·  Black Friday Weekend traffic was softer YoY due to adverse weather, a softer weekend box office, aggressive online promotions, and potentially a strong Saturday college football schedule that kept folks on their couches for the day. (They sprang into shopping malls on Sunday).

·  The trends align with what we said about September (and likely October) retail sales. This suggests that the Christmas season is likely to be good, but not gangbusters like 2024’s.

Broadly speaking, traffic for 2025’s Black Friday Weekend was softer than the recent trend, and down YoY, with Saturday particularly soft. We suspect the cause was adverse weather (snowiest in 40 years), the box office compare (Zootopia vs. Moana), and maybe college football. Given what we were doing on Saturday, watching Ohio State vs. Michigan, Wisconsin vs. Minnesota, and a few other games, most of which were great match-ups, and so maybe many other households took to watching the games (while also picking deals for delivery). That may explain part of Saturday’s softer vs. Sunday’s stronger result. And yes, there were deals, more deals, and more-more deals. We noticed that Amazon was particularly aggressive in deals and delivery speeds. As shown in the table below, activity at Amazon’s fulfillment centers and more local sortation centers were particularly strong (and the trend picked up appreciably from the 1H-November). Walmart also hit hard as demonstrated by its store-delivery business increasing by +57% for the Weekend, while also holding traffic flat. Best Buy connected with shoppers, given its strong foot traffic gains (a strong pickup from the 1H of November). Costco also outperformed.

This year’s lighter box office contributed to lighter mall traffic. For the weekend, the 3-day box office total was $185M, driven by Zootopia-2, which did a smashing $156M. However, last year was a $277M, driven by Monana-2, plus Wicked and Gladiator II. The difference between $277 and $185 is around 7.7M attendees. 7.7M over a 3-day period and the visits to shopping malls for the Weekend is a big relative number (we estimate around a -230bps headwind). We also see evidence of that in the softer visits to full-service restaurants (-0.6%).