Old Navy's Sales Slipped 4 Percent. Here's the Reason Gap Actually Gave — and the One It Didn't.

Gap Inc. reported second-quarter fiscal 2026 results on August 27 — the date this outlet named in print nine days earlier. Old Navy — the Gap Inc. banner whose extended-size assortment this desk's own reporting found had fallen 12 percent year over year — posted comparable sales down 4 percent for the quarter, its first negative comp in 11 quarters, according to Gap Inc.'s own chief executive.

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Gap's own press release put it plainly: "Comparable sales were down 4% reflecting expected pressure in the women's seasonal assortment, in addition to an unanticipated slowdown in traffic." That is Gap's stated reason for the quarter, not this outlet's conclusion — the same discipline this desk applied on August 18, when it declined to name a cause neither Target nor Gap had claimed. Gap attributed Old Navy's softness to a seasonal assortment miss and a traffic slowdown, on the record; this piece reports that as Gap's claim, not as an established fact about why shoppers stayed away.

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This outlet read Gap Inc.'s press release and its earnings call transcript directly and searched both for eight terms: size, sizing, extended, plus, plus-size, assortment breadth, mix, and GLP-1. None appears — not from Dickson, not from chief financial officer Katrina O'Connell, and not from a single analyst who asked a follow-up question. That is the second consecutive quarter this outlet has found that exact silence at earnings-call tier, following the finding in this desk's August 18 piece that no Target or Gap disclosure has ever attributed an extended-sizing decision to GLP-1 drugs. One number circulating this week needs a caveat rather than a flat correction: several outlets have described Old Navy's decline as its "first negative comp in nearly three years," a figure that reads as those outlets' own calculation from Gap's trailing results, putting Old Navy's prior negative quarter at roughly the second quarter of 2023 — not a number Gap itself has stated. It does not match Dickson's own on-the-record figure, quoted above: 11 quarters. This outlet could not independently settle which count is correct against Gap's own historical filings, so it reports Dickson's figure as exactly that — his own quoted, attributed statement — rather than adopting either number as this outlet's verified fact.

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Old Navy's result lands eight days after Target's own second-quarter report, posted August 19: net sales up 5.3 percent, comparable sales up 3.8 percent on comparable traffic up 3.6 percent, with all six of Target's core merchandising categories growing in net sales terms, by Target's own account. That topline growth came with a caveat volunteered on the call, not in the release: chief financial officer Michael Fiddelke told analysts that apparel and home ran "flattish," and that flattish growth "isn't what we strive for." Target's call, like Gap's, never mentioned plus-size, extended sizing, or GLP-1s either. A flattish department in a quarter where Target's own release credits only one of its other five core categories — Fun 101 — with double-digit growth, and two more, Food & Beverage and Beauty, with high-single-digit growth, isolates nothing about who is or isn't buying larger sizes. It's one line in an otherwise strong quarter, and this piece treats it as exactly that, not as evidence for or against the forecast retail has been planning against since last September.

Two consecutive quarters now carry the same shape: two named retailers, two earnings calls, and a stated reason for a soft quarter that has nothing to do with size or the drugs an entire advisory layer has been forecasting against since last September. Torrid, the third company this desk has been tracking, reports its own second-quarter results on September 3. Until a named retailer puts GLP-1s in its own mouth, on its own earnings call, the forecast and the results remain two separate conversations — and this desk will keep checking which one the numbers actually support.