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.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Tractor Supply reported $3.47B in sales for Q1, a +2.1% increase vs. last year and slightly less than Advan’s estimate of $3.52B (-1.5% miss). We suspect that the miss was due to the timing of Easter, which would have pushed sales into the last day of the quarter last year; average ticket slipped by -120 bps QoQ to a -2.9% YoY decline. Weather was also very disruptive this year, which pushed seasonal sales later in the period, adversely impacting both traffic and comp-ticket.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Elon Musk started off the Q1 results call saying, “Well, it’s never a dull moment these days. Well, thanks, for sure, every day is going to be exciting.” That’s a statement that most would agree with. Following TSLA the company and stock has never been dull for us over the past decade; as such, it has been a topic in our Advan Insights. And so, here we go with one more update.

We are now introducing our new monthly report called _The Advan Buysider. _The purpose of it is to share insights about public company performance and macro trends that can uniquely and easily be seen in our data. Our objective is to provide insights that are meaningful, timely, and novel, and so, your feedback on that is most welcome. Issue #1 starts with six tickers or “themes.” In our subsequent issues, we will provide more insights on each and add more themes.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights Traffic trends going into Easter Sunday 2025 demonstrated that households planned to celebrate the holiday this year and that the “outside environment” didn’t diminish their enthusiasm and preparations. (Generally, holidays are largely immune from anxieties about the economy; it’s the shoulder periods between seasons that suffer.) As it relates to foot traffic, interpreting this year’s trend is complicated by the late timing of Easter vs.

By Thomas Paulson, Head of Market Insights As anticipated, March was a strong month for retail sales per the Census Bureau’s Advance Monthly Sales report, and no, it wasn’t all due to pull-forward effects and pre-buying ahead of tariffs as we showed earlier . Yes, there was pull-forward in auto, furniture, and electronics but the month was also better for other general merchandise categories and apparel as well. We attribute that improvement (beyond pull-forward) to warmer temperatures after a harsh February and early March, and an overall strong spring selling season despite Easter’s timing.