COVID-19’s Impact of U.S. Consumer Behavior Trends

Location data, generated by pseudonymized consumer mobile devices, provides superior insight into the everyday movement patterns of consumers. This aggregated information is most frequently used by brands for a range of marketing purposes — powering market research, understanding buyer personas, finding the best location for a new store, or mapping the buyer journey. It is, however, broadly applicable to myriad other use cases — including public health and resource planning — for which it is imperative to quickly understand population movement patterns and how they are changing.

The rapid spread of COVID-19, combined with federal, state, and local government encouragement of social distancing, has resulted in unprecedented shifts in visit patterns to retail locations. Some business categories have seen visits skyrocket — at least temporarily — while in others, foot traffic has come to a virtual standstill. Our economic activity dashboards measure the effect of COVID-19 on everyday consumer behavior. How has consumer behavior changed, and how is it continuing to change? Which areas of the country are actively practicing or avoiding social distancing? Which categories are most impacted and which are starting to show signs of recovery?

Unless otherwise noted, all data studies are built using Gravy DaaS and the Gravy Visitations dataset. This privacy-friendly dataset captures consumer visits to millions of business locations and public places, across thousands of different place categories and for over 3,500 leading brands. Visitations data only includes data derived from location signals observed at commercial places of interest and is delivered at an aggregate level. It is a massive sample data set that reflects the daily habits of groups of U.S. consumers.