NPS Intelligence (beta)

WEEKLY DIGEST · ISSUE 04

Issue 04 · Sector Highlight · 2026-05-19

Retail & Consumer Goods

The retail and consumer goods sector—spanning everything from Tyresnmore's tyre aftermarkets to Tonies SE's audio toys and Ceconomy AG's electronics chains—continues to trade heavily on the strength of customer advocacy. Yet underneath the headline numbers, the sector's NPS trajectory tells a story of pandemic gains now giving way to post-recovery volatility.

The headline

The sector cohort comprises scored disclosures with a median NPS of 70.0—materially below the all-database median of 74. Retail proper (108 disclosures, median 80.0) and automotive-focused sub-verticals (median 82.0 across nine observations) perform well above the sector midpoint, while big-box chains struggling with structural churn weigh on the average. The result is a sector that rewards category leadership but punishes scale without differentiation.

NPS evolution

Median NPS climbed steadily from 54.0 in 2017 through a peak of 80.0 in 2023, driven by pandemic tailwinds and digital acceleration. Since then the trajectory has softened: 2024 saw a retreat to 70.0, 2025 continued the slide to 65.0, and 2026 has rebounded modestly to 76.0 on a smaller sample of 42 disclosures. Average NPS mirrors the pattern, rising from 47.4 in 2017 to 72.8 in 2023 before falling to 56.6 in 2025 and recovering to 67.8 year-to-date. The inflection reflects normalization of pandemic-era loyalty, intensified price competition, and the reemergence of service friction in omnichannel operations.

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Average disclosed NPS by year — Retail & Consumer Goods

Disclosure volume

Disclosure activity surged from 35 observations in 2017 to a local peak of 79 in 2025, before settling at 42 so far in 2026. The step-change in 2020–2021 (52 and 67 disclosures, respectively) coincided with investor and board attention to digital engagement metrics; the subsequent plateau suggests NPS has moved from novelty to routine operating metric for many firms in the cohort.

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Disclosure volume by year — Retail & Consumer Goods

Company stories

Biggest swings

Zomato shed 56 points between March 2018 (84.0) and August 2021 (28.0) as rapid delivery expansion collided with service-quality complaints. (Target's apparent collapse from 88 to 5 over the same window is treated separately in the deep dive below—the headline movement turns out to be a measurement artifact.)

Recent standouts

Accent Group disclosed an NPS of 86.0 on 13 May 2026, supported by an average transaction value of $170—a combination that suggests pricing power alongside advocacy. iHerb reported 88.0 in late April, while Dogtopia hit an all-time high of 90.0 in the first quarter. These scores cluster well above the sector median and reflect brand moats in specialty categories.

Negative-NPS watch

Makro sat at −76.0 in September 2024. Club Monaco reported −28.0 in April 2026, signaling continued friction in the fashion-retail segment. (For the more dramatic negatives—StubHub at −100 and Cracker Barrel at −11—see the deep dive below.)

Fresh in 2026

The most recent wave of disclosures highlights strength in niche verticals:

Older nuggets worth a second look

Reader-marked deep dive: twelve companies, twelve different stories

Public NPS disclosures usually arrive one at a time. A company puts out a number, the press picks it up, and that number floats free of any context. But when a company discloses more than once—a habit a small minority of public companies have built—something more useful happens: you can see the trajectory, you can see the consistency, and most importantly, you can see whether the number means what the company wants you to think it means.

We marked 69 noteworthy retail and consumer-goods names in this month's dataset. Twenty-two of them have disclosed NPS more than once. Three of those tell a clean evolution story. The rest tell a different kind of story—about how loosely "NPS" gets thrown around in public reporting.

Three companies disclosing NPS like they mean it

Mytheresa—the luxury e-commerce platform—has reported NPS in seven consecutive quarterly results, from Q2 FY21 to Q2 FY25. The number has drifted from 90.0 down to 80.8 and back up to 83.3, framed each quarter as "industry-leading." Whether you believe the framing or not, the methodology is consistent: same customer base, same survey rhythm, same disclosure venue. That's what makes the gentle 7-point softening over four years legible as a real signal rather than noise.

Redcare Pharmacy has been even more disciplined: nine NPS disclosures from October 2023 to April 2026, mostly quarterly, all customer-facing. The shape is a classic operational story—70 in Q3 2023, a slip to 64 by Q1 2025, then a steady climb back through 70 in Q3, 74 in Q4, and 76 in Q1 2026 (for the electronic-prescription segment specifically). When a company shows you the dip and the recovery, that's a tell of confidence.

Aramis Group, the used-car platform, sits in the middle of these two for reporting cadence (five disclosures) but tells the simplest story: 64 in 2021 → 73 in early 2025 → 75 in Q3 2025, with a parallel +52 employee NPS disclosed alongside. Consistent metric, consistent improvement, same competitive framing each time.

These three are how the disclosure system is supposed to work.

Three companies where the "drama" is a measurement artifact

Target appears at first glance to be a catastrophic decline—88 in 2018, 80 in 2021, then 5 in 2025. The first two numbers are technically sound but cherry-picked: 88 was for the Drive Up service specifically, 80 was a peak-COVID omnichannel reading. The 5 in 2025 isn't a score at all—the underlying announcement was that "NPS is up 5 points for wait times" since Express Self-Checkout launched. Three disclosures, three different things being measured.

Wayfair's two 2025 readings—70 in May, 20 in August—look like a flash crash but are nothing of the sort. The 70 was for a single Illinois store location; the 20 was a relative uplift on Verified items versus a control set. Two distinct sub-segment numbers, neither describing Wayfair-the-company.

Tesco's 2017 "11" is a similar trap: the underlying release celebrated the largest improvement in the industry—up 11 points. That's a delta, not a score. The 2019 reading of 53 (discount stores only) is closer to a real score, but again restricted to a sub-format.

The Apple paradox

Apple has eight NPS disclosures in the dataset, more than anyone else on the marked list. Six of them land around 61. The other two—53 and 47—are for Apple Intelligence and Apple Music respectively, not Apple-the-company. So is Apple's NPS 61, declining slightly from 72 in 2017? Probably, broadly. But the cleaner reading is that Apple is happy to have several different NPS numbers in public circulation, each for a different product surface, and the headline 61 is the one that keeps repeating.

The peaks and the floors

When a company discloses NPS only once, you can't see a trajectory—but you can see where they planted their flag.

What to take from this. If you read public NPS disclosures the way they're written, you'll conclude the retail sector swings wildly between magical scores and catastrophic floors. If you read them the way they should be measured—same population, same wording, same cadence, repeatedly—the picture is much narrower, much more boring, and much more useful. The three companies highlighted above (Mytheresa, Redcare Pharmacy, Aramis Group) are doing it right. The others are doing what most of the disclosure population does: putting whatever NPS number they have in front of an audience that is unlikely to ask which NPS, of what, measured how. That gap is where the real story lives—and it's the gap we'll keep mapping in future digests.

Generated 2026-05-19 · Source: NPS Intelligence database · Sector view: 539 scored canonical disclosures. Deep dive: 22 of 69 reader-marked names with ≥2 NPS disclosures (HIGH/MEDIUM quality, canonical = 1, valid score range).

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