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Recent news reports have highlighted an increase in foot traffic for CostCo as the spread of the coronavirus spurs people to stock up on essentials. Some analysis has put the number of visitors to CotsCo stores in the US up 72% year-over-year. At Advan, we ran a detailed analysis of true foot traffic at CostCo. The graph below shows average daily traffic for each month since October 2015, with year-over-year changes overlaid.

Is Gamestop’s traffic up? Is Jimmy John’s traffic growing more than Subway’s? Every day some new analysis of cellphone location data portrays to measure the exact foot traffic in one or all of these, and every day we emit a collective gasp at the incredulous claims. Let’s get this quickly out of the way: Gamestop traffic is trending down; Jimmy John is down too and that trend has not changed for 3 years straight; it’s also worse than Subway’s downward trend, except for some bright, but inconsistent, spots in 2019.