Restaurants: Key Info for Accurately Calculating Two-Year Same-Store Sales
By Ryan D. Lavender
Published on March 15, 2021 at 4:31 PM
Normally, when looking at two-year same-store sales trends, the magnitude of the numbers involved is so low that the two-year rate is calculated by just adding the two years together. The “errors” this simple method produces are negligible. For example, a concept that generates +5.0% same-store sales in the year-ago period, and -5.0% same-store sales in the current period, would have a simple-method two-year number of 0.0%. But the actual math works out to a two-year figure of -0.3%, because the base in the current period is +5.0% larger than what it was in the year-ago period.