Why Fitness, Food and Wellness Are Winning
The strongest retail centers are built around the needs and routines of their communities—and tenant mix is what brings that connection to life. Few factors have a greater impact on customer loyalty, leasing performance, NOI durability, and long-term asset value.
In partnership with Placer.ai, Cushman & Wakefield analyzed a curated set of top-performing neighborhood and lifestyle centers, selected based on trade area strength, occupancy, investor demand, and overall quality. We layered in Placer.ai's foot traffic and visitation data to better understand which tenant mixes drive frequent visitation, repeat engagement, and sustained demand.
The findings are clear: retail's strongest-performing centers are increasingly built around service-oriented uses that support how consumers live and spend today. As a result, tenant curation is evolving beyond traditional merchandising models toward a more intentional mix of uses.
Retail’s New Traffic Drivers
Five years ago, neighborhood and lifestyle centers were largely anchored by traditional retail: apparel, department stores, and soft goods. That model has steadily lost relevance, replaced by a more diversified ecosystem anchored by grocery and necessity retail and complemented by health and wellness, food and beverage, fitness, entertainment, and service uses.
While neighborhood centers remain rooted in convenience and daily needs, lifestyle centers increasingly rely on dining, entertainment, and experiential retail to create destination appeal. This shift reflects changing consumer preferences, evolving engagement with physical retail, and lasting post-pandemic shopping behaviors.
More important than the category itself is whether those tenants collectively give customers compelling reasons to return. Grocery may be the foundation of many leading neighborhood centers, but fitness, medical, wellness, and dining tenants act as traffic multipliers, bringing consumers back multiple times per week.
Traditional apparel may draw just one visit per month. But according to Placer.ai, a fitness anchor draws the same customers around four times a month and grocery anchors draw customers two to three times a month. Medical, wellness, and personal care tenants add a different kind of value: visits are less frequent but longer, and the demand is growing fastest of any category while being effectively immune to e-commerce. When paired with complementary uses, such as a health-conscious QSR, they can extend dwell time and support spending across multiple tenants.
This dynamic is evident at centers like Whole Foods at Wynnewood External Link in Pennsylvania, where a premium grocer generates frequent, needs-based visits and supports adjacent dining and prepared food concepts. The result is consistent, daily engagement rather than intermittent, peak-driven traffic.
Follow the Customer, Not the Category
The reallocation of space across tenant categories reflects a broader shift in how consumers shop and spend.
“Historically, centers were merchandised through broad categories and price tiers: luxury, contemporary, mid-price, value, off-price. Those distinctions still matter, but they don’t fully capture how people shop anymore,” explains Jessica Gangoso, Vice President, Emerging Brands at Cushman & Wakefield. “Consumers are moving across price points based on identity, occasion, convenience, values, and cultural relevance. The next generation of tenant strategy has to follow the customer.”
Millennials and Gen Z are the fastest-growing spending cohorts, representing approximately 37% of total expenditures. Combined with the expected transfer of $84-124 trillion from Baby Boomers to younger generations over the next 25 years (Cerulli Associates), they will increasingly shape how retail space is used and leased.
Their spending patterns reinforce growing demand for experiences, convenience, and personal services. Since 2019:
- Restaurant spending increased 26% among Millennials and 14% among Gen Z.
- Entertainment spending increased 50% and 93%, respectively.
- Personal care spending increased 58% and 57%, respectively.
As these generations account for a growing share of consumer spending, their preferences are increasingly influencing demand across retail categories, creating new opportunities for landlords to rethink how space is allocated and curated.
From Spending Patterns to Tenant Mix
Those shifts are already visible in retail visitation patterns. Between 2019 and 2025, U.S. retail foot traffic tilted decisively toward experience. According to Placer.ai, national fitness visits climbed roughly 23% and med-spa and wellness surged 31%, while apparel shed about 25%.
