Weekday and weekend footfall: why the difference matters

Weekday and weekend footfall can differ so much that an average over the whole week describes neither. A business district can be crowded Monday to Friday and empty on Sunday; a leisure quarter can be the reverse. Measuring the two apart, and dividing one by the other, tells you which kind of place you are in and when your effort pays.

This article is for anyone who plans around the week: restaurant groups, venues, retail chains, gyms and service businesses. It shows how to split the measurement, how to read the ratio, how the weekend is defined in different countries, and where people go wrong.

Why one average misleads

Say a plaza has 30,000 people-hours on an average day. That figure could come from 36,000 on each weekday and 15,000 on each weekend day, or from 24,000 on weekdays and 45,000 on the weekend. Both average out to the same 30,000, but the first is an office crowd and the second a day-out crowd, and they want different things at different times.

The whole-week figure is still useful for ranking places against each other. It just cannot tell you how to staff, when to open, or what to sell on which day.

How to measure the two apart

1. Feed your places to a first Mobility Footfall block set to Days: Weekdays only, with the circle and window you want.
2. Add a Calculated field that keeps its figure: weekday_footfall = footfall_daily.
3. Add a second Mobility Footfall block with the same circle and window, set to Days: Weekends only. Its footfall_daily is now the weekend figure.
4. Add another Calculated field: weekend_ratio = footfall_daily / weekday_footfall.
5. Sort by the ratio with Sort and limit, and send the list where your team reads it.

A ratio above 1 means the average weekend day is busier than the average weekday; below 1, the reverse. Because each figure is an average day, the ratio is fair even though there are five weekdays and two weekend days.

The weekend is not the same everywhere

The block counts the weekend the way the place itself lives it. In most of the Gulf the weekend is Friday and Saturday; elsewhere it is Saturday and Sunday. A chain with branches in Riyadh and in Mexico City gets the right days for each without setting anything, and hours are counted in each place’s own time zone.

Made-up figures for a made-up restaurant group, to show how the ratio reads.

The group in this example now sees two families of branch. The business-park branch in Riyadh and the office-corridor branch in Mexico City are weekday places, with weekends at about two fifths of a weekday. The mall branch and the historic centre are weekend places. Treating all four the same, with the same menu, hours and staff, would leave two of them short at the busy time and two overstaffed in the quiet one.

What to do with the ratio

• Weekday places (ratio well under 1): set-lunch menus, quick service, loyalty offers that bring office workers back, and a lighter weekend team. Consider closing on the quietest day.
• Weekend places (ratio well over 1): longer opening, family and group offers, booking systems, and stock that is heavy on Friday or Saturday.
• Balanced places (close to 1): plan by hour of the day instead, because the week is even. See finding the busiest hour and day around a shop.
• Marketing: aim weekday campaigns at the weekday places and weekend campaigns at the weekend ones, rather than running one plan for the whole chain.

Traps

• A short window with a public holiday on a weekday will make that week look like a weekend. Use 30 days, and check footfall_from and footfall_to.
• Comparing a ratio from a 7-day window with one from a 30-day window. Keep the window the same for every place in the comparison.
• Reading a high ratio as a better place. It is a different kind of place, not a better one; the daily level and your own sales decide which is worth more to you.
• Forgetting that the figures arrive late. Each day reaches the block about ten days after it happened.

An AI employee for the whole network

For a chain, run the comparison once a month. A Schedule, your branch table from My data, the two Mobility Footfall blocks, the calculated ratio, then xMap LLM asked to group the branches into weekday, weekend and balanced places and suggest one change for each group. A Make a report block turns it into a PDF for the operations meeting.

Each month the report shows which branches changed family, which is often the first sign that something around them changed: an office that emptied, a new attraction, or a road that closed for months.