Small-Business Customer Trips Keep Falling, and Weekday Daytime Shows the Widest Gap

Payment data released Oct. 5 show sales rising on higher prices as transactions fell for an 11th straight month. Foot-traffic research points to weekday daytime hours as the weakest stretch, while evenings gain.

Cover image: an illustration of customers shopping inside a neighborhood store. Illustration: AI-generated image, Touch Won News.

U.S. small businesses rang up more sales in September but served fewer customers, according to payment data released Oct. 5 by Fiserv.

Small-business sales rose 2.2% from a year earlier, the Fiserv Small Business Index showed, while transactions, which Fiserv uses to track customer traffic, fell 2.0%, the eleventh straight monthly decline. Average tickets rose 4.2%, meaning higher prices did much of the work.

"Spending remains deliberate, with consumers shifting dollars among categories to meet immediate needs while pulling back elsewhere," Prasanna Dhore, chief data officer at Fiserv, said in the release.

The weekday daytime gap

The missing trips are not spread evenly. Placer.ai, a location analytics firm, found in a July 9 analysis that Monday-through-Friday visits to U.S. retail corridors between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. ran 20% to 30% below pre-pandemic levels in the second quarter of 2026, a pattern its authors said closely mirrors office attendance. Evenings were the exception: Friday visits from 8 p.m. to midnight came in 2.0% above the same quarter of 2019.

Owners feel the strain. In the Federal Reserve Banks' 2026 Report on Employer Firms, released March 3, 57% of small employers surveyed named reaching customers and growing sales as a challenge in the prior 12 months, the most common answer.

For owners, the figures point to two questions: which weekday hours sit emptiest, and whether offers reach regulars in the evening, when traffic is growing. With customers making fewer trips, each return visit during a slow stretch carries more weight.