By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights At a time when many are concerned about a recession and a cutback in consumer spending, Disney once again demonstrated that it is a special place in consumers’ lives and an exceptional business. Domestic park attendance inflected by +300bps to +1% growth. Advan data in the table below shows that the Orlando parks, especially Magic Kingdom, drove the acceleration as hurricanes weren’t disruptive in the period, like the prior quarter.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Amazon’s Q1 results and guidance for Q2 reflect what we are broadly witnessing – relatively stable demand for goods, some pull-forward effects ahead of tariffs, and a lot of uncertainty. Including Leap Year, the North American retail business slowed about -400 bps QoQ to around +8% unit growth and +6% $-volume growth, per our estimate. Average ticket fell -200 bps as: (1) Amazon and its third-party sellers have been highlighting savings and lower prices, and (2) consumables (which are generally lower-priced items) grew at +12%, which is twice the rate of general merchandise (our estimate).

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Floor & Décor Holdings Q1 results showed stability in earnings despite a challenging housing market. However, those challenges combined with the added pressures from tariffs led management to reduce its store openings plan for 2025 from 25 to 20. CEO Tom Taylor said, “If economic conditions worsen from our current expectations, we have the ability to further reduce fiscal 2025 openings.” On the outlook, Taylor said, “This is a bit of unprecedented times.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights McDonald’s US “comp-sales” declined -3.6%, or roughly -2.6% excluding Leap Day. The -2.6% figure was below expectations (+0.7%) and Advan’s estimate* (-1.2% +/-0.8%) – as such, something in the “environment” changed (that’s why you have errors in forecasts such as this that are based upon-ML). Advan also shows that McDonald’s traffic decelerated further (-20 bps) and that average check also softened. We’ve been writing about the weak year-to-date trend for the limited-serve industry and put out stories on misses by Chipotle and Domino’s .

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Sprouts Farmers Market again produced stellar quarterly results; comp-sales increased +11.7% (vs. Advan’s estimate* of +11.9%) and management guided Q2 for a 6.5% - 8.5% increase. We take that outlook to be “conservative” as Advan’s ML estimate* is +8.8%, i.e. something would materially need to change in the external environment for them to not beat their guidance. The +11.9% for Q1 and +8.8% for Q2 embed a 140bps improvement in the 3-year trend.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Polaris makes snowmobiles, motorcycles, ATVs, and power boats – all big-ticket discretionary goods, a category of consumer expenditure that has been in a world of hurt following a pandemic / fiscal stimulus fueled super-cycle in 2021 / ‘22. Higher interest rates (vis-a-vis financing) has also been a headwind during the downturn. Looking at personal consumption expenditure from the BEA, pleasure boats are down -10% from peak and RVs are down -25%.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights In the context of ongoing weak earnings results for Kraft Heinz and other branded food names, we took a deeper look into Trader Joe’s and Aldi’s traffic growth. Recall that one of our central themes is that industry growth of food-at-home will be driven by private brands and those retailers that excel at it. That’s principally the reason behind the -7% decline in volume and revenue for Kraft’s North American business segment in Q1.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Given the recent news from the airlines that bookings were dropping and the deceleration in longer-term visits to Hilton’s brands as shown in Advan, it wasn’t surprising to hear Hilton cut guidance for the year. CEO Chris Nassetta said, “We reported system-wide RevPAR growth of 2.5% year-over-year, driven by strong momentum from the end of last year that carried into 2025 and supported solid performance in both January and February.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Similarly to Chipotle , Domino’s reported softer comps for the quarter with U.S system comp-sales falling -0.5%, a figure that aligned with Advan’s -0.8% estimate* and the weaker traffic for limited-service category overall. While down, the 2- and 3-yr CAGRs strengthened and the comp to ’19 remains inline with last year’s rate. Delivery comp-sales were down -1.5% and carry-out increased +1.0%. Delivery has been more impacted by affordability challenges for lower-income households; however, that has now spread to carry-out, which slowed -220 bps with both traffic (-100 bps QoQ per Advan) and mix negative.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Chipotle reported a +6.4% revenue increase for Q1, composed of a comp-sales decline of -0.4% and a +680 bps contribution from more locations. Breaking down the comp increase, transaction fell -2.3% (-630 bps QoQ) and check grew by +1.9%. Advan traffic data pointed to a -690 bps deceleration QoQ to -3.2% on an adjusted basis. As shown in the chart below, traffic has notably softened in April; as such, we were not too surprised that management lowered guidance from low-to-mid single-digits to +LSD comps for the year.