In mid August, a heatwave hit, and visits to city centre shops dropped almost 10 percent in a single week. People headed for the coast instead. A couple of weeks later, heavy rain and flooding arrived, and the numbers fell again while covered shopping centres filled up.
So what actually decided footfall in August? The weather.
Footfall is a weather report
This should be uncomfortable reading for any retailer who treats footfall as their headline number. And plenty do. It sits at the top of the weekly report, it gets discussed in every regional meeting, and store managers are asked to explain it as though they had a hand in it.
But nobody in your store chose the heatwave. Nobody scheduled the flooding. Your teams did not decide that the school holidays would pull families toward the coast instead of the city centre.
Gøril Wold Waegger, who has spent years working with retailers on this exact problem, put it plainly in one of our webinars: hard KPIs are influenced by countless external factors. Weather, market trends, renovations, even the mood of the day. They are valuable, and they rarely show what is really happening in your stores.
Which raises a better question. If you cannot control how many people walk in, what can you control?
The answer is smaller than you think
You can control what happens after the door opens.
That sounds obvious. And yet some retailers still spend more energy analysing visitor numbers than analysing the visit itself.
Here is where it gets concrete. In a 2024 Maze study, 21 percent of customers who left without buying said the reason was that nobody helped them. That is not a footfall problem. That is a behaviour problem, and behaviour sits entirely inside your four walls.
We see the same pattern in grocery. When we ask customers why they chose a particular store, the biggest group says location. Fair enough. But the customers who answer ”previous good experience” have basket sizes 15 to 18 percent higher. They came back because of how the last visit felt, and they spent more when they did.
Behaviour is the only real lever
Gøril has a line we come back to often: variation in your results is the result of variation in your employees’ behaviour.
Greeting a customer. Asking what they came in for. Offering help in the fitting room. Recommending the thing that goes with the thing. These are all completely within an employee’s control, on any day, in any weather.
They are also measurable. That is the part most retailers miss. Soft KPIs feel soft until you start tracking them daily, at which point they behave exactly like every other number you manage.
A better question for Monday morning
Next time footfall drops and the room goes quiet, try swapping the question.
Instead of asking why fewer people came in, ask what happened to the ones who did. How many were greeted? How many were offered help? How many left with something they had not planned to buy, because somebody on the floor made a good suggestion?
Those answers are available every day, from your own customers, in every single store. And unlike the forecast, they tell you something you can actually act on tomorrow.
The weather will do what it wants this autumn. Your teams do not have to.
How we can help
At Maze, we help retailers turn everyday customer feedback into everyday improvement. Every store gets real comments from its own local customers, every day, so teams can see what is working on the floor and what is not.
The result is simple. Your staff know exactly which behaviours matter most for their customers, in their store, this week. And they get to see the difference it makes.
