Foot traffic dropped for the first time since COVID last year.
Most retailers still don’t know why.
This week’s blog, The Thing You’re Avoiding, is about the thing on your list you keep skipping — and what it’s actually costing you to avoid it.
In this newsletter, we’re looking at why foot traffic alone is no longer the number that matters, and what the best furniture and mattress retailers are doing differently right now.
The gap between who walks in and who buys is where the money is.
Today's Rundown
Here's a quick glimpse of what is in this week's newsletter.
The Brown M&M audit: Download our latest guidebook and unlock 7 diagnostic tests for your sales floor.
Brick-and-mortar: New store openings now outpace closures as retailers rethink the role of physical locations in a post-digital-first world.
Case Study: See how this furniture retailer gained 5 conversion points in a down market.
Notable News
📉 The Traffic Drop Furniture Retailers Are Ignoring
After four years of steady growth, brick-and-mortar foot traffic posted its first real decline since COVID in the second half of 2025 — and most retailers are heading into 2026 like it didn’t happen.
The Seaker Group, which tracks mobile-location data across roughly 500 U.S. shopping destinations, found that starting in June 2025, weekly store traffic fell 10% or more and stayed depressed through year-end. That’s a 30-point swing from the gains recorded just months earlier.
Here’s the number that should get your attention: retail sales still grew 3.7% in 2025, but foot traffic only grew 1.8%. Traffic and revenue are no longer moving together — and in a high-ticket category like furniture or mattresses, that gap is everything.
The average furniture store converts somewhere between 16% and 40% of the people who walk through the door. That’s a wide range — and where you sit in it matters more than how many people you’re getting in. A store at the low end of that benchmark seeing 100 visitors a week is functionally leaving 24 sales on the table compared to a store at the high end. At a $2,400 average ticket, that’s nearly $58,000 a month in the gap.
Most stores don’t know where they sit. That’s the real problem.
We wrote about this exact blind spot this week. Read The Thing You’re Missing HERE
Notable News
Go Deeper: The Brown M&M Audit
Last week’s blog introduced the idea of tripwires — small, observable moments that reveal whether your systems are actually working. We’ve turned that idea into something practical. The Brown M&M Audit is a short guide built for owners, leaders, and sales teams who want to see what’s really happening on their sales floor, not what they hope is happening.
Inside the guide are seven simple diagnostic tests you can run immediately — from follow-up and first questions to walk-aways and handoffs — each designed to surface where attention is compounding and where revenue is quietly leaking .
If you want to move beyond theory and put the idea into action, download the Brown M&M Audit and see which details are paying off — and which ones are costing you more than you think.
🛍️ Your Customers Already Know What They Want
A new Capgemini study of 12,000 consumers across 12 countries just confirmed what most furniture and mattress retailers already sense but haven’t fully acted on: the bar for the in-store experience has moved significantly.
In 2026, value isn’t just about price. Consumers are making decisions based on trust, consistency, and whether the experience feels worth the trip. And 74% of shoppers say they specifically value human support during in-store interactions — which is good news for showroom-based retailers, if you’re delivering it.
Here’s the tension: online mattress sales are projected to hit 60.8% of the total market in 2026, up from 52% just two years ago. Shoppers are doing more research, qualifying themselves further, and arriving at your store with higher expectations and less patience. The ones who still make the trip in want an experience that justifies it.
That means the stores winning right now aren’t just the ones with the best product — they’re the ones who know their customer well enough to meet them where they are the moment they walk in.
The question worth asking: how well do you actually know yours?
Clarity on your customer starts with clarity on your data. See how one retailer found $184K/month.
