There was quite a bit of buzz online over the past day about Nintendo using their tariff refund dollars to discount products for a customer appreciation sale. It was smart of them to leverage that for a marketing because it gained quite a bit of coverage.

I bring that up on a website that covers the grill industry because Academy Sports + Outdoors did the same thing with some of their grills. It was discussed on their earnings call this week, confirming a previous allegation by Lowe’s.

Some actions are taken on this front. First, we’re reinvesting the majority of the proceeds from the tariff refunds we received back into improved pricing for our customers. We’ve done a thorough review and have adjusted pricing across many of our private brand products to offer customers pre-tariff mobile prices, which has already stimulated demand, driven traffic and delivered value to our customers. 

A couple examples of this are: In Q2, we promoted our Outdoor Gourmet three-burner gas and charcoal grills for key events at $99.99, taking our largest private brand key item, Magellan Outdoors Laguna Madre shirt back to $19.99 versus $24.99 previously.

Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports + Outdoors

This is one instance of Academy’s broader promotion strategy to bring more traffic into their stores. They continue to adapt to their changing customer financial demographics, with less shoppers in the under-$50k a year households and more from the over $100k crowd.

Clearly, we’ve seen a shift in the consumer spending patterns as we progress through the first half of the year, with demand decelerating from Q1 into Q2. Our expectation is the trends we saw take shape in Q2 will persist throughout the remainder of the year. Based on this assumption, we’re reacting accordingly. We know that being able to present our customers with compelling value during the key events on their calendar is critical to driving sales in the back half of the year.

Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports + Outdoors

Consumers are deferring purchases to traditional sales periods on the calendar, so Academy is offering market-leading deals during those times. Academy is also leaning into end of season clearance offerings as a way to bring in the households under $50k.

As their demographics have shifted, they said on the call that their over $100k cohort is pushing 40% at this point. The under $50 cohort is in the neighborhood of 30%.

…I think that the trends you cited are true of pretty much all of our income cohorts, but I think it’s more exaggerated within the lower income cohort. So I think the shopping is even more episodic. They definitely come out during the peaks on the calendar, retreat during the lulls, and it takes some pretty deep discounting to get some of those people, I think, in the store during those time periods. That’s one of the reasons when we talked about ways we can get them to activate with us. 

We talked about using clearance, right? That is a way we can deliver deep value at the end of the season to these customers. And what we found in our customer research was — they told us, hey, we will buy, you know, the out-of-season bat this year so that my kid can play, you know, softball or baseball next year. And they’re okay with that if they can get a really good deal.

So we’re going through one of those periods right now in September. We go through another one as we exit fall into spring in February and early March. And I think they definitely come out then. I think they’ll come out again during holiday, when we’re running deep discounts around Black Friday and kind of those promotional windows. But I think you’re just seeing more of a pronounced behavioral change from them than you do see from the upper income consumer. That being said, on the other end of the spectrum, newness continues to do well. So we will see almost agnostic of price that if there is something really new that they have to have, that they will buy it.

And so we’re also leaning into that as well. But I think that’s probably a little more of the higher end consumer than the lower end consumer.

Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports + Outdoors

Store Openings

Academy has an aggressive store growth strategy to continue to expand their brand and add density. They remain on track for their previously announced goals.

ain on track to open up 22 to 24 stores this year. During Q2, we opened up three new stores with locations in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and Morristown and North Knoxville, Tennessee. We plan to open 11 additional stores in Q3. Remaining stores for this year are scheduled to open up in November, giving customers a great option to shop for holiday gifts.

At this point, we have 46 stores that were opened up between 2022 and 2025 that are currently in the comp base, and these stores continue to perform well in Q2, comping in the mid-single digits. As we progress through the back half of the year, we’ll continue to see fall 2025 stores start to move into the base.

By the end of the year, we’ll have 63 stores from prior vintages help fuel our comp sales.

Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports + Outdoors