US Broadlines Retail: What does traffic data by income tell us about the state of the US consumer?

Research evidence excerpt

US Broadlines Retail: What does traffic data by income tell us about the state of the US consumer?

16 July 2026

US Retailing Broadlines & Hardlines

US Broadlines Retail: What does traffic data by income tell us

about the state of the US consumer?

The US consumer is becoming increasingly K-shaped. The low income cohort has Zhihan Ma, CFA

+1 917 344 8303 experienced below-average wage growth while having come under greater inflationary

zhihan.ma@bernsteinsg.com pressure in recent years. This trend is further exacerbated by the OBBBA, which benefits

higher income households disproportionally through incremental tax refunds, while low

Jeremy Miles, CFA income households lose out due to SNAP and Medicaid eligibility changes. Although gas

+1 917 344 8370

jeremy.miles@bernsteinsg.com prices have started to moderate, inflationary pressure is likely here to stay. This means

that low income consumers could remain under pressure, while middle to high income

consumers remain value conscious. Are we seeing this in the traffic data?

We leverage ADVAN’s visits and demographic data to triangulate retailers’ traffic growth

by income cohorts. To conduct the analysis, we took the weekly number of visits by store,

distributed them by income cohorts based on ADVAN’s estimated demographics at the

store level, and added them up at the chain level. We then added up the total number of

visits by income cohort for each banner to calculate the YoY change in visits by income

cohort as a proxy for traffic trends by income.

The short answer is that there is some evidence of low income pressure, reflected by

them shopping more frequently in value channels (e.g., dollar retailers) with smaller baskets.

Meanwhile, we don’t see evidence of middle- to high-income consumers trading