Comparable Sales: How Same-Store Sales Work

Introduction

Every retailer and restaurant chain can grow sales by opening more locations. The harder question is whether the existing stores it already has are selling more. Comparable sales, often called same-store sales or simply comps, answer that question by measuring growth only at locations open long enough to be compared with a full prior period. They are the single most watched number in retail and restaurant results.

The gap between total growth and comps can be wide. Chipotle Mexican Grill's 2025 revenue rose 5.4% to $11.9 billion as it opened 334 company-owned restaurants, yet comparable restaurant sales fell 1.7%, with transactions down 2.9% and average check up 1.2%, according to Chipotle's fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. The company grew because it built restaurants, while its existing restaurants served fewer orders. This article explains how comps are defined, how they split into traffic and ticket, how to read them over time and through the retail calendar, and how sales releases bring them to market.

Comparable Sales

The change in sales over a period at stores, restaurants and websites that were open throughout both that period and the comparable prior period, excluding new and closed locations. Comparable sales isolate the performance of the existing fleet from growth that comes from opening, closing or acquiring locations.

Comps play the same role for store-based companies that organic growth plays for brands, explained in organic growth: price, mix and volume: both strip out the growth a company bought, leaving what its existing business achieved. Because comps are not defined by accounting standards, each company sets its own rules and discloses them.

Investors focus on comps because of operating leverage. Rent, store wages and head-office costs are largely fixed in the short term, so sales growth at an existing store falls disproportionately to profit, while a comp decline squeezes margins just as quickly. New stores, by contrast, bring their own fixed costs with them. A chain with positive comps grows margins without new capital; a chain with negative comps must open stores just to stand still.

Which stores count

The core rule is a maturity threshold: a location joins the comp base once it has been open long enough to have a full prior-year period. Home Depot includes stores and websites open more than 52 weeks, including remodels and relocations, and excludes closed stores; acquisitions are typically included after they have been owned for more than 52 weeks, according to Home Depot's fiscal 2025 Form 10-K. Chipotle uses company-owned restaurants in operation for at least 13 full calendar months, a slightly longer window that keeps a restaurant's opening month out of the comparison.

Other choices vary more. Some retailers exclude stores that have been significantly expanded or closed for remodeling for several weeks. Some report comps excluding fuel sales or currency effects, because fuel prices and exchange rates can swamp the underlying trend. Franchisors often report system comps, covering franchised as well as company-operated restaurants.

Digital sales and comps

Most retailers now include online sales in comps, since a customer who orders on the app instead of driving to the store is still the same customer. Home Depot's online sales were 15.9% of net sales in fiscal 2025. Including digital sales makes comps a measure of the whole customer relationship, but it also means that a retailer shifting sales from stores to its website can report healthy comps while individual stores weaken, a tension covered in omnichannel and e-commerce economics for retailers.

Digital sales also raise an attribution question: which location gets credit for an order placed online, picked up in one store and returned to another? Retailers allocate these sales by their own rules, often to the store that fulfils the order, so store-level comps depend partly on accounting choices. When a retailer reports store and digital comps separately, bankers look at both, since store comps show whether the physical fleet is holding up.

Why total sales and comps diverge

Total sales growth equals comp growth plus everything comps exclude: new locations, closures, acquisitions and differences in the number of selling days. Home Depot's fiscal 2025 shows several at once. Net sales rose 3.2% to $164.7 billion while comps rose only 0.3%. Acquisitions added about $6.3 billion of incremental sales, and the prior year's extra week had contributed about $2.5 billion, so the comparison worked in both directions.

Comps themselves split into two parts, how many customers came and how much each one spent, and the split often matters more than the total.

Traffic and Average Ticket

Traffic is the number of customer transactions in comparable locations, sometimes measured by visits or guest counts. Average ticket, or average check in restaurants, is sales divided by transactions: the amount spent per visit. Comparable sales growth is roughly traffic growth plus ticket growth.

The two parts multiply rather than add, but for small changes the sum is close. Home Depot's fiscal 2025 comps of 0.3% reflected a 1.4% increase in comparable average ticket offset by a 1.0% decrease in comparable customer transactions. Chipotle's -1.7% combined transactions down 2.9% with average check up 1.2%.

