Placer.ai Releases 100 Retail and Dining Index
Placer.ai, a market intelligence platform, has released its Placer 100 Retail and Dining Index, which it plans to release monthly in order to provide an ongoing understanding of retail’s status, challenges, and potential for brands including Buffalo Wild Wings, Chili’s, Crunch Fitness, Warby Parker and other large retail chains. Location analytics including visit trends, trade areas, and demographics are the foundation of the company’s data. Ethan Chernofsky, SVP of Marketing at Placer.ai, explained the process and importance of the Index to retail advertising decision makers.
Which marketplace conditions made Placer.ai decide to produce this report?
The retail landscape in recent years has been uniquely volatile, and so much of the Placer.ai mission has centered around empowering people to optimize their decision-making capabilities amidst this tumult. The Placer 100 Index provides a needed “finger on the pulse” to understand how key brick-and-mortar segments are performing and a capacity to understand those changes at national and local levels.
How are you defining “high performance” in this context? Foot traffic or sales or both?
The foundation of Placer.ai’s unique perspective rests on the ability to enable reliable and accurate location analytics, and the Placer 100 Index uses this foot traffic perspective as its centerpiece.
Is the thinking among these brands—just get the customers in, and they’ll not leave without spending? So foot traffic becomes the most important metric?
If we really believe that omnichannel retail is the goal then we need to embrace metrics that help us understand the full impact of the retail store. Yes, spend and transactions are absolutely critical, but understanding that the role of the store can actually boost sales even if they take place in other channels is equally critical to understanding their evolving role and the strategies built around them.
What methodology did you use to gather this information?
Placer.ai leverages de-identified location data from a panel of tens of millions of mobile devices, upon which the company leverages industry-leading AI and machine-learning capabilities to make estimations about overall visits to any location.
How did you select the brands and verticals for this report? Were they the only ones that showed such growth?
There was an extensive process to identify the ideal mix of retailers to provide a true sense of what is happening offline. Myriad factors were considered from size, balance of segments, performance, and more to attempt to provide a snapshot of what is really happening in the brick-and-mortar environment.
Costco didn’t make the list in 2024 but was on it in 2023. Was that a surprise? If so, why?
Many of these chains are included. We specifically call out brands with the highest growth rate. The key to understanding growth rate is not that those growing the most are somehow the best. For example, Costco had strong growth, but their baseline was so strong that even a small improvement on such an impressive starting point is noteworthy.
Why do you think the Midwest saw the highest growth for retail and dining out compared to other parts of the country?
There was a fairly consistent trend of growth across the country with critical retail states like California, New York, Florida and Texas all seeing overall upticks in visits. The widespread nature of the success indicates the continuation of a trend where brick-and-mortar businesses continue to drive significant value.
