2024 holiday shopping season will beat 2023, Motive says

The holiday shopping season in 2024 will be a stronger than last year, with higher sales and earlier shopping than 2023, according to an economic report from Motive, a California firm that offers fleet and spend management tools.

Motive drew that conclusion as retailers are preparing for strong Q4 sales, with grocery and superstore warehouse visits surpassing 2021 levels, and department stores, apparel, and electronics jumping over 30% year-over-year. That assessment comes from the firm’s “Motive Monthly Economic Report – August 2024.”

That foundational economic strength will also impact global trade trends, as 2024 is on pace to be a record year for Mexican imports to the U.S., with Mexico establishing itself as the United States’ top importer until at least 2030. In May alone, Mexico imports continued at its all-time high as 675,000 trucks brought a total of $32.5 billion in goods into the U.S.

The same trend held true over the longer term, as Mexico has now imported more goods than Canada by truck for the last 22 months consecutively. With Chinese imports down 19.9% year-over-year since May 2022, it’s clearer than ever that U.S. companies are adopting nearshoring from Mexico as their primary resourcing strategy, Motive said.

Those healthy freight flows will soon help push the beleaguered trucking market to hit net-positive growth by November, ending nearly two consecutive years of losses, the report said. Motive creates its monthly economic report by using aggregated and anonymized insights from the Motive network and from publicly available government data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, U.S. Census, and U.S. Department of Transportation.

Another data point was that June saw one of the strongest month-over-month jumps to date for retailer restocking, according to Motive’s Big Box Retail Index. The metric, which tracks visits to warehouses of the top 50 U.S. retailers, jumped 10.8% since May, and 16% year-over-year. While these rates typically rise in summer months, this year’s surge indicates retailers are expecting bigger summer sales than last year and will likely report record sales for the month of July, which featured competing promotions from large retailers, like Amazon Prime Day.