Lifestyle centers tell a similar story. Med-Spa and fitness together expanded their share of visitor traffic by about 2 percentage points (spa/wellness +1.5, fitness +0.5), while full-service (31% of lifestyle-center visits) and limited-service (14%) restaurants now account for about 45% of visits, reinforcing food and beverage as a primary traffic driver.
Neighborhood-oriented centers such as The Shops at Wildwood External Link in Bethesda exemplify this shift, combining a premium grocery anchor with a curated mix of wellness, dining, and service tenants that create steady, daily traffic in an affluent trade area.
“The most successful centers today have a deep understanding of their consumer – how they live, what they need day to day, and the brands they choose – and a curated and distinctive tenant mix that directly reflects their needs and expectations,” says Kristen Pash, Senior Director of Mall & Shopping Center Leasing & Development at Cushman & Wakefield.
From Composition to Orchestration
Curating the right tenant mix is only the beginning. Long-term performance depends not just on who occupies a center, but on how those tenants work together.
“The real opportunity is to understand the cultural identity of each community,” says Gangoso. “That local intelligence should inform the tenant mix, the adjacencies, the programming, and the brands we bring in. The best retail environments will be the ones that feel specific, not interchangeable.”
Thoughtful adjacencies amplify the value of individual tenants. Wellness concepts positioned near food and beverage can extend dwell time, while daily-needs retail located alongside fitness uses can create natural, convenience-driven trip chaining. The strongest centers aren't collections of leases; they're intentionally curated ecosystems designed around how customers move through the property, where leasing strategy, site planning, placemaking, and programming work together to create a cohesive customer experience.
Walkable environments such as Old Town Square External Link in Chicago illustrate how thoughtfully integrated dining, retail, and services can create a seamless, day-to-night experience that strengthens a center’s role within the community.
Rethinking Anchors
The definition of an anchor tenant has changed. Traditional apparel no longer delivers the consistent traffic growth or sustained demand it once did. Instead, today's highest-performing centers rely on a combination of uses, each serving a distinct role:
- Grocery and necessity retail provide recurring traffic and durable, long-term income
- Fitness, food, and beverage generate recurring engagement and longer visits
- Wellness and medical tenants create recurring service demand
- Off-price retail attracts resilient value-oriented shoppers and remains the strongest-performing segment within apparel
“Today’s anchors are defined less by size and more by their ability to generate frequent visits, resilient demand, and cross-center traffic,” says Pash.
Increasingly, the most effective anchors are not single tenants but combinations of uses that collectively generate consistent traffic and demand. Destinations like Santana Row in San Jose demonstrate how dining, entertainment, and experiential retail can collectively function as an anchor, creating sustained visitation through a carefully curated mix of uses and programming.
The Window for Repositioning
Tenant demand is increasingly concentrated within a small group of expanding categories, creating a narrowing window for repositioning. As fitness, wellness, grocery, food and beverage, and off-price retail continue to absorb space, leasing outcomes are diverging between centers that reflect evolving demand patterns and those still anchored in legacy merchandising strategies.
Landlords have an opportunity to:
- Backfill vacancy with expanding tenant categories
- Use lease expirations to optimize tenant mix
- Reallocate space toward service-oriented uses aligned with consumer demand
“The greatest leasing risk today is misallocation,” says Pash. “Owners who delay repositioning risk allocating space to shrinking categories instead of capturing tenants that continue to gain market share and consumer demand.”
As demand consolidates around a smaller set of growth categories, lease expirations and vacancies offer owners a valuable opportunity to realign tenant mix with the direction of the market.
The Bottom Line
The most successful neighborhood and lifestyle centers are more than collections of stores – they are woven into the fabric of daily life. As consumer expectations evolve, performance increasingly depends on creating a tenant mix that gives customers reasons to return. Centers that thoughtfully blend necessity-based anchors, high-frequency service uses, and engaging public spaces foster more cross-shopping, stronger sales, deeper customer loyalty, and a greater sense of community.
For a deeper data-driven perspective, read Placer.ai’s white paper: The New Tenant Mix Playbook.
