No. of Recommendations: 9
April through June data now available at Placer. Putting it together, Placer's Q1 and Q2 quarterly reports for dollar stores have traffic growth yoy as follows:
Jan-Mar 12.6%
Apr 9.1% (note: Easter fell in March this year)
May 14.3%
Jun 15.9%
Placer looks at total "foot traffic", so a good chunk of the above traffic growth arises from (1) store growth and (2) remodels of smaller footprint stores. [Note: It is also why FIVE shows up well in this metric, on placer's Q2 report, despite their recent struggles -- they've added quite a few new stores on a percentage basis]. The several popshelf to DG conversions also presumably resulted in increased traffic.
But per store traffic growth is the better metric.
DG's Q1 earnings call reported "consumer traffic" growth by store to be "over 4%", for the February to April quarter. If one is taking Placer's numbers for the quarter and turning them into per store numbers, that required about a -7% adjustment for Q1.
The rate of DG's store growth, on a percentage basis, did not change much during the relevant time periods. Assuming, very roughly, a similar haircut of 7% to Placer's May and June numbers, we'd get 8.1% traffic growth by store in the first 2/3rds of Q2. I'll take the under on the figure, but I assume its roughly right and DG is not having a problem drawing customers in Q2.
I will be interested in seeing if DG give another percentage figure on customer traffic growth in the Q2 call. Eyeballing Placer's numbers here and elsehwere, they often appear a bit inflated, though perhaps it is because they are picking up "foot traffic" growth that does not result in sales/consumer growth.
Links to the above data:
Some reporting, at Quartz:
https://stocks.apple.com/AAvwmKXP2SS-eXWZf1tPIDwPlacer's Q1 report:
https://go.placer.ai/library/q1-2024-retail-dining...Placer's Q2 report:
https://go.placer.ai/library/q2-2024---retail-rest... 