One good example comes from Dollar General ($DG), the discount retail giant that made $38.7 billion in its fiscal 2023. Dollar General filed its second-quarter earnings release at the end of August, and included numerous nifty items:

• Same-store sales

• Merchandise inventories

• Category sales

• Store count

• Square footage

You can track all these disclosures in the Footnote Query & Disclosure tool in Calcbench, seeing how they have evolved over time. For example, we used the Export History feature to dig up the total square footage of Dollar General stores for the last 14 quarters and put them into a chart. Figure 1, below, took us less than three minutes. 

But wait, there’s more! We then dug up Dollar General’s quarterly revenue, too; and calculated revenue per square foot over the same period. See Figure 2.

So even though revenue increased by 21.5 percent over those 14 quarters (from $8.4 billion at the start of 2021 to $10.2 billion in second-quarter 2024), revenue per square foot only went from $65.15 to $66.10 in that same timeframe. Except for a single spike at the end of 2022 (hello inflation, we see you there), revenue per square foot fluctuated within a narrow band.

Other Retail Metrics

Another critical metric for retail sector performance is same-store sales, also known as comparable store sales. It measures the change in sales at individual stores open for some set period (usually a year), so analysts can get a better sense of trends in the company’s sales growth without the influence of new stores opening or failed stores closing.

Same-store sales growth is typically reported in the earnings release, and you can often find it in the Management Discussion & Analysis of the 10-Q, too. We pulled comparable-store sales growth for Target ($TGT), shown in Figure 3, below.

Yet again, we see that sales growth was doing OK until mid-2022 when inflation flared up, and then faltered through most of 2023. Only earlier this year did comparable-store sales rebound, when inflation had largely receded. 

What will Target’s comparable-store sales growth be for Q3? Ask us again in a few weeks, when the company files. 

You can explore other nooks and crannies of disclosure, too. For example, Macy’s ($M) reports same-store sales broken out by stores the company actually owns and those where Macy’s simply licenses the brand name to other owner-operators. Williams Sonoma ($WSM) breaks out revenue by specific store brands it owns. See Figure 4, below.

Other retailers report breakouts of products sold, although that’s more usually seen in the full 10-Q rather than the earnings release. 

All of it, however, is promptly collected and indexed by Calcbench! Just use our Disclosures and Footnotes Query page to dive into the data as deeply as you want, for as many retailers and you want. We have the data!