suffered a significant blow during what is usually the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Foot traffic was down 41% year-over-year on Black Friday and 45% on Saturday. As we reported in our blog post last week, there was a pick-up in traffic during the first three weeks of November as many people opted to take care of their shopping sooner, in order to beat the rush and in anticipation of lock-down orders across the country.

With a new phase of lockdowns beginning across the US, many shoppers have opted to get a jump on Black Friday over the past week. Foot traffic to malls increased steadily across most states other than Texas where case numbers have climbed significantly, although lockdown measures have not yet been imposed. Mall visits in Texas have remained more or less flat since the start of the month. Florida saw a week-over-week increase of 7% in mall traffic, on top of a 3% increase in the prior week.

With the UK now in its second week of nationwide lock-down we are starting to see some familiar patterns of behavior based on analysis of foot traffic data. But there are also some significant differences compared to the first wave. We looked at 5 indices for key sectors. All of our comparisons are against the average footfall in January 2020, as a pre-COVID benchmark. In April, when the majority of businesses were closed, foot traffic fell by 80% or more across almost all sectors, with the exception of those in our food stores index.

Among the many social and cultural changes that the pandemic has brought about, arguably the most impactful will be the ways in which it has influenced our decisions about where to live. Not just temporary relocations while we ride out lock-downs and WFH, but permanent migration that will alter how we live and how we spend. Mobility data allows us to see these patterns in almost real time and our recently launched REPerspectives portal allows us to easily visualize where people live and where they are moving to, at any census level.

After a dismal April and May, when casinos across the country were closed to visitors, Nevada’s casinos have been slowly recovering. But although many casinos on the strip are now open, foot traffic remains depressed - down 40% year over year in October to date. Around the country, the pace of recovery for the sector has varied significantly by state. Missouri’s casinos were the first to jump back. As early as June, foot traffic was only down 50% compared to the previous year.

In our recent webinar, we spent some time looking into foot traffic trends at airports in America and Europe. Location data is a very reliable proxy for airline passengers, since there are few reasons to be at an airport other than to board a plane. Precise mapping can filter out people who have come to collect or drop off passengers from those who have passed security in order to catch a flight.

In a previous blog post we talked about how the home improvement sector has been one of the bright spots in the pandemic. Year-over-year foot traffic to building material retailers was up 26% in September. Given this trend, we wanted to look in more detail at one of the most popular companies in the home improvement sector - Ikea. While foot traffic at Ikea stores fell to 0 between April and June, once stores reopened traffic rebounded almost immediately to pre-pandemic levels.

For investors, foot traffic data is fast becoming a critical weapon as part of an alternative data armory. The value of tracking real-time visitation numbers to retail and consumer-facing compa-nies is widely recognized. Yet, as we explore here, measuring traffic to industrial companies can offer even more effective signals to predict top line performance. It is intuitive that the number of employees at production facilities should be an indicator of pro-duction, which in turn would help forecast revenues.

Are you back in the office? It’s a question many of us find ourselves asking our friends and peers. The answer is, it depends. Each has their own comfort level, and it also depends largely on their role and their employer. Morgan Stanley announced in May that it would start bringing traders back to the floor in June. Most recently, JP Morgan made a similar announcement - those in sales and trading roles returned on September 21.

What does a COVID recovery look like for businesses? 6 months after the initial lock-down we know that, in the US, the journey has been remarkably different for different types of businesses. Our foot traffic indices capture trends that show just how varied the path has been. We looked at the percentage change in foot traffic for 5 different sectors during each month of this year. Starting in March, of those we analyzed, the sectors most quickly impacted were clothing & accessories.