The post-Memorial Day data dropped over the long weekend and into Tuesday, and the headline number is the kind that gets the consumer-discretionary desk on the phone with the corporate-strategy desk. According to industry survey data reported by Inside Radio, 54% of US consumers planned to make a purchase during the Memorial Day weekend — up from 36% in 2025 — but the average ticket fell to $86 from $289 the year before. Participation up 50%. Ticket down roughly 70%.

That's not a contradiction. It's the cleanest single-data-point illustration of "selective spending" the consumer-research community has produced this year.

What's actually happening at the basket level

The category mix tells the rest of the story. The top-spending categories were grills and outdoor cooking (28% of respondents bought into the category), summer apparel (27%), home goods and décor (21%), electronics (18%), pool and beach gear (18%), home-improvement supplies (16%), outdoor furniture (15%), and appliances (15%), per the same survey series. What's missing is also instructive: there's no category in the top eight that requires a $300+ ticket. Even appliances at 15% is the kind of purchase that gets defrayed across a financing offer.

The implication for the retailers most exposed to Memorial Day promotional cadences — Home Depot, Lowe's, Best Buy, Wayfair, the off-price names, and the home-goods specialty channel — is that conversion improved at the cost of basket size. More feet in the door, fewer dollars per visit. That's a margin question for the back-half guide as much as it is a top-line question.

The two-speed consumer becomes the two-speed weekend

The other piece of the weekend that doesn't show up in retail survey data shows up in travel data. AAA projected a record 45 million Americans would travel at least 50 miles from home for Memorial Day weekend — a holiday-record number — even as those same households were cutting their retail-purchase ticket by 70%. SUCCESS Magazine's coverage of the dual-speed consumer framed it as the experiences-over-goods inflection that the post-pandemic recovery teased but didn't deliver until now.

This is the structural read that retailers actually have to plan around. The customer didn't disappear. They went to a restaurant or got in a car instead of buying a TV. Travel and dining are not zero-sum with retail in the strict sense, but they are zero-sum with retail's share of discretionary wallet during exactly the high-promotional windows that mass and home-improvement chains rely on for quarterly comp lift.

PYMNTS' Memorial Day analysis added another data point worth pulling out: 35% of US adults are in what the firm classifies as "active financial retreat" as of the April reporting cycle, meaning they've made an explicit decision to reduce discretionary outflow. That cohort isn't disappearing; it's still showing up at the door. It's just shopping smaller.

How this reads against the Conference Board print

Endcap's coverage Tuesday of the Conference Board's May confidence print noted that two of the major confidence gauges — Michigan and Conference Board — were now pointing the same direction. The Memorial Day survey is the third independent measurement and it confirms the pattern in transactional terms rather than survey-sentiment terms. Confidence is soft; participation is up; ticket size is down.

That's the most retailer-relevant translation of the macro mood. It's also why Macy's, Dick's, and Abercrombie all reported strong Q1 prints this week and still had stocks that traded heavy on the days they printed: the read-through to the back half assumes that the consumer who walks in the door spends less than they did a year ago, and the management commentary has to accommodate that without spooking the model.

What retailers should plan for in Q3

Three operating implications for the next 90 days. First, traffic-driving promotions are working but margin-dilutive promotions are not — the survey data suggests that small-ticket, high-frequency offers (think outdoor-cooking accessories) are pulling more traffic than the high-ticket appliance and electronics promos. Second, the back-to-school window in late July and August is going to land into a consumer that has been compressing ticket size for six straight months — pricing strategy should assume the trend doesn't break heading in. Third, the Memorial Day data argues for the kind of inventory-position discipline that retailers have spent two years tightening; the worst outcome for Q3 is a category-specific glut that has to be cleared into a consumer that's already trained to wait for markdowns.

The selective consumer was a thesis at the start of the year. Memorial Day weekend just turned it into a measurement.