Comp-store blog.

Since I write a good deal about retail for a living, and that includes restaurants, visiting a new chain restaurant is now partly a professional duty, though not enough of one to be reimbursed for it—I could, and do, write about chains and concepts I’ve never experienced. And sometimes, I write about places I’d never heard of till I got the assignment, but they tend to be trendish clothes shops, not restaurants. I’d never heard of Wet Seal, for instance, till it appeared in the pages of GlobeSt.com/Retail, but since it’s a clothier catering to teen girls, no wonder. Also, it’s a West Coast chain. Only the behemoths are truly national; a lot of chains are still regional, or multiregional.

Teen girls are fickle, incidentally. Wet Seal has had a tough go of it lately. What kind of name is that, anyway? Seals are usually naked, aren’t they?

I’ve also come to understand why average “comp-store” or “same-store” sales are so important in the retail realm. (Comp = comparable in this case.) Any fool of a company can puff up its net sales by opening more stores, but if you measure the difference in sales among stores that have been open for a year or more—this fourth quarter compared to last year’s fourth quarter, for example—then the sales picture is a good deal clearer. Either your established stores are selling more stuff, or they ain’t.

Oops, I meant to write about my experience over the weekend at the nation’s only Aztec restaurant chain, but that will have to wait.