Measurement & Market
What are same-store sales, or comps?
Same-store sales — comps, or comparable sales — measure sales growth at locations open long enough (conventionally at least a year) to be compared against their own prior-year performance. By excluding newly opened and closed stores, comps isolate whether the existing business is actually growing, rather than whether the brand is simply adding units.
Comps are the industry's headline metric, but the single number hides its own composition. A +3% comp built on +6% check and −3% traffic is a very different business than one built on +1% check and +2% traffic: the first is pricing over a shrinking customer base, the second is genuine growth. The decomposition, not the headline, is the information.
Comp comparisons also inherit calendar noise — holiday shifts, trading-day differences, weather, and lapping last year's promotions or price increases. Reading comps well means knowing what the base period contained, which is why serious comp analysis is done against an expected baseline rather than a raw prior-year number.
Why it matters
Every operator reports comps; far fewer can say why comps moved. Decomposing the number into price, traffic, and mix is where the actionable version of the metric lives.
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