Why traffic matters more

Traffic shows whether customers are choosing the store. Ticket can rise for good reasons, such as customers buying more items or trading up, or for less durable ones, such as price increases that pass through cost inflation. A retailer posting positive comps on rising ticket and falling traffic is often losing customers while charging the remaining ones more, a pattern that tends to end badly once price increases stop. Retailers therefore split ticket further into units per transaction and average price per unit where they can.

Measuring traffic from outside

Companies report traffic only once a quarter and sometimes not at all, so investors and bankers supplement it with alternative data: card transaction panels that show spending trends, and mobile location data that estimates visits to individual stores. These sources arrive weekly or even daily and cover competitors as well as clients, which makes them useful for spotting share shifts before results are published. Each has blind spots, from panels skewed toward certain shoppers to location data that cannot see what a visitor bought, as explained in consumer data: scanner, panel, card and foot traffic. Bankers treat them as directional signals to be tested against company-reported comps, not as substitutes.

Restaurants: check, mix and menu price

Restaurants read the same split with different labels. Average check rises with menu price increases, with mix shifts such as adding drinks or premium items, and with group size; it falls with discounts and value menus. Franchised systems add a further layer: franchisors report system comps across franchised and company restaurants, and the two can diverge when franchisees and the company operate in different regions or run different promotions. Because many chains have raised menu prices substantially in recent years, analysts compare menu price increases with check growth to see whether guests are trading down. How check, traffic and restaurant margins connect is covered in how restaurant companies make money, segment by segment.

A single quarter's comp is compared with the same quarter a year earlier, so it depends heavily on the prior-year base. Analysts therefore read comps over several years and alongside the age of the stores, rather than reacting to one quarter.

Two-year and three-year stacks

A multi-year stack combines comps across consecutive years to show performance against a base two or three years back. The simple version adds the yearly comps; the precise version compounds them, which matters when the individual comps are large.

When a retailer faces a weak prior-year quarter, analysts say it is lapping an easy comparison, and a strong comp is expected. The reverse applies after an exceptional year, when even a healthy business may post flat or negative comps against a tough comparison. Management teams discuss upcoming comparisons on earnings calls, and investors set expectations quarter by quarter with the prior-year base in mind.

Cannibalization and closures

Comps can also be moved by a chain's own store decisions. A new store opened near an existing one takes some of its customers, a loss called cannibalization, which lowers comps at the older store even though the chain as a whole gains sales. The reverse happens when a chain closes a store: some of its customers move to nearby locations, which then post higher comps from these transfer sales. A retailer closing many stores can report rising comps at the survivors while total sales fall, so bankers read comps alongside store counts and total sales.

Comps by store age

New stores usually ramp up over their first years, so a fleet with many young stores can post higher comps simply because those stores are still maturing. Some formats show the opposite pattern, a honeymoon effect in which a new store opens with a burst of curiosity visits and then settles lower, which drags on comps once the store enters the base. Bankers ask for comps by store vintage, grouping stores by opening year, to separate maturing new stores from the trend at mature ones. A healthy chain shows mature stores still growing; a chain whose comps depend on young stores may be masking decline elsewhere. Store productivity across the fleet is measured with sales per square foot and average unit volume, and the returns on new units with four-wall EBITDA, new-unit returns and payback.

Retail results follow their own fiscal calendar. Comparing January 2026 with January 2025 can mislead because the months contain different numbers of weekends, and weekends drive much of retail spending.

4-5-4 Calendar

A retail fiscal calendar that divides the year into quarters of three months lasting four weeks, five weeks and four weeks, so every month starts on the same day of the week and contains the same number of Saturdays and Sundays as the comparable month a year earlier. The National Retail Federation (NRF) publishes a standard version.

The calendar, as set out on the National Retail Federation's 4-5-4 calendar page, ensures comparable months contain the same number of Saturdays and Sundays. Most US retailers use it or a variant, ending their fiscal year around the end of January or early February, after the holiday season and post-holiday returns.

That timing creates a naming convention that trips up newcomers. Home Depot's fiscal 2025, for example, ended on 1 February 2026, so most of the year's sales fell in calendar 2025. Some retailers instead name the fiscal year after the calendar year in which it ends. Bankers building comparable company tables align fiscal years to the same calendar months before comparing peers, or use the latest twelve months for each.

Restating the 53rd week

Fifty-two weeks of seven days add up to 364 days, so the calendar drifts by a day each year, two in a leap year. To bring it back into line, a 53rd week is added from time to time. NRF says this occurs approximately every five to six years, and lists 2006, 2012, 2017 and 2023 as 53-week years.

