Same-store sales
Also known as: comparable store sales, comp sales
Same-store sales measures only at locations that have been open for at least a year, or sometimes longer depending on the company's own definition, stripping out the effect of newly opened or recently closed stores. It's the standard growth metric for retailers, restaurant chains, and other multi-location businesses.
The reason this metric exists is that growth can be misleading for a company that's actively opening new locations. A retailer could report strong overall purely because it opened dozens of new stores during the year, even while at its existing, established stores were flat or declining. Same-store sales isolates , whether the business the company already had is actually getting stronger, by comparing at the same set of locations .
A positive same-store sales figure means existing locations are selling more than they did a year earlier, driven by some combination of more customer visits, higher average purchase amounts, or price increases. A negative figure means the core business is shrinking even if total company is still growing on the back of new store openings. Because it separates growth into what came from expansion versus what came from the existing footprint, it's one of the first numbers analysts look for in a retail or restaurant .
Definitions of which stores count as "comparable" vary somewhat between companies, some use a twelve-month cutoff for a store to qualify, others use thirteen months, and some exclude stores that underwent major renovations during the period. That makes same-store sales more reliable when tracked consistently for one company over time than when compared precisely across different companies using slightly different definitions.