Visits to physical stores on Super Saturday up 17%

Shoppers turned to brick-and-mortar stores as the holiday shopping season entered its final week.

Visits to physical stores on Super Saturday (Dec. 17) were up 17% from the previous Saturday (Dec. 10) and up 36% from Dec. 3, according to shopper traffic data from Sensormatic Solutions. Shopper traffic on Super Saturday was up 0.2% compared to 2021.

Super Saturday is usually second to only Black Friday in terms of shopper traffic. But Sensormatic noted due to the timing of the 2022 holidays — Super Saturday fell a full eight days before Christmas — it did not expect that to be the case this year. (Super Saturday came in fourth on Sensormatic’s predictions for the ten busiest shopping days of the 2022 holiday season, which it released in September. The 10 busiest shopping days are likely to account for approximately 40% of all holiday retail traffic, according to Sensormatic.)

“Our predictions have Dec. 23 taking second billing and Dec. 22, Dec. 18, and Dec. 21 rounding out the top 10, so we believe there’s plenty more traffic to come, weather dependent,” said Brian Field, global leader of retail consulting and analytics at Sensormatic Solutions.

Field added that as Sensormatic continues to track against its initial predictions for the busiest shopping days of the 2022 holiday season, it is monitoring the winter storm that’s anticipated to hit the Midwest later this week.

Sensormatic’s Super Saturday traffic report is part of the company’s annual efforts to highlight retailers’ performance during the holiday season. The company recently released its Black Friday Weekend report, which showed that store traffic on Black Friday increased 3.1% compared to 2021, and Thanksgiving Day saw an uptick from 2021’s numbers, with a 17.2% increase.

Last week, the National Retail Federation forecast that 158 million consumers would shop on Super Saturday, the highest number since NRF first started tracking this data in 2016.