As consumers adjust to rising prices while slowly returning to pre-pandemic habits (like procrastinating on their shopping), some stores saw notable changes in foot traffic last quarter.

Food chain: According to Placer.ai, grocery stores saw foot traffic fall in Q1 of 2022, down 8.6% from the previous quarter, though visits were up 4.6% YoY.

• The second half of Q1 saw a more significant slowdown, with YoY visits the week of March 28 down 6.6%, which Placer.ai attributes to higher costs—particularly record-high gas prices—taking hold.

Visits per individual store dropped by 4.4% from pre-pandemic levels and 10.1% from last quarter, so overall foot-traffic numbers were influenced by store expansions from Trader Joe’s, Publix, and Aldi (which beat 2019 visit numbers in Q1) rather than a boost in shopper numbers.

• The median length of visits also dipped—down 1.9% QoQ and 4.4% YoY, another likely side effect of inflation and smaller basket sizes, the report noted.

But despite YoY visit-rate declines in Q1, visits grew each month in the quarter, a positive sign for grocery, said Ethan Chernofsky, Placer.ai’s VP of marketing.

“The lasting strength in the sector is a powerful indication that the boost the sector saw from the pandemic could be far longer-lasting than initially expected,” he told Retail Brew in an email.

Supersized: Meanwhile, the promise of one-stop shopping (and value pricing) at superstores like Target, Costco, and Sam’s Club has kept foot traffic going strong, per the report.

• Visits took an unsurprising 17.2% dive QoQ following Q4’s typical holiday rush, but YoY, they were up 3%. Weekly visits slowed down toward the end of Q1, but remained strong compared to 2019.

Consumers are also returning to their pre-Covid shopping habits of pushing everything off to the weekend. After three quarters of decline, weekend shopping visits to superstores last quarter were up 36.2%.

• But, again, the visits are getting shorter: they fell by 9.1% YoY and 5.6% QoQ.—EC

Things are looking up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—literally.

It’s where Wing is operating its first on-demand drone delivery service in a major US metropolitan area, in partnership with Walgreens.

• Drones can drop off health and wellness products (and even ice cream) to “tens of thousands” of homes in the towns of Frisco and Little Elm, according to the company.

Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field chatted with Alexa Dennett, Wing’s head of communications, to get the deets on how it actually works.

Up and away: Walgreens employees pack up the order in a box, then the drone takes over from there, with little human involvement. “The drone will follow its autonomously-chartered flight route, automatically unclipping the package from its hook when it reaches a customer’s yard,” Hayden explained. Dennett called the service a “store-to-door” model.

• It isn’t completely without supervision. “We have pilots overseeing the flights of our drones, and they can intervene on an exceptions basis,” Dennett said, adding that each pilot heads up to eight drones in Wing’s DFW operations.
• Wing also had to place “visual observers in elevated areas along the route to satisfy legal requirements,” Hayden wrote.

A sight to see: The Alphabet-owned company, which also operates in Australia and Finland, performed 30,000 flights through March 1 of this year. Last year, Wing delivered 100,000+ packages worldwide, most of them in Australia.

Click here to read the full story on Emerging Tech Brew.—JS

Today’s top retail reads.

Grimace: How inflation hit the Big Mac. (Axios)

Tik’d off: A Dollar General manager got famous—and fired—thanks to TikTok. (The New York Times)

Gorillas in the midst: An interactive map of the dark retail stores in New York. (Fast Company)

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What happened in the world of retail this week in…1905 and beyond? Retail Brew takes you way, way, way back.

Sorry about the heat, but this week you’re going to have to stay in the kitchen.

• On April 17, 1905, in Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that had set legal maximums on the daily and weekly hours—10 and 60, respectively—bakers could be required to work.
• On April 20, 2018, the wheels of justice also turned across the border, where a Mexican court issued a temporary injunction, blocking sales of a Frida Kahlo Barbie doll until it could be determined if Mattel had the rights to the artist’s image.
• On April 21, 1911, Ivan D. Combe was born in Fremont, Iowa, and would go on to gain a truly unblemished reputation as the inventor of Clearasil.
• And on April 21, 1930, Donald J. Tyson, the son of a poultry farmer who would become the billionaire president and CEO of Tyson Foods and help develop the Chicken McNugget, was born (hatched?) in Olathe, Kansas.

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• Breaking down alt-proteins’ 2021 by the numbers
• How growing a beard went from a rejection of grooming to a grooming bonanza