In our business we anchor a center with a name — a Key Food, a Stop & Shop, a BJ’s. That name secures the financing and sets the co-tenancy. But after 30-plus years leasing supermarket-anchored real estate, I’ll tell you the anchor that actually drives the asset doesn’t appear on the rent roll. She’s the woman pushing the cart, and she is the most underrated force in retail real estate.

The numbers aren’t subtle. Women are directly or indirectly responsible for an estimated 70% to 80% of all purchasing decisions, and various studies credit them with influencing up to 85% of consumer spending. Globally, women account for something on the order of $35 trillion in spending — roughly half of all consumer dollars. And the trend line points up: by 2028, women are projected to control about 75% of discretionary spending.

For a supermarket-anchored portfolio, one figure matters more than the rest: roughly 78% of women are the primary grocery shopper for their households. That is the engine of the weekly trip our entire merchandising strategy depends on. She comes for the grocery run, but she’s the one deciding whether she also stops at the nail salon, grabs the dry cleaning, picks up the prescription, and treats the kids on the way out. Women also shop more often and longer — about 39% shop on any given day versus 34% of men, averaging 58 minutes a trip to a man’s 45. Every one of those extra minutes is dwell time our inline tenants live or die on.

She is not the cliché

Here’s where the old marketing playbook gets it wrong, and where the opportunity lives. The caricature of the female shopper as an impulsive splurger simply doesn’t hold up in the data. She is, if anything, the most financially disciplined customer in the center. A recent analysis found more than three in four women are concerned about rising living costs and nearly half are actively seeking bargains — and notably, 91% say brands still don’t understand them.

The 2025 data sharpened the point. Circana reported that women account for 59% of U.S. discretionary general-merchandise spending, yet in the first half of last year female discretionary demand actually went flat while men’s unit purchases rose — women pulled back on big-ticket categories like furniture and housewares faster than men did. What they kept buying tells the real story: the smaller, mood-lifting purchases. Home décor gained. Beauty held. It’s the same signal we just saw in Ulta’s and Victoria’s Secret’s blowout quarters — she trades down the sofa but still funds the small treat that makes the house, or herself, feel better.

That is not a retreating consumer. That is a discerning one. And a discerning customer rewards the center that respects her time, her budget, and her intelligence.

What it means for how we lease and merchandise

If she is the real anchor, then the center should be merchandised around her trip — not around a leasing plan drawn in a vacuum. In practice that means clustering the high-frequency, female-led services close to the grocery box: beauty and nail concepts, fitness and wellness, medical and urgent care, quick-service food, and the household errands that turn one stop into five. It means weighting the tenant mix toward the categories proving resilient in her wallet — beauty, wellness, value, and the affordable treat — rather than the big-ticket softlines she’s deferring.

It also means taking the experience seriously. The female shopper is doing the work of the whole household on that trip; convenience, safety, lighting, parking flow, and a clean, legible center aren’t amenities to her — they’re the difference between a place she returns to weekly and one she abandons for the warehouse club or her phone. Co-tenancy reads differently through this lens, too: a strong beauty or service tenant beside the grocery anchor isn’t filler, it’s what extends her visit and lifts the whole property’s sales-per-square-foot.

My father started this firm in 1978 on the belief that retail real estate is, at bottom, a people business — you lease to the demand, and you’d better know who that demand actually is. Two generations later, the answer hasn’t changed. The most important tenant in any center we lease isn’t a signature on a lease. She’s the customer that every signature is ultimately chasing. Build the center for her, and the rent roll takes care of itself.