We’ve already written about why Q4 needs two distinct timing windows instead of one steady ramp, and about why waiting on media spend costs more than just time. There’s a third adjustment retail media plans need to make this season, and it has nothing to do with timing or pricing. Retail media plans often talk about ‘the holiday shopper’ as if that’s one person with one set of priorities. This season, that person doesn’t exist.
Retail traffic grew overall, but not evenly
Placer.ai found nationwide retail visits up 2.8% from November 1 through December 24, 2025, compared with the same period the year before. That headline number hides a much sharper split underneath it. Thrift store visits rose 11.7% and off-price retailer visits rose 6.6%, the two biggest gains in the entire apparel category. Wholesale club traffic was up 7.5%, and discount and dollar store visits rose 6.9%. Value formats didn’t just hold steady this season, they led it.
The middle is where the traffic disappeared
At the other end, luxury chains and department stores posted modest visit gains of 1.8%, holding their ground even as broader apparel traffic softened. What didn’t hold was the middle. Mid-tier department stores saw visits fall 6.2% over the same period, the steepest decline of any major format Placer.ai tracked. Retailers sitting between “clearly cheap” and “clearly premium” lost the most ground, because that’s exactly the position shoppers are actively moving away from.
The same shopper is doing both
This isn’t just two different groups of shoppers, budget-conscious and premium, splitting off from each other. It’s frequently the same person making both moves at once. Deloitte’s 2025 Holiday Retail Survey found 77% of shoppers trading down on brands or retailers in at least one category this season. At the same time, Buy Now Pay Later usage crossed $1 billion in a single day for the first time on Cyber Monday 2025, a payment method that’s frequently used to make a bigger purchase feel more manageable, not to avoid spending. Trading down in one category is funding a splurge in another, and increasingly a financed one.
Private label follows the same pattern from the retailer side. Circana found U.S. private label sales reached $330 billion in 2025, a record 24% unit share, largely concentrated in food, beverage, and CPG categories. Retailers aren’t just responding to value-seeking behavior, they’re actively building more of it into their own assortments.
What this means for how a campaign should speak
A single message built for an average shopper is built for a shopper who barely exists this season. Messaging tuned for value, price, deals, savings, will resonate with a real and growing share of the audience. Messaging built around quality, exclusivity, or premium experience will resonate with a different, equally real share. What won’t work is something built for the middle, the same territory mid-tier department stores are actively losing traffic from.
Managing a Q4 campaign well means recognizing which end of that split a given creative or offer is actually speaking to, and being deliberate about not blurring the two. That’s on top of the timing and pricing pressure we’ve covered elsewhere in this series, together, they’re three reasons a Q4 plan built on last year’s assumptions is already behind.
If you want a second set of eyes on how your current messaging splits across that divide, contact us today.
