Edit - Well damn. EPS and revenue beat but guidance is king these days. Holding onto the calls at this point in case a miracle happens but counting the full 8k as a loss. Only down 1.7k on shares so far but if it does the same thing it has done the last 3 quarters, it will rebound to new highs so not too worried. Congratulations to all the Bears and better luck next time to all the Bulls with me.
I believe BBWI is going to crush earnings based on 5 months of store stalking and no one is talking about it. Literally not one mention about earnings on wallstreetbets. TLDR at the end.
Background:
I have been on paternity leave for a little over 5 months now. I live 20 minutes away from 3 different malls and thought I walking around them for an hour or two every day would be a great way to kill some time while also letting my newborn see new things. Around the same time I watched a video on how a Chinese coffee shop got outed for fake financials by people literally watching the store and counting the number of people buying things. That gave me the idea to track how many people were in stores and how many shopping bags I saw around the mall from each store indicating a purchase. Obviously there is a major difference between dozens of people watching stores vs just little old me but the data I gathered has been spot on for earning beats on what I considered to be outliers. The stores that have surprised me with their high volume are Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Urban Outfitters, Sephora, and of course Bath and Body Works.
Method:
All in all I have 124 days worth of data so far. I usually only visit one mall a day but sometimes two. Any day of the week and usually between 12pm and 5pm. I try and park at different entrances so I don’t get biased in my counting of bags because I park right next to one store or another. I go to three different malls each catering to a different economic class. Pretty much lower, middle, and high income. I do 2 passes, about and hour apart, of each store I am tracking. I count the number of customers in the store. While I walk around, I also count the number of bags I see from each store. This is a bit harder to trust though as people with multiple bags usually condense into one. So stores with small bags (looking at you Sephora) are underrepresented. I would occasionally go into BBWI and count the items in people carts too but only did this a handful of times.
Data:
The average number of people I have seen at BBWI is 9.82 on weekdays and 23.68 on weekends. This crushes the average from all the stores I tracked which was 2.98 on weekdays and 8.2 on weekends. The only store with a higher average was Sephora which was 10.36 and 25.25 respectfully. All three malls had similar numbers with the higher income mall being slightly higher but not enough to note. I think this was due to young girls traveling in packs of 3 or 4 which I didn’t see at the other two malls.
The average number of bags (aka purchases) for BBWI was 4.1 on weekdays and 11.67 on weekends. Which again crushes the average of just 1.45 and 3.11.
For some context here are pictures of the check out line Saturday 30 minutes apart. Wanted to hide people because I think it is rude for a random stranger to snap pictures of people and post them online. There are currently multiple tellers checking out customers with 5 more people in line.
https://preview.redd.it/j7utbegx6d4d1.png?width=1485&format=png&auto=webp&s=66905e26bba9ebd5134ef3e817efaaf26b45b8cc
30 minutes later and still 5 people in line
https://preview.redd.it/dbjon4ep6d4d1.png?width=1493&format=png&auto=webp&s=3ce85d8724ee99cd47b3e79a3b0bbaa7112b79bc
Other Things to Note
Male Skin Care \- Something I didn’t track, but surprised me, was the number of males in the store alone or with another guy (this goes for Sephora as well). Doing a bit of research on the topic of men's skin care shows a 6.2% year over year growth and a 389% increa