In this third blog post of our summer series, we review two different measures of economic activity that can help paint an overall picture of consumer trends. Measuring foot traffic at consumer discretionary businesses helps us understand the extent to which people are back to shopping for non-essentials - an indicator for increasing flexibility of movement and confidence in the outlook. During April and May there was a massive year-over-year drop in visits to non-essential locations.

With a decrease in social distancing measures across most states, and markets reaching record highs, the past couple of weeks had felt like a tentative breakthrough after months of lockdown and uncertainty. Yet news from the Fed today that they would hold rates steady for the foreseeable future and another heavy week for jobless claims led to a 5% drop in the Nasdaq. The fall of 1,400 points sent stocks towards their worst day for markets since mid-March.

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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.