Retail Foot Traffic Shows 'Significant Recovery' After Omicron Setback

The Omicron variant dealt the retail and office sectors a major setback in their journeys toward a return to post-COVID normalcy, but foot traffic data from Placer.ai reveals that a “significant recovery” was underway by mid-February of this year.

The new variant disrupted retail visits even more than Delta earlier this winter.  Brick and mortar retail visits recovered steadily in the summer of 2021, creating a summer peak with visits up anywhere between 6 and 9% year-over-two-year.  Urban retail foot traffic showed a somewhat uneven recovery across major metros, with New York City suffering most, but summer foot traffic in the Big Apple was nearly back to pre-COVID levels.

But by late August, the Delta variant had pushed visits back into negative territory over 2019 comparisons across the country.  As of January 24, 2022, foot traffic for overall retail visits was down 7.7% over January 2019 numbers, but that number has decreased significantly as infections waned.

“During Delta, the period of impact lasted around a month and the actual declines were fairly limited, with weekly visits quickly bouncing back by October,” Placer.ai’s Ethan Chernofsky says. “But Omicron has been impacting visit rates since the end of the holiday season, and the visit declines in January and February have been far larger than anything seen during Delta.”

The impact was even more substantial, Chernofsky says, for the dining sector.

“For this sector, the Omicron-induced downturn caused the Yo2Y visit gap to revert back to rates not seen since early Spring 2021 – indicating that Omicron has been harder on the dining sector than the Delta variant or any other setback in 2021,” he says. “The clear conclusion is that this particular COVID wave had driven a major setback in the overall recovery process for retail and office visits.”

And for the office sector, “months of progress (were) decimated in January,” when year-over-two-year visit gaps were higher than 50%.  

The takeaway? “The spread of the Omicron variant created a unique challenge at this stage of the recovery and drove major visit declines,” according to Chernofsky. “However, brick-and-mortar retail, restaurants and even offices once again showed resilience and continued their recovery trajectory as soon as case numbers declined. So, while this particular variant may be remembered for causing one of the bigger challenges, the clear, fast and significant recovery being seen is the latest and perhaps greatest testament toward ongoing consumer demand for in-store experiences.”