C-Store Trips and Spending Rose Last Week

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—PDI and NACS have launched a new weekly report powered by PDI Insights Cloud providing consumer trip and basket-level data and analysis that will enable essential businesses around the United States to deliver what their customers want and need right now.

Here are some key insights for the week ended April 5, 2020:  

Although trips and dollars are still down year over year, this is the first week the dollar sales rate of decline has lessened due to a more significant increase in dollars per trip vs. a year ago. Since the start of March, declines have accelerated when comparing week over week performance, and this week trips and dollars have increased compared with the preceding week. This increase was due primarily to a surge in spend (+125%) and trips (+9%) within store services, specifically, money orders; this is typically seen at the beginning of each month.

Nearly every major category, aside from foodservice, packaged sweet snacks, and cold dispensed beverages, saw week over week increases in trips and dollars. The categories contributing most to the dollar increase were tobacco, beer, non-alcoholic packaged beverages, and candy.

However, the overall trend continued to be negative, and weekend declines appeared more severe than the days leading up to it, perhaps due to the Easter holiday. As more states continue to expand shelter in place directives, trends are likely to continue.

As in previous weeks, tobacco and beer continued to experience performance that positively outpaces remaining categories, and other categories, including non-alcoholic packed beverages and candy, experienced declines somewhat slower than in prior weeks. Once again, foodservice, including dispensed beverages, continues to decline compared with the prior year at a similar pace.

Click here to read the free two-page summary, and click here to download the full report from PDI.