The extra week inflates total sales for the year that has it and depresses reported growth in the year after. Comps solve this by comparing like periods, using a restated prior year. NRF restates a 53-week year in the following year by pushing each week back one week, ignoring the first week, so holidays line up. Home Depot did the same in fiscal 2025, comparing weeks 1 through 52 of fiscal 2025 with weeks 2 through 53 of fiscal 2024; it said the 53rd week had added about $0.30 to fiscal 2024 diluted earnings per share.

Holiday and calendar shifts

Even with a 4-5-4 calendar, holiday timing moves. A late Thanksgiving shortens the shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas; Easter can fall in the first or second quarter; tax refund timing shifts spending between February and March. Retailers often quote calendar-adjusted comps, or combine adjacent months or quarters, to strip these effects out. Weather adds noise of its own: a warm autumn delays coat sales and a wet spring delays garden sales, so seasonal categories are read over a full season rather than a single month.

Comps reach the market through quarterly results and, for many retailers, through holiday sales updates released in early January, before full fourth-quarter results. These updates cover the November and December period that makes or breaks many retailers' year, and they often come with revised guidance.

Disclosure has become less frequent over time. Many retailers once published comps every month; most now report quarterly, with only a few still releasing monthly sales. Outside the regular schedule, a company that expects results well outside its guidance may issue a pre-announcement, which can move the shares as much as the results themselves.

The ICR Conference

Many of these updates are timed for the ICR Conference, an investor conference held in Orlando each January where more than 250 public and private growth companies, including many consumer, retail and restaurant chains, meet investors. Five Below, for example, reported on 12 January 2026 that comparable sales rose 14.5% in the nine-week holiday period from 2 November 2025 to 3 January 2026, with net sales up 23.2% to $1.47 billion, and raised its full-year comparable sales outlook to about 12.5%, ahead of a fireside chat at the 2026 ICR Conference that day, according to Five Below's holiday sales release.

Because so many companies update investors in the same few days, the conference works as an early read on the consumer for the year ahead. Investors compare holiday comps across formats, from off-price to specialty apparel and restaurants, and the meetings on the sidelines between management teams, investors and bankers often start conversations that become deals later in the year.

What bankers do with sales releases

For coverage bankers, January updates set the tone for the year's deal calendar. A retailer that beats its holiday plan may be ready to refinance, raise equity or start a sale process in the spring, while a miss can bring a strategic review or a need for liquidity. Bankers track the releases across their coverage list and build them into market updates for clients and sponsors.

Comps sit at the center of retail and restaurant valuation. Investors pay higher multiples for chains with sustained positive comps, because growth at existing stores needs little capital and spreads fixed costs, while chains with negative comps trade at discounts and attract activist or sponsor interest. Lenders watch the same number: a run of negative comps erodes the cash flow that services fixed rent and debt, so comps feature heavily in credit analysis of store-based borrowers, from rating agency reviews to the forecasts behind a refinancing. A chain whose comps have turned negative for several quarters usually finds that both its equity multiple and its borrowing capacity shrink at the same time. The Valuation guide's retail and consumer valuation primer shows how comps feed multiples.

Comp guidance and the long-term algorithm

Most listed retailers and restaurant chains give comp guidance, a range for the year that they update each quarter, and many describe a long-term algorithm built on low-single-digit comps plus a target rate of new unit growth. Investors judge results against that guidance as much as against the prior year: a 2% comp can lift the shares if guidance was flat, or sink them if it was 4%. Changes in guidance therefore move valuations more than the reported number itself, and guidance credibility becomes part of how investors value management. In a sale process, buyers test management's forecast comps against the company's own history and against peers, and a forecast well above the recent stack is usually haircut.

Comps in the model

In models, revenue is built from two engines: comp growth on the existing fleet and sales from new units, each driven by its own assumptions. Margins then follow comps through flow-through, the share of each extra sales dollar that reaches operating profit. A retailer whose fixed costs grow 2% a year typically needs comps of around that level just to hold margins, and every point above it widens them, which is why small changes in comp assumptions move an LBO model's debt capacity. Bankers check:

For a coverage banker, comps are the closest thing retail has to a vital sign: they show whether customers are coming back to the stores a company already owns, which is the growth every other number depends on.